Contemporary Art Museum: Friday, 7 September 2012
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) is pleased to announce its Fall 2012 season featuring three exhibitions — Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun, Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed, and Jonathan Horowitz: My Land/Your Land: Election ‘12, opening on Friday, September 7, 2012.
Opening Night Public Reception
Friday, September 7, 2012, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Free and open to the public. Cash bar. Food truck on site.
Artists’ Talk: Leslie Hewitt and Rosa Barba
Saturday, September 8, 2012, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Free and open to the public. Complimentary coffee and baked goods.
Hewitt’s sculptural photography, for example, features key visual references that allude to the ongoing influence of politically important historic events, while Barba’s film-sculptures focus on neglected or hidden sites that question how land and space are utilized, and to what ends. Horowitz’s My Land/ Your Land: Election ’12, on the other hand, demonstrates how artists more literally and actively incorporate political content in their work by directly engaging their viewers.
Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun
September 7 – December 30, 2012
A Series of Projections is comprised of 12 black-and-white photographs in which imagery sourced from the Corbis archive is interlaced with fragmentary images of domestic interiors. The result is a counterpoint between the generally historical and the specifically personal. Hewitt’s process of citation and re-presentation prompts us to question the power over imagery
and knowledge that companies like Corbis possess in licensing the rights to millions of photographs, footage, and other visual media. The emphasis on seemingly insignificant phenomena in A Series of Projections further suggests how even documented history comprises eventful, as well as uneventful, moments.
Blue Skies, Warm Sunlight features seven photographs of varying arrangements of objects, books, and snapshots. Six of the images are framed within box-like structures that lean against the wall — a signature presentational format that allows the works to function simultaneously as photography and sculpture. The items Hewitt depicts are both anonymous — a wood board — and specific to a time and place — the 1969 book The Politics of Protest, which is a study of the socio-political climate surrounding the American anti-war and civil rights protests. Snapshots featuring the kind of atmospheric conditions described in the series’ title, blue skies and warm sunlight, fall somewhere in-between, representing phenomena experienced by all but in different ways, places, and times. Hewitt’s subtle rearrangement of these elements from picture to picture prompts the viewer to experience the images spatially and pictorially, suggesting how the personal and the political are forever changing yet interconnected. Leslie Hewit: Sudden Glare of the Sun is curated by Dominic Molon, Chief Curator.
Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed
September 7 – December 30, 2012
Rosa Barba’s installations and sculptures use the basic elements of film — celluloid, projection, light, and sound — to create historical narratives and examinations of geographical locations that heighten our awareness of film’s material properties. The central work in the exhibition is the The Long Road (2010), a 35mm film shot at an abandoned racetrack in the Mojave Desert. The work contemplates the passage of time as the track is gradually absorbed back into its dusty environment. The circular, enigmatic narrative in I Made a Circuit, Then a Second Circuit (2010), a work closely related to The Long Road, is presented on a tapestry-like piece of felt from which Barba has cut the letters of a text. Like a modern-day illuminated manuscript, the prose only becomes legible when a spotlight shines through the letter-shaped gaps. Other works in the exhibition present the desert as a site of excavation and discovery. The silent 16mm film Waiting Grounds (2007), for example, considers abandoned desert military test sites as both archaeological artifacts and the stuff of science fiction, while Western Round Table (2007) focuses on a specific historical encounter, recast as a confrontation between two 16mm projectors. Invisible Act (2010) extends Barba’s interest in the kinetic qualities of film with a projection beam that shines upon a small silver ball as it rolls along a single strip of celluloid, creating a shadow play as experiential as any live performance.
Barba’s works are in constant motion, their gestures occurring in the gallery in real time. Together, the pieces featured in Desert – Performed move beyond conventional cinematography to stories experienced live and in three dimensions. Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed is curated by Kelly Shindler, Assistant Curator.
Jonathan Horowitz: My Land/Your Land: Election ‘12
September 7 – November 11, 2012
In anticipation of the forthcoming Presidential election, CAM will join five other institutions in the United States in presenting Jonathan Horowitz’s My Land/Your Land: Election ’12.This multipart installation will activate the Museum’s lobby by splitting the space into blue and red halves; continuously showing CNN’s and Fox News’s coverage of the elections on separate, opposing monitors; and, upon conclusion of the election, placing either Mitt Romney’s or Barack Obama’s portrait on the wall to signify being elected President of the United States. The title, My Land/Your Land, will appear in red and blue to underscore the work’s examination of America’s bipartisan political process. In addition to its dynamically direct engagement of the viewer, the installation extends Horowitz’s ongoing exploration of how mass media and popular culture increasingly determine our experience of everyday life.
