Spaceships

Carlo Borer, 2009
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    At first glance, the Spaceships do not meet the expectations raised by their evocative title, which alludes to space travel and science fiction. Viewed head-on, the oblong objects look like fragments of a real, mighty tree trunk with heavily textured, gnarled bark. The surprise comes when we try and take a look at the cross section of the trunks and find the supposedly natural objects to be hollow copper-lined tubes that draw the eye into a void suffused with an unreal reddish light. Borer’s Spaceships fuse biological and technical forms in ways that do not so much result in a real synthesis as in a palpable paradox that deals the viewer’s perception a lasting blow.
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