Cameron Forbes: The Maritime Plaza Hotel

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Cameron Forbes, "Plaza Windows," 2016

acrylic and oil on board, 54" x 90"

Launch and artist talk: 7pm, 18 May 2018

Built in 1964, the mushroom-shape of Montreal’s Maritime Plaza Hotel was a local iteration of a larger movement towards circular constructions, reproducing a hopeful gesture towards a future utopia, one that never would come to be.

Inspired by the Plaza, Forbes’ painting and drawing based installation conjures and amplifies the transitoriness that such places inhabit in twenty first century life. Occupying both a past iteration of an expected bright future while crises that inform current architecture leave such buildings obsolete is deeply uncanny.

The work explores this via observation, repetition and staging. By looking outward through the Plaza’s framed and curtained windows as well as inward to its oxidizing décor, the movements between interior and exterior, public and private, the grid and the curve, the past and the future break from their binaries to form a hyperobject that is both beautiful and unsettling.