General catalogue No. 39: Ordinary conversations
The work of Villa Design Group - Than Hussein Clark, James Connick, and William Joys - draws on the formal languages of architecture, theater, and the decorative arts. 'Tragedy Machine', by imagining a form for the automated creation of dramatic scripts, considers the speculative possibilities of 'queer objects'. This exuberant catalogue features an essay by exhibition curator Alise Upiti and conversations between VDG and Bonnie Honing, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Miriam Leonard. It follows the first institutional show of the group at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2016, where the architectural installation doubled as the setting for premiering 'This Is It or Dawn at Bar Bazukha', a four-act adaptation of 'The Iceman Cometh' (1939) by Eugene O'Neill. Exhibition: MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (20.5. - 17.7.2018).