THE FRONT ROOM
CAM is pleased to announce the latest season of the Front Room. Running parallel to the Main Galleries, the Front Room operates at a different rhythm, featuring films, performance, panting, sculpture, sound, photography, and new installations, each lasting a few weeks at a time.
September 7 – October 14, 2012
Lauren Adams mines the histories of early exploration, colonialism, and industrialization to make new and surprising connections that resonate with current sociopolitical issues.
Working in a variety of media — from paintings and drawings to textiles and printmaking — she calls attention to obscure historical events and phenomena to explore the relationship between power, labor, and material culture. Inspired by historical decorative forms and designs such as Chinoiserie-style wallpaper, Elizabethan-era dress, pirate flags, and Soviet avant-garde agitprop from the early twentieth century, Adams’s hybrid objects and installations are purposely anachronistic and deeply relevant in regard to how we value labor and its attendant outcomes today.
October 18 – November 25, 2012
Anthony Pearson creates photography and sculpture (often presented together) that explores the subtle interplay of light, shadow, and surface. His abstract works emphasize material processes, with an equal attention to the development of formal elements such as color, reflection, and texture. Pearson joins other artists of his generation who are similarly investigating the notion of the photograph as an object and the pictorial potential of sculptural work. For his Front Room project, Pearson will present a selection of his “tablets,” wall-based cast-bronze sculptures that feature aggregations of cut-metal forms that alternate knowingly between pure aesthetic expression and the decorative.
November 29 – December 30, 2012
Sreshta Rit Premnath investigates systems of representation in order to understand and challenge the process by which images become icons, events become history, or discourse becomes doctrine. Conducting rigorous research and working across various media, the artist ruminates on the histories of specific objects, sites, and people, such as the MGM lion, urban development in the city of Bangalore, India, and the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Through unraveling and undermining the meanings of familiar symbols, Premnath renders them strange while also suggesting new possibilities for interpretation.
New hours (effective September 7, 2012) Wednesday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm Thursday 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Friday 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm Sunday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm.
Opening Night Public Reception
Friday, September 7, 2012, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Free and open to the public. Cash bar. Food truck on site.
Artists’ Talk: Leslie Hewitt and Rosa Barba
Saturday, September 8, 2012, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Free and open to the public. Complimentary coffee and baked goods.
Hewitt’s sculptural photography, for example, features key visual references that allude to the ongoing influence of politically important historic events, while Barba’s film-sculptures focus on neglected or hidden sites that question how land and space are utilized, and to what ends. Horowitz’s My Land/ Your Land: Election ’12, on the other hand, demonstrates how artists more literally and actively incorporate political content in their work by directly engaging their viewers.
Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun
September 7 – December 30, 2012
A Series of Projections is comprised of 12 black-and-white photographs in which imagery sourced from the Corbis archive is interlaced with fragmentary images of domestic interiors. The result is a counterpoint between the generally historical and the specifically personal. Hewitt’s process of citation and re-presentation prompts us to question the power over imagery
and knowledge that companies like Corbis possess in licensing the rights to millions of photographs, footage, and other visual media. The emphasis on seemingly insignificant phenomena in A Series of Projections further suggests how even documented history comprises eventful, as well as uneventful, moments.
Blue Skies, Warm Sunlight features seven photographs of varying arrangements of objects, books, and snapshots. Six of the images are framed within box-like structures that lean against the wall — a signature presentational format that allows the works to function simultaneously as photography and sculpture. The items Hewitt depicts are both anonymous — a wood board — and specific to a time and place — the 1969 book The Politics of Protest, which is a study of the socio-political climate surrounding the American anti-war and civil rights protests. Snapshots featuring the kind of atmospheric conditions described in the series’ title, blue skies and warm sunlight, fall somewhere in-between, representing phenomena experienced by all but in different ways, places, and times. Hewitt’s subtle rearrangement of these elements from picture to picture prompts the viewer to experience the images spatially and pictorially, suggesting how the personal and the political are forever changing yet interconnected. Leslie Hewit: Sudden Glare of the Sun is curated by Dominic Molon, Chief Curator.
Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed
September 7 – December 30, 2012
Rosa Barba’s installations and sculptures use the basic elements of film — celluloid, projection, light, and sound — to create historical narratives and examinations of geographical locations that heighten our awareness of film’s material properties. The central work in the exhibition is the The Long Road (2010), a 35mm film shot at an abandoned racetrack in the Mojave Desert. The work contemplates the passage of time as the track is gradually absorbed back into its dusty environment. The circular, enigmatic narrative in I Made a Circuit, Then a Second Circuit (2010), a work closely related to The Long Road, is presented on a tapestry-like piece of felt from which Barba has cut the letters of a text. Like a modern-day illuminated manuscript, the prose only becomes legible when a spotlight shines through the letter-shaped gaps. Other works in the exhibition present the desert as a site of excavation and discovery. The silent 16mm film Waiting Grounds (2007), for example, considers abandoned desert military test sites as both archaeological artifacts and the stuff of science fiction, while Western Round Table (2007) focuses on a specific historical encounter, recast as a confrontation between two 16mm projectors. Invisible Act (2010) extends Barba’s interest in the kinetic qualities of film with a projection beam that shines upon a small silver ball as it rolls along a single strip of celluloid, creating a shadow play as experiential as any live performance.
Barba’s works are in constant motion, their gestures occurring in the gallery in real time. Together, the pieces featured in Desert – Performed move beyond conventional cinematography to stories experienced live and in three dimensions. Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed is curated by Kelly Shindler, Assistant Curator.
Jonathan Horowitz: My Land/Your Land: Election ‘12
September 7 – November 11, 2012
In anticipation of the forthcoming Presidential election, CAM will join five other institutions in the United States in presenting Jonathan Horowitz’s My Land/Your Land: Election ’12.This multipart installation will activate the Museum’s lobby by splitting the space into blue and red halves; continuously showing CNN’s and Fox News’s coverage of the elections on separate, opposing monitors; and, upon conclusion of the election, placing either Mitt Romney’s or Barack Obama’s portrait on the wall to signify being elected President of the United States. The title, My Land/Your Land, will appear in red and blue to underscore the work’s examination of America’s bipartisan political process. In addition to its dynamically direct engagement of the viewer, the installation extends Horowitz’s ongoing exploration of how mass media and popular culture increasingly determine our experience of everyday life.
THE FRONT ROOM
CAM is pleased to announce the latest season of the Front Room. Running parallel to the Main Galleries, the Front Room operates at a different rhythm, featuring films, performance, panting, sculpture, sound, photography, and new installations, each lasting a few weeks at a time.
September 7 – October 14, 2012
Lauren Adams mines the histories of early exploration, colonialism, and industrialization to make new and surprising connections that resonate with current sociopolitical issues.
Working in a variety of media — from paintings and drawings to textiles and printmaking — she calls attention to obscure historical events and phenomena to explore the relationship between power, labor, and material culture. Inspired by historical decorative forms and designs such as Chinoiserie-style wallpaper, Elizabethan-era dress, pirate flags, and Soviet avant-garde agitprop from the early twentieth century, Adams’s hybrid objects and installations are purposely anachronistic and deeply relevant in regard to how we value labor and its attendant outcomes today.
October 18 – November 25, 2012
Anthony Pearson creates photography and sculpture (often presented together) that explores the subtle interplay of light, shadow, and surface. His abstract works emphasize material processes, with an equal attention to the development of formal elements such as color, reflection, and texture. Pearson joins other artists of his generation who are similarly investigating the notion of the photograph as an object and the pictorial potential of sculptural work. For his Front Room project, Pearson will present a selection of his “tablets,” wall-based cast-bronze sculptures that feature aggregations of cut-metal forms that alternate knowingly between pure aesthetic expression and the decorative.
November 29 – December 30, 2012
Sreshta Rit Premnath investigates systems of representation in order to understand and challenge the process by which images become icons, events become history, or discourse becomes doctrine. Conducting rigorous research and working across various media, the artist ruminates on the histories of specific objects, sites, and people, such as the MGM lion, urban development in the city of Bangalore, India, and the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Through unraveling and undermining the meanings of familiar symbols, Premnath renders them strange while also suggesting new possibilities for interpretation.
New hours (effective September 7, 2012) Wednesday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm Thursday 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Friday 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm Sunday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm.
posted by Bill Barrett at 4:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home