Artist Tau Lewis @ ICA Boston - "Tau Lewis: Spirit Level" Exhibition + Monograph

Tau Lewis: Spirit Level

ICA, Boston

August 29, 2024 – January 20, 2025 

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Tau Lewis: Spirit Level, the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. For the ICA, TAU LEWIS (b. 1993, Toronto) is creating a new body of work that is accompanied by her first monograph. The exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, ICA Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant. 

Tau Lewis transforms found materials into fabric-based figurative sculptures, quilts, masks, and other assemblages through labor-intensive processes such as hand-sewing and carving. She forages for objects and materials that carry meaning and memories—from previously worn clothing and leather to driftwood and seashells. Often, these artifacts are drawn from a meticulously organized material library the artist has amassed since 2000 collected from innumerable places. The evocative objects Tau Lewis gathers and transforms carry their own spirit and energy and connect her work to the social, cultural, and physical landscapes that she moves through, collects from, and inhabits. Tau Lewis describes these different landscapes as “Black geographies.” These geographies—oceanic, terrestrial, extraterrestrial—are the areas where Tau Lewis’s otherworldly beings live.  

“Lewis harnesses the beauty and power carried by found materials in her monumental soft sculptures,” said Jeffrey De Blois. “Her sculptures are alive with the energy of previously worn found fabrics and animated through every meticulous gesture. They are intensely personal, yet open to a world of associations and meanings.” 

Tau Lewis’s upcycling relates to forms of material inventiveness practiced by Afro-diasporic communities. For the artist, working with things close at hand is a reparative act aimed at reclaiming agency. Her works circumnavigate a broad range of references, from the mythic underwater civilization of Drexciya, to forms of material inventiveness practiced by artists such as Thorton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and the quilters from Gee’s Bend Alabama. Throughout, Lewis’s interest is in advancing the diasporic traditions and exploring the transformation and rebirth of materials that occurs when an object is made by hand.  

For the ICA, Tau Lewis is creating a new, interrelated body of sculptures including a large floor-bound quilt and five monumental figurative sculptures. The patchwork quilt is pieced together with a series of repeating panels the artist refers to as sequences radiating out from the center, where a miniature architectural form made from found metal components and a starfish is located. Each repeating sequence is composed of a set of found objects from the artist’s material library that recall kingdom-like organizations of the universe: animals, planets, satellites, weapons, aliens, and more. Intricately detailed in its configuration, and a whole world unto itself, the quilt evokes the idea of a portal or a galactic landscape; a cosmological ecosystem where struggles for power are playing out. The quilt is surrounded by five statuesque, fabric-based sculptures, each approximately 10 feet in height, adorned with hand-sewn, cloak-like garments and holding unique gestural hand poses. Their garments are pieced together with a makeshift aesthetic from found fabrics—ranging from muslin scraps dyed with tea or rust to deconstructed leather jackets and parachutes—while the figures themselves are by turns oceanic and extraterrestrial in appearance. Holding space in the exhibition, the figures congregate together as onlookers towering over the quilt.    

TAU LEWIS - Artist Biography 

Born in 1993 in Toronto, Tau Lewis lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at venues including the Barbican, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; ICA/Boston; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Hepworth Wakefield, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; and New Museum, New York. Her work has been included in major international group exhibitions including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Biennale di Venezia, and Yesterday we said tomorrow, Prospect.5, New Orleans. Tau Lewis’s work is held in several permanent collections, including Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

Publication - The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first monograph featuring an essay from the exhibition’s curator, Jeffrey De Blois, and a conversation between Tau Lewis and Lonnie Holley, renowned artist, musician, and long-time mentor to Tau Lewis.  

Related Post on Wanafoto: Taux Lewis, Atlanta Contemporary, 2018

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART / BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210 

www.icaboston.org

Betye Saar Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art - Serious Moonlight

Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

October 29, 2021 – April 17, 2022 

Rarely-seen installation works by pioneering artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) receive their first dedicated exhibition in more than three decades at ICA Miami. Serious Moonlight spans significant installations created from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that is reconfigured for the first time in more than 30 years. Showcasing this lesser-known aspect of the artist’s practice, the survey provides new insights into Betye Saar’s explorations of ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Serious Moonlight is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. 

“Betye Saar’s impact on art history is undeniable, yet important aspects of her innovative body of work have yet to be fully explored,” said ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld. “Serious Moonlight gives audiences the first opportunity to view many works of large scale sculpture and installation together that have not been seen in a museum context for decades. ICA Miami is committed to exploring under- recognized aspects of significant artists’ practices in order to enable deeper understanding of their work and its impact.”

