Chloé Rager

In a series of iconoclastic gestures, the sculptures in Ruined, But Overwhelming render culturally and literally massive architectures into fragments.

Thin and narrow sculptures, pieces of rubble, small photographs, and aquarium ornaments reduce the massiveness of architecture to individual samples and components of built structures, whose effect seems measurable and calculated. An aquarium ornament sits atop a slender pedestal, relegating the architecture to a kitsch object on diorama scale. Small antique photographs of Grecian temples strapped to the modern concrete slab or broken cinder block treat the documentation of classical western architecture with an irreverence.

Still, their place in these sculptures suggests that the role they play in cultural imaginaries is still active.

For classical architecture, and the subsequent buildings that have drawn upon it, has always been bound up in the political histories that attempt to use it as a symbol of power.

These works position the material of contemporary structures as vulnerable– interjecting orange juice into the casting of the concrete or coating broken chunks of asphalt with salt– an attempt to physically erode their overwhelming shadow in the built environment.