News

In the Studio with Vik Muniz

Architectural Digest just published this image of Vik Muniz with Mnemonic Vehicle #1 in his Brooklyn studio.

“What makes up the pictures inside your head? This is the question I’m always asking myself,” says artist Vik Muniz. Best known for assembling mundane materials into trompe l’oeil tableaux, which he then photographs, the Brazilian-born talent (shown above in his Brooklyn studio) is the subject of a retrospective opening this winter at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. In his inventive compositions, garbage, chocolate, and powdered pigment are arranged into facsimiles of famous paintings, while scraps of old snapshots are collaged into family portraits, and pictures of castles are improbably etched onto grains of sand. New sculptures reproduce toy cars—like those Muniz collected as a child—at full size. “I have no interest in what I haven’t seen,” he says. “You have to make images that are mysterious but still communicate ideas to everybody.” February 28–May 29; high.org

Rennie Collection, Winter 2015: Collected Works

Vancouver's Rennie Collection will open Winter 2015: Collected Works on January 23, 2016. The exhibition will present the work of 41 artists, including Tavares Strachan and John Baldessari:

John Baldessari's (b. 1931) larger-than-life Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large) (2013) casts its meditative gaze towards the eye of the adjacent towering needle, illuminating a confluence of beliefs and connecting cultures that have drifted apart through the course of history. (click for full press release)

Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise

John Baldessari's Ear Trumpet appears on the cover of the new English translation of Michael Chion's Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Duke University Press Books).

First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound. Chion considers how cultural institutions privilege some sounds above others and how spurious distinctions between noise and sound guide the ways we hear and value certain sounds. He critiques the tenacious tendency to understand sounds in relation to their sources and advocates "acousmatic" listening—listening without visual access to a sound’s cause—to disentangle ourselves from auditory habits and prejudices. Yet sound can no more be reduced to mere perceptual phenomena than encapsulated in the sciences of acoustics and physiology. As Chion reminds us and explores in depth, a wide range of linguistic, sensory, cultural, institutional, and media- and technologically-specific factors interact with and shape sonic experiences. Interrogating these interactions, Chion stimulates us to think about how we might open our ears to new sounds, become more nuanced and informed listeners, and more fully understand the links between how we hear and what we do. (Amazon)

Ian Stell + Beyer Projects

When in Berlin: don't miss Diagint, which Beyer Projects produced for Ian Stell, on view through summer 2016.

Last month, New York-based artist and designer Ian Stell debuted Diagint, his very first work to be shown in Berlin, along the bank of the Spree River. The installation consists of a pair of interlocking staircases cleverly configured in such a way that five steps on each flight pivot open like a door, allowing Diagint to become a four-way passage.

Read the full text and interview at L'Arco Baleno.

Vik Muniz at Art Basel - Parcours

We are pleased to announce that our Mnemonic Vehicle collaboration with Vik Muniz will be exhibited by Pace Gallery at Art Basel - Parcours.

PACE (New York, London, Zuoz, Beijing, Hong Kong) will present ‘Mnemonic Vehicle (Ferrari)’ (2015), an installation by Vik Muniz comprising a life-size sculpture of the iconic Matchbox toy car at St. Martin’s church. A project about memory, desire and scale, the artist has been collecting vintage toy cars from flea markets, old toyshops and eBay over the last year, considering the importance of toys and playing to our adult selves.

June 17-21, 2015  MAP

Kay Rosen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Kay Rosen's exhibition, Map of the World, is underway at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. The exhibition includes two large scale wall pieces.

The Gallery’s entrance court is its most public space, traversed by hundreds of viewers every day. But whose space is it? Is it ours or is it yours? In her wall-to-wall project for the entrance court, American artist Kay Rosen conjures with these big questions of possession, occupation and cultural territory.

Rosen has emblazoned one side of the entrance court with YOURS OURS, a vast word painting in which two pronouns – ‘yours’ and ‘ours’ – struggle unequally for ownership of the available wall space...

...Part puzzle, part proclamation, and part concrete poem, Rosen’s project is the latest addition to the Gallery’s long-running series of contemporary projects. Rosen is also represented in the Gallery’ collection by the recently acquired wall painting BLURRED. (click for full description)

Sylvie Fleury's "Yes To All" Gold-Plated Trash Can at the Bass Museum, Miami

FleuryTrashCanYesToAllBeyerProjects

Sylvie Fleury's Yes to All, (2004) is included in the current Bass Museum 50th Anniversary exhibition, GOLD.

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Bass Museum of Art presents GOLD, featuring artworks by contemporary artists who physically or conceptually utilize gold in their practice. The 24 international artists in GOLD examine the multitude of ideas with which the material is associated, using gold to reinforce or challenge notions of transformation, beauty, spirituality, and values, both economic and moral.

Don't miss the Wall Street Journal's slideshow of exhibition highlights.

Tavares Strachan: Neon "You Belong Here" at Prospect.3 New Orleans

Congratulations to artist Tavares Strachan for his participation in Prospect.3, New Orleans. You Belong Here is a 100 foot neon work on a barge that traveled the Mississippi river for a week in late October. The accompanying You Belong Here app is available on iTunes. More recently, a 61 inch version of the work sold at Phillips to benefit the Dubin Breast Center at The Mount Sinai Health System.