META ART Virtual Gallery
Architecture, Master planning & Interior Architecture
Launched Spring 2022.
A little glimpse of the art within the VERSES META ART Virtual NFT Gallery concept by REAFE STUDIO in collaboration with @woodsocietyofthearts. Located within the Sonoran Desert.
The VERSES Gallery has opened it’s digital doors to the increasingly important NFT art world. Blending established contemporary architecture within a virtual architectural space, set within the harshest of desert environments.
The gallery is a space without borders that brings the art community together to curate, view and buy art across the digital spectrum. Connecting people from diverse creative disciplines across the world.
Big thank you to @martingayford for the wonderful artwork exhibited within.
The work involved Concept Development, Master Planning, Architectural and Interior Architecture.
Robin Friend - Bastard Countryside
REAFE STUDIO have had the pleasure of building a curated exhibition that shows the complete Bastard Countryside body of work, all housed within the META ART Gallery.
Bastard Countryside collects together 15 years worth of exploration within the British landscape, dwelling on what Victor Hugo called the ‘bastard countryside’: “somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures”. Friend’s large-format colour images scrutinise these in-between, unkempt, and often surreal marginal areas of the country, highlighting frictions between the pastoral sublime and the discarded, often polluted reality of the present.
Starting from a classical landscape tradition, Friend’s meticulous 5x4 photographs are given heightened effect through exaggerations of colour and composition, embodying friction between British pastoral ideals and present reality. In particular, Friend follows moments in which the expected narrative of the landscape is rudely interrupted: often through leakage, pollution, or the wreckage and containment of nature.
In his accompanying essay, writer Robert Macfarlane describes Bastard Countryside as “a vision par excellence of our synthetic ‘modern nature’– produced by assemblage and entanglement rather than purity and distinction”. Contained within Friend’s photographs are “hard questions […] about what kinds of landscape one might wish either to pass through or to live in; about what versions of ‘modern nature’ might be worth fighting for, and why.”
