"Model City: An Installation by Kendall Buster"
2005-08-05 until 2005-08-21
KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts (KZNSA)
Durban, , ZA South Africa

Kendall Buster is an American artist living and working in Richmond, Virginia where she is associate professor in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Buster completed her Masters in Fine Art at Yale University and have participated in numerous group exhibitions, include "Art Positions" at Miami Basel in Miami, Florida, "ARCO" in Madrid, Spain, and "Recent Acquisitions" at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, USA.

Solo projects include "Highrise" at the Houston Centre for Contemporary Craft, "Model City" at Drake University, Iowa and "Inventory of Imagined Places" at the Kreeger Museum in Washington. She was recently included in the 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters exhibition in New York where she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in the arts.

This exhibition is her first solo show in South Africa, and follows earlier participation in "Open Circuit" at the KZNSA Gallery in 2000, organised by Pulse Projects. Buster's large-scale installation will occupy the entire Main Gallery, and is a continuation of her interest in creating architectural spaces, which are sculptural and an experiential. Originally trained as a microbiologist, the microscopic world is often referenced in her work but re imagined as large scale constructions.

The installation utilises 80 manufactured tents configured in a grid to create a field. Flexible fibreglass tent poles support and give form to the nylon fabric tent domes. Suspended to float, weightlessly above the viewer, this grid of interconnected tents viewed from underneath appear as an undulating sky-like surface, and from above, as a turquoise blue cityscape.

The word "model" in Model City is a play on the word, referencing at once an architectural scale schematic, and an ironic use of the term to suggest an ideal utopian modular urban plan.

IMAGE
Kendall  Buster
Subterrain
Height of columns: 10'. Height of space: 35'
Wood, PVC sheets
2001

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