“Saar’s radical immersive installations are incredibly rich with narrative,” said ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. “Connecting the political and the spiritual from a feminist point of view is an enduring aspect of Saar’s practice, and her groundbreaking work continues to spur important dialogues about gender and race. Through these rarely-seen installations, made nearly three decades ago, the exhibition illustrates her bold and pioneering approach as an artist, storyteller, and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.”

Recognized for her visionary artistic practice, Betye Saar has been a pioneer of assemblage art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her dense, complexly referential assemblages, sculptures, and collages reflect changing cultural and political contexts—generating and influencing dialogues and artistic practice related to race and gender. Rich with familiar symbols, a number of the works in the exhibition highlight Saar’s interest in spirituality and cosmology. Serious Moonlight brings together a series of her lesser-known installations to demonstrate the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism throughout her practice, as well as her explorations of myth and spirituality in relation to the African diaspora and the African American experience.

Influenced by Betye Saar’s lifelong home of Los Angeles and research trips to Haiti, Mexico, and Nigeria in the 1970s, the installations seen in the exhibition explore concepts of ritual and community through both cultural symbols and autobiographical references. Reconfigured in close collaboration with the artist, each installation is exhibited in a dedicated architectural pavilion, enabling each work to be showcased individually and supporting the artists’ intentions to create immersive, dynamic viewer experiences with each installation.

Among the significant works on view is Oasis (1984), the exhibition’s earliest installation, which will be reconfigured for the first time since 1988. Featuring meticulously blown glass spheres around a children’s rocking chair embedded in sand, Oasis evokes a utopic space where life and death merge and coexist.

Serious Moonlight additionally features House of Fortune (1988), an ominous scene of a card table, tarot cards, and Vodou flags as a meditation on spirituality. Limbo (1994) and Wings of Morning (1992), both address death and mourning, and draw from the history and experience of African American communities to create tangible and powerful monuments consecrating collective memories. Saar’s reflections on the African diaspora are also illustrated through the installations Mojotech (1987), Secrets and Shadows (1989), A Woman’s Boat: Voyages (1998), and Gliding into Midnight (2019)—the latter with fragments of the 1993 installation In Troubled Waters—which touch upon this history of the aftereffects of the transatlantic slave trade. 

Betye Saar - Exhibition Catalogue: Serious Moonlight is accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue edited by Stephanie Seidel. The catalogue features contributions by Sampada Aranke, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Ollman, and Stephanie Seidel that consider Betye Saar’s work in the contemporary context. 

BETYE SAAR - BIOGRAPHY

Boldly addressing questions of race and gender in her art and activism, Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles) has been a pioneer of readymade art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her revolutionary work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and around the world, including, most recently, the exhibition “Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl's Window” at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, dedicated to her prints; the retrospective “Betye Saar: Still Tickin’” at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, and Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; the group show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the monumental traveling group show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at the Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Current exhibitions include solo presentations “Betye Saar: Call and Response” at the the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, MS, previously on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) and traveling to Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (Fall 2021), focused on her sketchbooks and related works. The Academy of Arts and Letters recently inducted Saar May 19, 2021. Saar’s works are held in more than sixty museum collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; MoMA; LACMA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Dalton Gata Exhibition @ ICA Miami - The Way We'll Be

Dalton Gata: The Way We'll Be 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

May 7 – November 21, 2021 

In Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based artist Dalton Gata’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, ICA Miami presents his surrealistic installations across media, which explore his personal experiences, queer and popular culture, and psychological and mythical symbols. The artist’s recent focus on metaphysical still-lifes is reflected through newly commissioned paintings and sculpture that depict symbolic elements in human scale, such as monsters, masks, and a pearl that doubles as an 8-ball.

Trained as a fashion designer, Dalton Gata reimagines craft to consider its relationship to identity and sexuality, creating innovative works across mediums. Dalton Gata’s work draws from an expansive and deeply personal archive of images assembled by the artist over the past five years, including a trove of digital sources. His practice is also profoundly impacted by his experience of immigration, and explores the diasporic conditions of Cuba in the Caribbean through symbolic landscapes and the incorporation of cross-cultural references.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Robert Grosvenor @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art

Robert Grosvenor 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

May 7 – November 21, 2021

ICA Miami presents a major work by the American artist and recipient of the 2020 Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, Robert Grosvenor. Untitled (1968/2019) represents the artist’s use of commonplace materials and exploration of monumental scale and poetic form. Recently acquired by the museum, the large-scale sculpture also showcases a historical dialogue with Minimalism, while challenging the movement’s limitations, and engages the site to provoke profound viewer experiences.  

