Circus (Caribbean Orange)

Trained as an architect, Gordon Matta-Clark gave spaces affected by blight or gentrification a second life as sculptures by cutting geometric voids into condemned buildings with a chainsaw. For Circus (Caribbean Orange), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Matta-Clark carved three spherical volumes (like a three-ring circus) from a three-story townhouse adjacent to the MCA’s former location, before the building was transformed into additional gallery space. Matta-Clark printed slides of the resulting space and then cut into the photographs to produce collages like this one. He explains that these photocollages “try and capture the ‘all around’ experience of the piece” and are “an approximation of this kind of ambulatory ‘getting to know’ what the space is about.”