Build Utopia celebrates the potential for humankind to not only explore or discover, but to create our own structures, meanings - our own reality.
Build Utopia brings together two figures united in their explosive creative zeal, detonating of conventions, and their remarkable cross-discipline exploration. Both William Blake and Sophie Tabeur Arp fearlessly followed their creative muse, placing the power of human imagination and artistic vision at the core of what we experience, who we are and what we can be.
'Composition With Rectangles, Squares And Set Circles', the artwork in Build Utopia, is just one facet of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s prolificaly impactful (but under-recognized) work across multiple disciplines and major avant-garde art movements of the first half of the 20th Century. The painting's geometric abstractions mark a creative realm beyond worldly representation, where the interplay of form, color and equilibrium become central to the work itself. This kind of abstraction slots into Tauber-Arp's lifelong dedication to Dadaist utopian ideals of changing society by transforming human perception with radicalized aesthetics. It is also an expression of the progressive ideals of Concrete, Constructivist and Geometric art of which she was an active and influential force.
William Blake is often described as a visionary, a radical, and the greatest ever English artist, or simply the greatest Englishman, to have ever lived. Build Utopia's words are from his work Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion.
They are spoken by Los, the character which represents the artist’s imagination at work in the material world. In the final chapter, Albion (Blake’s embodiment of man or Britain or the Western world) awakens to discover that Los is Christ and Christ is Los. And indeed Blake’s creativity itself embodies Los’ words. Blake created his own mythology and thus possibilities, recasting through the fire of his own creative vision the materials of religion, history, and knowledge surrounding him.
These two extraordinary, fearless creators exemplify the power of human and artistic vision to disrupt, break and ultimately create our material and moral universe. To create ourselves. To Build Utopia.