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Chakaia Booker Exhibition @ ICA Miami - The Observance

Chakaia Booker: The Observance 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

April 22 – October 31, 2021

As the first comprehensive museum survey of American artist Chakaia Booker, this exhibition explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Chakaia Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the exhibition highlights Chakaia Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.

The Observance includes some of Chakaia Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes––Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots. 

Chakaia Booker: The Observance is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Janiva Ellis Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Rats

Janiva Ellis: Rats

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

February 25 – September 12, 2021

Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is the first solo museum exhibition for the American artist Janiva Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works express a tense intimacy that has been mischaracterized as descriptions of internal crisis. In actuality, the tension in her work comments on the pervasiveness of white delusion and its denial as a brutal and violent social and societal force. Her paintings make expert use of contemporary and historical styles—abstraction, figuration, landscape, and cartoon—to turn a lens to the insidious nature of whiteness. The exhibition traces recent and significant experimentation in the artist’s practice, marking an expansion of her critical approach to representation. 

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Claudia Andujar Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art

Claudia Andujar 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

January 20 – May 2, 2021

On view is a concise selection of artist and activist Claudia Andujar’s most experimental and expressive photographs from her earliest series of the Yanomami people, dating from 1972-1976. Andujar became fully immersed in the complex culture of the Yanomami—who reside in the Amazonian rainforest of Northern Brazil—through photographing, working with, and fighting beside the Yanomami. With a lifelong commitment to advocating for the interests of the Yanomami, Andujar has continued to visit the community since her first visit in 1971, and created a unique record and political campaign that has helped to designate their homeland as a protected Indigenous reserve. The exhibition features images that see the artist creating her own documentary style defined by distorted light and soft colors through the use of infrared film, color filters, and the application of petroleum jelly to the camera lens. The resulting images are dramatic views of landscapes and intimate portraits. 

The exhibition is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Allan McCollum Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Works Since 1969

Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

September 2, 2020 – January 17, 2021

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Miami) presents the first U.S. museum retrospective for legendary American artist ALLAN McCOLLUM (b. 1944). Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969 traces the artist’s iconoclastic philosophy on the originality, value, and context of art. While McCollum’s contributions have been the focus of six major museum exhibitions in Europe and his work is included in more than 90 museum collections worldwide, this is the first museum exhibition in the U.S. to survey his 50-year career across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, rarely seen early works and large-scale installations. Works Since 1969 is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel. 

“For decades, Allan McCollum has explored how identity and community are created through collections of objects. In our fractious and digital age, his explorations of regional American culture have never been more timely,” said Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s Artistic Director. “McCollum’s work is profoundly influential on artists working on the role of the museum in society—yet has been underexplored to date. Our survey builds on ICA Miami’s history of providing the first major U.S. museum platform for artists whose work merits renewed attention and reveals insights about contemporary society and culture.” 

Organized chronologically, Works Since 1969 brings together more than more than 20 series that blur the boundaries between mass-produced object and unique, exalted artifact. Some of the artist’s earliest major series, “Bleach Paintings” and “Constructed Paintings”—both begun in 1969—reflect Allan McCollum’s interrogations of art history’s longstanding preoccupation with medium specificity. Not painted in a traditional sense, but instead made from materials widely available in supermarkets and hardware stores, Allan McCollum considers the cultural conventions surrounding painting, fabricated through its context and social significance.

Critiques of originality and value carry through Allan McCollum’s five decades of practice, demonstrated through a range of major series on view in the exhibition. These include his iconic “Surrogate Paintings” (1978– ) and “Plaster Surrogates” (1982– ), wooden wall-mounted reliefs and plaster casts shaped like framed pictures in monochromatic colors, which emphasize the conventions of framed images as a universal sign for anything meaningful and valuable. 

