Gaelen Pinnock is an architect and artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Pinnock uses various techniques to explore and document expressions of power in the urban landscape.
His work scrutinizes the legacies of failed utopian visions and the shadows cast by laws, societal structures and urban development. He is preoccupied with the patterns that underlie our cities, obscured by the myopia of day-to-day existence: masked by the glitz of developments and the creep of securitised precincts; ignored by the clustering of suburbs and the ebb and flow of traffic; pushed aside by our own fears and prejudices.
Much of Pinnock's work looks at how modern developments and policies in South Africa are entrenching class separation in an urban landscape that is already shaped by the legacy of colonial rule, apartheid legislation and divisive spatial planning. He teases out patterns, sensations, feelings of exclusion and distils his findings into stark, geometric works. These snapshots of a city and a society are aesthetically beguiling, but loaded with undercurrents of deficiency and violence.