calendario eventi  :: 

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7/2/2013

Two exhibitions

MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge

Amalia Pica

The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago present Amalia Pica, the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition provides an in-depth look at the last ten years of this London-based, Argentinian artist’s work.

Using materials such as photocopies, light bulbs, drinking glasses, and cardboard, Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Argentina) confronts the failures, gaps, and slippages of communication. The act of delivering and receiving a verbal or nonverbal message, and the various forms that communicative exchange may take, along with the very limits of language, are central to her work. In Babble Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada yada yada yada (2010) Pica spells out the work's title using semphore flags. The Catachresis sculptures (2011-) are made with objects whose features are referred to metaphorically as parts of the human body, i.e. the tongue of a shoe, the teeth of a saw, the legs of a table, etc. The title of the series is derived from the literary term describing the misapplication of a word or expression to denote something that does not have a name.

The literal and metaphorical figure of the listener is also at the center of much of Pica's work. In Acoustic Radar in Cardboard (2010-12) Pica reimagines an acoustic locator, the precursor to radar, to “make an image about listening, rather than making a functioning device”. Other works in the exhibition reflect fleeting moments of shared experience, often incorporating the signifiers of celebration and communal gatherings with fiesta lights, bunting, and confetti. Throughout the exhibition performers will enact Strangers (2008) a work where two people who have never met before hold a string of bunting in the exhibition space.

During the exhibition Pica’s nomadic sculpture I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011) will be lent to members of the MIT campus community who’ve signed up to take care of the sculpture for one week, then passing it on to the next host. Participants fill out a lending card, which serves as a record of the sculpture’s travels. (For the List Center’s presentation of this work the title will change to reflect the community interaction and location of the artwork.)

Born during Argentina’s dictatorship and so-called “Dirty War”—a seven year campaign against suspected dissidents and subversives—Pica has long ago been interested in the relationship between form and politics, and between history and representation. In Venn Diagrams (under the spotlight) (2011) the artist addresses this period in Argentina when modern mathematics was banned from school programs. Stage (as seen on Afghan Star) (2011) alludes to the Afghan television program for aspiring pop stars; for many voting for their favorite, the show offered a rare public forum for the expression of individual opinion. Pica reflects on how speech is a protected right in some regions of the world, while still a privilege in many others. Surveying the artist's sculpture, performance, installation, video, and drawing produced over nearly a decade, the exhibition is itself conceived as a conversation among Pica's works across various mediums.

About the Artist
Amalia Pica received a BA from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes P.P in Buenos Aires in 2003 and attended graduate school at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Pica has had solo exhibitions at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2012), Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, and Chisenhale Gallery, London (both 2011), and Malmö Konsthall (2010), to name a few. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as The Ungovernables at the New Museum (2012), Silence at the Menil Collection (2012), Map Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery (2010), Word Event at the Kunsthalle Basel (2008), and Drawing Typologies at the Stedelijk Museum (2007). One of the most promising artists of her generation, she is a recipient of a CIFO grant from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize fro the Pinchuk Foundation, and recently completed an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Headlands Center for the Arts outside of San Francisco.

Amalia Pica is co-organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition was co-curated by João Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at MCA Chicago. The exhibition opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the exhibition will be on view at the MCA Chicago April 27–August 11, 2013.

In conjunction with the exhibition The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the MCA Chicago have produced an illustrated 124-page scholarly catalogue which includes an interview between exhibition curators João Ribas and Julie Rodrigues Widholm, and Amalia Pica, a bibliography and exhibition history of the artist, and images of her work. The publication also includes essays on Pica’s work written by Tirdad Zolghadr, a writer and curator who teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY, and Ana Teixeira Pinto, lecturer at Humboldt University (Berlin) and Mousse Magazine contributor.

Support for the exhibition presented at the MIT List Visual Arts Center has been generously provided by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List.

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Oliver Laric
Versions

Degradation followed display, reified and emptied, the image was treated like the lowliest of things. Images were broken, burned, toppled, beheaded and hanged. They were spat, pissed and shat on, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties and charnel houses, and lewdly handled in brothels and inns. Stone statues were used as cobblestones, keystones and infill, or were modified to represent something new…..

Oliver Laric’s ongoing Versions (2009-2012) reflects the conditions of our digital world: how original and copy, thing and thought, event and document, are collapsed in a flattened information space where everything is a click away from everything else. Laric’s sculptural and online-based practice—including the website VVork—addresses how information networks afford new logical, epistemic, and affective patterns of experience and understanding. Described by the artist as “a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, a dance routine, a feature film and merchandise,” Versions confronts the mutability and variation of images.

Laric’s work evinces how images and objects are continually modified to represent something new, from Roman copies of Greek sculptures, to doctored and augmented images, remixes, and gifs. The differing versions of Versions themselves address this ongoing history of iconoclasm and copyright. Laric’s exploration of the nature of images and objects in digital space reveals the internet as not merely a space of representation, but of direct experience, as the real world is increasingly mediated by screens, and knowledge is replaced by searching.

About the Artist
Oliver Laric (born 1981 in Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Laric has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions including 50 50 2008↓↑ Touch My Body, SEVENTEEN, London (2008); Versions, SEVENTEEN, London (2010); and Diamond Grill, SEVENTEEEN, London (2011); Laric's first solo exhibition in Germany Be Water my Friend took place at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin in 2012. Versions (2012) premiered at Art Statements, Art|43|Basel (14-17 June 2012). Additional solo and group exhibitions include: alienate/demonstrate/edit, Artspace, Auckland (2012); Villa du Parc Centre d’art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2012); In Other Words, NGBK, Berlin (2012; Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); Frieze New York (2012); Kopienkritik, Skulpturhalle Basel (2011); Based in Berlin (2011); You don’t love me anymore, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2011); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2011); Music for Insomniacs, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico D.F. (2011); Priority Moments, Herald Street, London (2011); Memery, Mass MoCA, (2011); Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London (2010); Artists’ Video, Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); The World is Flat (curated by Lauren Cornell), X-initiative, New York (2009); The Steve Guttenberg Galaxy, SEVENTEEN, London (2008); and Unmonumental, New Museum, New York (2008). Upcoming group shows include: Detours of the Imaginary (curated by Julien Fronsacq), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum (curated by Bart van der Heide), Kunstverein München (2012); Museum of the Image, Breda, The Netherlands (2012). Laric is a co-founder of the VVORK platform (www.vvork.com).

Image: Amalia Pica, On Education, 2008. Super 8 transferred to DVD, colour, silent

Press Contact
Mark Linga - Public Relations Officer MIT List Visual Arts Center 20 Ames Street, E15-109 Cambridge, MA 02139 Telephone 617 452 3586 mlinga@mit.edu

MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames Street Building E15, Atrium Level Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Gallery hours
Tuesday-Wednesday 12-6PM
Thursday 12-8PM
Friday-Sunday 12-6PM
[closed Mondays]

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