Existing comment:
Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti
Paper Arch, 2018
plywood, hardboard, bond paper, fabric trim, and found objects
Since 2013, Michael Garlington and his partner, Natalia Bertotti, have teamed up to create large-scale installations based on religious structures, incorporating Garlington's elaborately framed, signature photographs, which explore the range of human experience between "the horror and the wonder," the two extremes of being. Two of these were created for Burning Man and burned at the conclusion of the event. Though influenced by David Best's temples, one of which Garlington helped build, these installations are meant as places of raucousness and whimsy rather than solemnity and silence.
Paper Arch, commissioned specifically for the Renwick, expands the pair's canon into secular architecture and evokes the symbolic threshold participants cross as they enter Burning Man. Exploding into a plume of paper flames that rises to the ceiling, the piece also suggests the ritual conclusion of the weeklong event and calls attention to the sculpture's ephemeral nature. |