Demonstrating the role of scale and repetition in his work, the exhibition additionally presents two of McCollum’s iconic sculptural series, “Perfect Vehicles” (1985– ) and “Over Ten Thousand Individual Works” (1987– ), which consider methods of collecting and the ways artworks accrue visibility, meaning, and value. McCollum also explores the notion of originality through photographic work, reflected in the “Perpetual Photos” (1982- ) series. For McCollum’s ongoing series, “The Shapes Project” (2005– ), he devised a simple numerical system to designate a unique shape for each person on the planet in the year 2050 (a total of 30 billion different shapes) using a simple home computer and Adobe Illustrator. Through this series, McCollum undermines the notion that art, if it is to be of any value, must be rare.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Allan McCollum’s rarely exhibited “regional projects,” works from the last three decades that explore how artifacts become charged with cultural meaning and how collections of objects and artifacts become agents for self-assurance and self-representation in regional communities. Works on view include The Dog from Pompei (1991), a cast of the famous form preserved as a natural mold in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79; Lost Objects (1991– ), casts of fossilized dinosaur bones; and Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah (1994), dinosaur tracks preserved in stone that are, themselves, copies; and THE EVENT: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida (1997) developed together with the International Lightning Research Center in Camp Blanding, Florida. 

“By rethinking modes of artistic production and distribution as parts of larger economies of value, McCollum is one of the most influential American artists working today,” said Curator Stephanie Seidel. “Over more than five decades his work has remained timely and effective at challenging aesthetic and material concerns, while critically reflecting on the museum context.” 

Exhibition Catalogue: A richly illustrated exhibition catalog accompanies Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969, and features essays by the exhibition curators, and scholars Alex Kitnick and Jennifer Jane Marshall.

ALLAN McCOLLUM (b. 1944, Los Angeles) has been making art for more than five decades. Survey exhibitions of his works have been held at, among others, the Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2006); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1995–96); Serpentine Gallery, London (1990); Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden (1990); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1989); and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (1988). He has produced public art projects in both the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over 90 art museum collections around the world. Allan McCollum’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012–13); “The Pictures Generation: 1974–1984,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); “The 1991 Carnegie International,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1991); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1975 and 1989); “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1989); and “Aperto,” Venice Biennale (1988).

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Joshua Mosley, dread – Exhibition at ICA, Philadelphia

Joshua Mosley, dread

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

January 16 - March 29, 2009

JOSHUA MOSLEY, dread, 2007

Mixed media animation and five bronze sculptures, 6 minutes. 

Courtesy of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago

Joshua Mosley titled his most recent installation dread after photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study sequences of a dog named Dread. Made over a two-year period, Mosley’s dread is composed of five bronze sculptures, and a six-minute, black-and-white, animated video that combines computer and stop-motion animation, as well as the artist’s own music and dialogue. dread is on view in ICA’s second floor gallery.

dread is installed in two adjacent rooms. The first houses five, small bronze figures on pedestals spaced about the room. Enter the second room to see the film, projected large so as to evoke the scale of the environment the characters inhabit: a real world place created using sequenced still photographs. But unlike the real world, music notes replace ambient sounds. Composed by the artist, each character has its own “soundtrack.” dread follows philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal on something of a nature walk. They encounter flora and fauna, and engage in conversation about existence, God, and nature; in the end, they encounter Dread.

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition catalogue has been supported by the generous sponsorship of Barbara B. & Theodore R. Aronson. Additional funds for the catalogue have been provided by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. ICA is also grateful for exhibition support from the Harpo Foundation and Goldberg Foundation. Additional funds for the exhibition have been provided by David & Gerrie Pincus; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation; Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania. On behalf of the artist, the ICA would also like to thank the following for support of the project: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and the Dean’s Office and the Overseers Special Projects Fund of the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

Click here for a short biography of Joshua Mosley and about Joshua Mosley: American International, exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, March 12 - August 29, 2010

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978, ICA, Philadelphia

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadephia
September 8 - December 12, 2004

ICA presents the first exhibition to survey the work of the legendary architecture and art collective, Ant Farm. A group of radical architects who were also video, performance and installation artists-but above all, visionaries and cultural commentators-Ant Farm was founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michaels in 1968 amidst the hot-house San Francisco counter-culture. Influenced by "alternative" architects like Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and Superstudio, Ant Farm's early inflatable structures were suited to a nomadic, communal lifestyle, divergent from the mainstream Brutalist architecture of the 1960s. The group was also known for spectacular performance events like "Media Burn" (1975), for which Lord and Michaels dressed up like astronauts and sped a customized Cadillac El Dorado through a pyramid of burning televisions.

