All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

For this project, Michael Joo presents an interactive multi-media exhibition which explores issues of representation, transmission and transformation. Sculptural objects, QR codes and alchemized relics obtained from scans of historical works in the Smithsonian Archives, virtually connect meaning, relationship and object.

Michael Joo is a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale University and teaches in the Columbia University MFA program. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, in 1991. His work investigates why we perceive as we perceive, and his non-linear, almost cyclical approach to his practice, together with his combination of scientific language and research, results in work that is a documentation of process. Joo is the recipient of a Warhol Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; FNAC (Foundation National d’Art Contemporain), Paris, France; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Samsung Foundation for Art and Culture, Seoul, Korea; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

This project was created in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution and with the generous help of Powerhouse Arts, and contains Carbon, Iron, Wood and Augmented Reality.