Assemblage, 1910-2020
Arabesques are usually used in repeating patterns and can be infinitely multiplied in order to cover a surface. In Assemblage -as in several works in the show- Tabet follows the repetition logic by stacking twenty original redwood corbels salvaged from Julia Morgan’s Saint John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Morgan (1872–1957), who was a student of Bourgoin, was the first female architecture student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and went on to become a prolific representative of the Arts and Crafts movement taking the idea of the arabesque from Europe to North America.