CAM: Friday, 8 September 2017

Zlatko Ćosić, frame from A Murmuration

Opening Night Friday, September 8
Public Reception 7:00–9:00 pm
September 8 through December 31, 2017

Mickalene Thomas: Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities, an exhibition of film, video, photography, and installation. Thomas recasts and reconfigures notions of beauty, gender, race, and representation in powerful new and recent works. Known for her expressive paintings and collages, Thomas builds upon previous explorations into portraiture to create expanded narratives. In these new works she focuses on black women who inspire, who represent, and who express a wide range of possibilities and desires.Thomas explores and explodes ideas of what it means to be a black woman in the spotlight.

Hayv Kahraman: Acts of Reparation highlights the evolution of the artist’s practice, where the protagonist female body is pictured in various sequences and activities. Fueled by her experience as an Iraqi immigrant, Kahraman is concerned with the multitude rather than the self. Kahraman says of her protagonist, “She is one who dwells in the margins, surviving and navigating a life of spatial and temporal displacement. She is at once an agent of both personal and collective memorial transmission and an interrogator of future and present realities.”

Video by Zlatko Ćosić in the latest installment of CAM’s Street Views series, projected on the museum’s Washington Boulevard façade. A native of the former Yugoslavia, Ćosić’s experience of war and displacement have consequently shaped the content of his artistic practice. His “motion painting,” A Murmuration, begins with the play of light on water, a natural image that Ćosić manipulates by intensifying colors, varying speed and direction, to mimic the patterns of a flock of birds. The artist has said that nature was a source of solace when he was driven into forced labor during the war. With A Murmuration, Ćosić expresses nature’s liberating imaginative power.

Hedge, an architectural installation created by the design team of Jason Foster Butz, Nathaniel Elberfeld, and Lavender Tessmer. Hedge will be on view in the CAM courtyard September 8 through December 31, 2017. Built from recycled materials taken from industrial sites, Hedge experiments with light and reflection, with material and ephemera, and with changes in the weather. The design team investigates modular forms, with the repetition of smaller units reconceived to create a large-scale holistic material system. The completed form maintains a subtle yet profound influence on the outdoor space, a surprise to the eye activated by cloud, sun, moon, and slant of light.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

3750 Washington Boulevard

St. Louis, Missouri 63108

314.535.4660

http://camstl.org