CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Villa Design Group creates sculptures, videos, and scripted performances inspired by the formal languages of architecture, theater, and the decorative arts. The London-based collective—comprised of Than Hussein Clark, James Connick, and William Joys—seeks to create a “theater of design” inhabited by “queer objects.” These objects are embedded in speculative narratives that ask what it might mean for a thing, not a person, to be queer today.

Tragedy Machine, Villa Design Group’s new body of work realized for the List Visual Arts Center, comprises sculptures and a four-act theatrical production imagining the potential of an automated machine or software with the ability to compose tragic and dramatic scripts. The exhibition is centered around three large-scale architectural installations that consider this potential and also reflect the group’s interest in theatrical structures and staging. Miriam Ruth as Architect (Exterior Façade: Deltress Holding) (2016) is a 25-foot wall with drawings of nineteenth-century actresses. Theater or Cruelty (Cometh, Cometh, Cometh) (2016) presents a modular stage that is, in part, imagined to be the workers’ cantina at a fictional factory that produces the tragedy machine. On the opposite side of the gallery, the hand-painted screen Bait and Glitch (Cancancancancancancan Smash) (2016) features a scene from Roland Emmerich’s 2015 film Stonewall, in which a white male protagonist replaces the historical Marsha P. Johnson in throwing the first brick of the eponymous 1969 riots.

Two sculptural costumes of tubular metal and millinery felt, Invalid Suit (The Danish Girl Ascending) (2016) and Invalid Suit (The Savage Theory of Grace) (2016), flank either side of the stage. Video screens displaying selections from British actor Eddie Redmayne’s films are integrated into these structures, turning them into a kind of tragedy machine. The installation’s capstone is For all Mediocre Students the Olive Tree Bears the Fruits of Competition (2016), a chandelier of steel and blown glass which hangs from the ceiling above the stage.

The exhibition also serves as the premiere of This Is It or Dawn at Bar Bazuhka (2016), the group’s most recent theatrical production, an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh (1939), by transposing the story from New York’s Greenwich Village to a gay nightclub on the Greek Island of Skiathos.

Villa Design Group is Than Hussein Clark, James Connick, and William Joys, who met at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011. Recent and upcoming performances and exhibitions include Edinburgh Art Festival; Blue Moon at Mathew Gallery, Berlin; KUB Arena; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Mathew Gallery, New York; and mumok, Vienna.

Villa Design Group: Tragedy Machine is curated by Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator, Public Art and Exhibitions, MIT List Visual Arts Center.