Snarkitecture co-founder Daniel Arsham has opened a solo show at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art in Georgia, which features eroded, rippled and cloth-like wall installations.

Called The Future Was Then, artist and designer Arsham's exhibition includes a series of faux concrete walls called Wall Excavation, which looks as if a series of vertical surfaces have been blasted through.

This site-specific piece was commissioned by SCAD and looks as if it were a permanent part of the room, but is actually made of styrofoam and joint compound, also known as polyfilla.

Visitors walk around the walls and look through the layers of openings. As the holes get smaller, they bear more of a resemblance to the outline of a human figure.

"As visitors engage directly with their surroundings and walk among the immersive excavation, they are met with sculpted openings in which jagged edges morph from abstract forms into the silhouette of a human figure," the museum said in a statement.

"This transformative experience evokes notions of progress in relation to mankind’s ability to manipulate his surroundings," it added.

Other pieces are intended to toy with perception and explore ideas of solidity and materiality. Hooded Figure looks as if a piece of cloth were being pulled off the wall by an invisible body.

The piece is made of fibreglass, also covered in joint compound so that it emerges seamlessly from the plane of the wall.

Liquid Wall resembles a drop of milk splashing and rippling out across the surface of the wall plane. The piece is rendered in fibreglass, paint and joint compound.

A trio of figurative works use unconventional materials – resin, ash, broken glass – to render parts of the body, rounding out the exhibition.

The Future Was Then is on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia until 24 July 2016.

In addition to his art practice, Arsham runs New York-based studio Snarkitecture with cofounder Alex Mustonen, creating interiors, installations, and furniture.

The duo's projects include Nike store with hundreds of replicas of Air Jordans, a "beach" of plastic balls filling the lobby of the National Building Museum in Washington DC and a series of camouflage garments.