MAM'S PERMANENT COLLECTION INSPIRES NEW EXHIBITION
marking time: moving images
May 13- September 11, 2005
Miami Art Museum's permanent collection inspires marking time: moving images, a new exhibition presenting 10 artists and 16 large-scale installations that are linked by the various ways they mark time through movement. The exhibition opens at MAM on May 13 and remains on view until September 11, 2005. The exhibition is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by Assistant Director for Special Projects/Curator Lorie Mertes. The exhibition is supported by MAM's Annual Exhibition Fund with special assistance from Mimi and Bud Floback.
marking time: moving images features works from MAM's permanent collection by Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Ann Hamilton. Also on view, are loans from other museums and private collections by artists Dara Friedman, Alfredo Jaar, Clare Langan, Paul Pfeiffer, Miguel Angel Rios, and Bill Viola.
"We're pleased to present this exhibition," said MAM Director, Suzanne Delehanty. "marking time: moving images reflects the growth of Miami Art Museum's collection and presents a theme that has preoccupied artists in the 20th and 21st centuries."
Recent acquisitions on view in this exhibition include Always New Always Familiar of 2001, a collaborative work by Janine Antoni and Paul Ramf rez Jonas. which consists of two separate videos and soundtracks shot simultaneously by the artists, one filming from the front of a moving boat and one from the back. Melding contrary points of view, the work is a metaphor for the nature of relationships and the time shared between two people. Dara Friedman's Romance was originally commissioned as part of MAM's New Work projects. On loan to MAM from a private collection, Romance is a film of various couples kissing in a park, presented in slow motion to influence our response to viewing the images.
The exhibition also includes multiple works by Ann Hamilton and Felix Gonzalez-Torres-artists who have had a significant influence on the art of our time and whose work has featured prominently in MAM's exhibition program in the last decade.
lineament, a seminal work by Hamilton in MAM's permanent collection, embodies the fundamental vocabulary of being an artist; inspiration, process, and result. The work consists of boxes containing emptied books, balled lines of text and a film documenting the repetitive action of an attendant carefully lifting strips of text from books and winding them into balls. capacity of absorption, on loan from a private collection, is another sculptural installation by Ann Hamilton reclaimed frotn previous ephemeral environments that engage the viewer through sight as well as sound.
marking time: moving images includes four sculptures by Felix Gonzalez-Torres whose work is a poetic meditation on the transience of life. Included is one of the artist's largest paper stacks measuring 45 by 38 inches with an ideal height of 7 inches. From a distance, the rectangular shape sitting on the floor recalls a minimalist sculpture. Up close, we see that it consists of individual sheets of paper imprinted with an image of the ocean. Visitors are allowed to take away individual sheets, and the stacks are replenished to their specified height as they dwindle over time. The artist thought of them as "gifts to the public."
Also on view from MAM's collection is Felix Gonzalez-Torres's stack piece with a circle of dolphins. It is one of a very few such pieces the artist did not intend to be renewable as a way of addressing concepts of mortality and immortality. The third work in the exhibition by Gonzalez-Torres is a glittering beaded curtain made up of individual strands of colored beads that sway and click together as the viewer passes through. Like the two stack pieces in the exhibition, this work refers to the artist's deep connection to the sea and its healing properties, stemming from his childhood memories of cuba and his time in Miami and Los Angeles. The fourth by Gonzalez-Torres tracks time of a different sort, graphically tracing with a simple line drawing the reality of AIDS and its destruction of the body over time.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is The Greeting of 1995 by acclaimed video artist Bill Viola whose work focuses on universal human experiences. Viola's piece, on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, is based on a Renaissance painting, The Visitation, a story from the New Testament about the spiritually significant meeting of the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. Unless the viewer is familiar with the singular significance of this moment, the scene seems like a simple encounter. Viola's life-size, projection of the 45-second encounter is made to last ten minutes, intensifying the movements, gestures, and emotions of a seemingly "everyday" moment in time.
marking time: moving images includes works by Irish-born artist Clare Langan and Miguel Angel Rios of Argentina on view for the first time in the United States. Langan's Film Trilogy suggests a post-apocalyptic future in which environmental catastrophes envelop the earth in water and ice, sand and lava. Unfolding like a surreal dream, Langan's three films follow a figure wandering the world bearing witness to the temporality and fragility of human existence.
A MORIR ('ti/ Death) by Miguel Angel Rios is a video projected larger-than-life on three walls, depicting a game played with spinning tops, called trompos. The lyrical, and sometimes violent dance of the anthropomorphic spinning tops is a metaphor for the chance moments that add up to our time on earth.
"One of the exciting aspects of this exhibition is that it is about time on many levels," said MAM Assistant Director for Special Projects/Curator Lorie Mertes. "MAM's own history is highlighted with works that were either acquired from or commissioned for past exhibitions. One such case is represented by the loan of Alfredo Jaar's Crossing and Bonjour Securite. These two works were commissioned twelve years ago by MAM, then the Center for the Arts, and remain as haunting today as they were at the time they were created. Jaar's photography functions as political witness to a significant moment in Miami's history."
The two works include images appropriated from news media that recorded the plight of Haitian refugees apprehended by the US Coast Guard while en route to Florida in June of 1992. Bonjour Securite consists of five freestanding light boxes with images of dazzling blue water. On the wall behind the light boxes are 25 framed.