Ant Farm officially disbanded in 1978 after a fire in their San Francisco studio destroyed a great deal of their work. Much of their photographic documentation and videotapes survived, however, and this, along with a wide range of Ant Farm materials organized into a visual "timeline," will form the core of the exhibition. A comprehensive catalogue, published by UC Press, will accompany the exhibition. It includes essays by Caroline Maniaque, Michael Sorkin, Steve Seid, a conversation among Constance Lewallen, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier, an Ant Farm-designed timeline, and a reprint of Lord's essay on American car culture, Automerica.

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 is co-curated by Constance Lewallen, Senior Curator for Exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, and Steve Seid, Assistant Curator for Video at the Pacific Film Archive. Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 was previously presented at Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (January 21 through April 26, 2004) and at Santa Monica Museum of Art (July 2 through August 14, 2004). After its presentation at ICA, the exhibition will travel to University of Houston, Blaffer Art Gallery (January 15 through March 13, 2005); ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, Germany (April 30 through July 24, 2005); and Yale University School of Architecture Gallery (August 29 through November 4, 2005).

Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289
www.icaphila.org

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality
ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
September 8 - December 12, 2004

This exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia draws attention to the late-1960s film and media installations of Argentinean artist DAVID LAMELAS (Buenos Aires, 1946) at a moment when they can speak with renewed urgency. "Exhibiting Mediality" reconstructs and recontextualizes a seminal work from this period to address the conditions under which images are produced and decoded; to consider what it means to exhibit not the image, but mediation. The concept of exhibiting pure mediality/mediation is further explored through collaborations with the University Archive and Records Center, and the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. This exhibition is organized by ICA's 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Tanya Leighton.

Image: David Lamelas, Límite de una proyección I (Limit of a Projection I),

1967 Installation View, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
Courtesy of the artist and Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

DAVID LAMELAS is a pioneer of the radical repositioning of sculpture in the sixties and seventies that abandoned traditional definitions of sculpture, displacing its materials and modes of production. In doing so a redefinition of the status of art and its "sites of display" took place. Situated within an emerging aesthetic of institutional critique (that addressed conditions of spectator behavior as forms of social experience within the public institution of art), and opposed to the false neutrality of minimalist sculpture, Lamelas' sought to analyze art as a means of communication, relating it to how information was conveyed by the film and television industry, and to the discourses around public space and media technology. In light of current discussions on the relationship between cinema, art, the media, and politics, his work re-presented thirty years later has lost none of its relevance. 

David Lamelas's work proposes an extreme focus on self-awareness, an aesthetic of pure information—unfettered and laconic. The transformation of the space of the exhibition is one of the most overlooked and critical dimensions of his work, and the often alienating effects that Lamelas realizes through his use of media, challenge us to distance ourselves and to question the role of film, television and the media. In Límite de una Proyección aka Light Projection in a Dark Room, David Lamelas divides the exhibition space into two distinct zones of light and dark by reducing the art object to a single beam of light: the projection of a spotlight in an otherwise completely dark space. The work is almost non-existent, David Lamelas offers only its illusion: "a (dark) space occupied by another (illuminated) space." He poetically and succinctly creates a work that exists for itself, in "undisguised violence," only within its own consciousness and self-awareness. The object upon which light is shed is deliberately erased, paradoxically highlighting the act of "shedding light" itself. The political implication of which is that the work always has the possibility of change, existing as it does as nothing other than the product of the spectator; it exceeds the prefigured meanings imposed by the artist as producer and challenges the restrictions of the aesthetic structure itself. 

In the context of this exhibition, David Lamelas' simple gesture of "shedding light" is understood "in the light" of cinema. Tracing the origins and pre-history of cinema we find that the act of "spotlighting" (the "fonction éclairagiste du cinéma" as French critic Serge Daney wrote) is the very genesis of cinema. The spotlit, illuminated 19th Century vitrine is widely understood as an essential component of cinema's birth. From a diametrically opposed perspective we could say that cinema's birth coincides with a notion of "blocked vision," a blocking-out, that is, a context in which the observer sees one thing, and then another successively in darkness; his/her vision directed only to what is being spotlit and to nothing else.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: Animal Locomotion plates, 1884

Parallel to David Lamelas's work, and as a means to elucidate the constitutive elements of cinema, "Exhibiting Mediality" draws attention to Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion plates, created in 1884 in Philadelphia, and preserved at the University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania. Eadweard Muybridge's photogravures offer another reflection on the essential elements of cinema and in a sense complete the sentence that Lamelas' spotlight opens. Cinema is one image after another, each image disappearing for the apparition of a third invisible image in the mind of the spectator. This invisible image is again what David Lamelas's work is spotlighting.

