MFA alum Pablo Gómez Uribe’s exhibition ‘Progresslessnesslessness’ on view now at PROXYCO Gallery.
“Born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, Gómez Uribe studied architecture there at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana from 1995 to 2000. These years, in the aftermath of Pablo Escobar’s death, were marked by continual political violence throughout the country as well as in Medellín. Thus, concurrent with Gómez Uribe’s formative training in how to design and build stable and lasting structures, real-world events conspired to offer a counter-programmed tutorial on the destabilization caused by broader political, economic, and social forces — on which even the most advanced architectural curriculum could have no real impact.
As Gómez Uribe established his own architectural studio, he nevertheless felt increasingly disillusioned with the profession’s rhetoric of rational progressivism, and in the same period he pursued a BFA in visual art at Medellín’s Universidad Nacional. Ultimately, the global economic crisis in 2009 offered an opportunity to change vocations and to study critical theory in the MFA fine arts program at The New School’s Parsons School of Design.
Gómez Uribe’s previous solo show with the gallery in 2018, All That Is Solid, revolved around the conceptual model of the stress test for standardized construction materials — in particular, of bricks, architecture’s irreducible and literal building blocks. But rather than using procedural methods to measure standards of structural competency, Gómez Uribe chose to discover and display material evidence of failure and trauma. In the present exhibition he extends this line of thinking to posit the notion of a “poetic standard” for architecture — a hypothetical mode of analysis that would focus on human narratives of subjectivity and fallibility.”
