Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited
March 1994
Curated by Louise Pelletier and Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Macdonald Harrington Building
815 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal
In March of 1994, the exhibition titled “Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited,” inspired by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) printed by the famous Aldine Press in Venice, opened at McGill’s School of Architecture. The exhibition was a part of a series of presentations on faculty work at the School of Architecture. Curated by Louise Pelletier and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, this show involved participation from students from the Architectural History and Theory program featuring graphic work and related architectural projects from the then recently published book by Pérez-Gómez, Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (1992). The exhibition’s most prominent feature was a large canvas wing that hung in the middle of the exhibition space. The large central canvas functioned as a screen for the analog projection of a long strip-image that ran at the bottom of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’s pages. The projection demonstrated the original cinematographic concept driving the imagery. The exhibition also included projections of the “places” visited by the hero of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili –both real and generated through other artists’ works; “liquid light” prints on water-color paper of original “polyphilic” cyborgs; and an architectural project for a site in Japan, loosely based on the book’s narrative and imagery.