Exhibiting Mediality is a collaboration with the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. For details of talks and film/video screenings visit http://www.icaphila.org

The curator, Tanya Leighton, is the ICA 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow. David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality is the culmination of a year-long fellowship offered by the Lauder Foundation, in collaboration with the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
September 8 - December 12, 2004
Exhibition Walkthrough: Friday, September 10, 5-6pm, ICA Members Only, join on-site
Opening Reception: Friday, September 10, 6 - 8pm, free and open to the public.

Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

September 18 - December 31, 2002

The Chinese-born, Paris-based artist CHEN ZHEN (1955-2000) poetically employs both his study of traditional Chinese culture and his knowledge of Western avant-garde art to create artwork that engages with contemporary social issues. In the first U.S. survey of this internationally recognized artist's work since his death, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will present a carefully chosen group of Chen Zhen's ambitious installations and sculptural pieces created during the last five years of his life. "Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes" is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art.

"The art of Chen Zhen draws you into an experience that is both familiar and foreign, crossing boundaries of geography, aesthetics, and disciplines," says Jill Medvedow, James Sachs Plaut Director of the ICA. "We are privileged to have organized this major exhibition of Zhen's work with the cooperation of his widow, Xu Min, who worked closely with the artist in realizing most of his installations."

"Chen Zhen's work is often profoundly personal," says Gilbert Vicario, Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, "reflecting seemingly opposite Eastern and Western approaches to medicine as a metaphor for art-making, global politics, and philosophy. Zhen's aim of establishing a dialogue between the everyday materials of consumer society, human beings, and nature results in giving these materials new meaning."

Chen Zhen's enormous, viewer-interactive piece Jue Chang (50 Strokes to Each) (1998), which will fill the ICA's entire first floor gallery, deals metaphorically with the notion of conflict and misunderstanding among people in a general, global context. The flat surfaces of more than a hundred chairs and beds collected from different parts of the world have been stretched with animal skins to create makeshift drums that are hung from a large, rustic-looking wooden frame. Visitors are encouraged to play this artwork turned percussion instrument. A series of five interconnected sculptures made from hundreds of multi-colored candles, which are traditionally thought of as a symbol of an individual's life, make up the installation Inner Body Landscape (2000). This installation takes inspiration from the traditional Chinese belief that one must treat the entire body rather than just the disease.

The exhibition also features Chen Zhen's last work, Zen Garden (2000), a model for a public garden exploring the fusion of two views of medicine--Chinese and Western--in relation to the human body. Representations of major body organs made of alabaster, pierced by such metal medical instruments as forceps, tweezers, and scissors, hover illuminated over raked sand. In Black Broom (2000), whose theme is similar to Zen Garden's, an ordinary broom becomes menacing with a brush that is made of black transfusion tubing with hypodermic needles at the ends. Crystal Ball (1999), a spherical flask filled with saline solution surrounded by an organic cage made of abacus and prayer beads, and Crystal Landscape of Inner Body (2000), exquisite pieces of blown glass representing different internal organs, complete the exhibition.

Born in Shanghai, China, Chen Zhen, who came of age during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, attended the Shanghai Fine Arts and Crafts school and the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution ended, he became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (which was forbidden under Maoist rule) and Western avant-garde art forms as an alternative to the official cultural ideology espoused by the government. During his early career, Chen Zhen pursued painting, which he abandoned in favor of installation after immigrating to Paris in 1986 to attend the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques. Chen Zhen had a rare medical condition called autoimmune hemolytic anemia that eventually took his life in December 2000.

The Institute of Contemporary Art's relationship with Chen Zhen extends back to 1998, when he participated in the group exhibition "The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers," at the ICA. His piece Opening of Closed Center (1996) dealt metaphorically with the collision between his own culture and that of the Shakers through a visual manifestation of the complex relationship between space, time, and spirituality.

During the last decade, Chen Zhen's work has been presented at venues throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, including large group exhibitions such as "First Shanghai Biennale" at the Shanghai Art Museum, and "Unmapping the Earth and Trade Routes: History and Geography" at the second Johannesburg Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Centre International d'Art contemporaine de Montréal; Deitch Projects, New York; National Maritime Museum Stockholm; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and ADDC-Espace Culturel François Mitterand, Périgueux.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA BOSTON

955 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02115

www.icaboston.org