The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

For his largest-scale exhibition in the United States, The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth, AVL draws from two bodies of work that give the exhibition its name. They transform Pioneer Works into an immersive installation of sculptures and industrial machines. Central to the New Tribal Labyrinth series is Blast Furnace (2013), an imposing structure referencing Industrial Revolution-era furnaces traditionally used to produce steel. The sculpture also contains domestic elements such as a kitchen, toilet, and sleeping quarters. This environment is inhabited by an imaginary tribe of metalworkers, a “new tribe” with a visceral desire to return to the beginning of industry—the origins of Western culture, wealth, materials, and products. This tribe feeds off the heat, waste, and noise of their industrial utopia, setting the stage for the synthesis of human and machine. Some of the works in the New Tribal Labyrinth series express this synthesis through sculptural representations of sperm and reproductive organs doubling as lamps and furniture. They posit the human body as itself a kind of machine, endlessly procreating.