ALEX R.M. THOMPSON

all images © Alex Thompson 2022

An unfinished wall, with the drywall seam visible. A selection of monochromatic prints of parking garages and construction sites are arrayed across it somewhat randomly, with yellow post-it notes, fragments of tarp, Tyvek, and thin cast concrete.

Annotated Architectures: Cycles of the Urban Still Life

The city streets stretch out, one after another, lined with an extensive and interlinked web of buildings. Walls overlap and flow into one another, and the perception of the space as a whole is confounded by its dense complexity. In a perpetual state of change and becoming, standardized structures in the midst of cycles of development, deconstruction, reassembly, and reconfiguration reify the conceptual intangibility of a holistic understanding of the city. Following Rudolf Arnheim’s declaration that architecture can never be viewed in its entirety, the urban milieu is a constantly buzzing entity that hangs like a curtain wall, partially transparent and creating an illusory overlap in the reflected surroundings. Relying on disparate sites, extensive supply chains, and histories of human ingenuity and building innovations, Annotated Architectures: Cycles of the Urban Still Life draws upon a collage sensibility to present the city not as a singular landscape, but as a hybrid space embodying change, decay, looming precarity, and hope.

A monochromatic collage of architecture, including a mall, parking lot, a long flight of wooden stairs, a non-descript glass building, and a neo-gothic school building door.

A monochromatic collage of architecture, including a neo-gothic school, a heap of tarps, a few dumpsters, a parking garage, and a condo building.

A monochromatic collage of architecture, with a gas station and set of modernist pillars holding up concrete and glass masses of brutalist and modernist school structures. A bell tower rises on the right, and a distant apartment building is in the centre.

The three previous prints, installed in a gallery space with white walls and a red-orange tiled floor. The artworks are each illuminated by a spotlight.

30 photographic prints of architectural details, centred on blank sheets of paper, in three rows of ten.

A monochromatic black and white structure wrapped in tarps, held aloft on a concrete pillar.

The previous image of a tarp-wrapped structure, but with chunks of the building appearing to be scraped away.

12 prints on a white gallery wall. They all depict the same structure wrapped in tarps, but in each print read left to right, top to bottom, the image becomes more and more worn away.

A group of prints on a white gallery wall. They all depict the same structure wrapped in tarps, but in each print read left to right, top to bottom, the image becomes more and more worn away.

A neat stack of bricks, two wide, stands on the gallery floor. Behind it, a photographic print is tacked to the wall, covered with brick-red dust.

A photographic print of a mortar and pestle, on a large sheet of white paper. The paper is smeared with brick-red dust.

A room in a gallery, with white walls and red-orange tiled floors. Two walls facing each other are visible, and there are three black and white prints on each wall.

Three large monochromatic black and white etchings, showing a series of tall, vertically oriented structures. As the prints are read left to right, the foundations of the structures become increasingly precarious.

A tall, open scaffold-like structure dominates the foreground, with a series of low, concrete buildings piled onto each other, in front of a glass facade that fills the background.

a blank faced, boxy structure with a few scaffolds around it stands in the centre of the image, some distance away. A pathway of broken up concrete and stone leads towards it, while beneath it and to the left, the ground appears to disappear.

A precarious structure made from scaffolds, support beams, and smokestacks is perched atop a spindly set of struts, leaning away towards the left.

Using Format