Susan Meyers at Plus Gallery

Denver based artist Susan Meyer’s latest work “Plato’s Retreat,” features both new sculptural works and short videos. Central to this body of work is a looming concrete warren of a structure, at once architectural model and dilapidated ruin. Meyer’s works strive to realize sparkling futuristic architectonic utopias, with small details suggestive of discontent.  “Plato’s Retreat” seems to revisit these same environments, after the deluge, to find them sparsely inhabited, overbuilt, abandoned and overgrown – still functioning, though in a manner that seems to favor the individual over the collective.

Brutalist architecture and Corbusier’s machines for living are influences, as much for their mixed public reception as their harsh beauty. Also referenced is “Hotel Palenque,” Robert Smithson’s 1972 slide lecture to the architecture faculty at the University of Utah; having visited Mexico to see the Mayan ruins at Palenque, Smithson gave a talk instead on the mundane yet beautiful ruin of a hotel in which he stayed. The metaphoric implications of this ramshackle, labyrinthian hotel, simultaneously in renovation and decay, haunt “Plato’s Retreat.”

Plus Gallery will host an opening reception for “Plato’s Retreat” on Friday, October 19th from 7-10pm.  The reception is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be on display through November 24.

Check out some of Meyer’s earlier works: