3/9/2003
Gillian Wearing and Patti Smith
ICA, Sansom, Philadelphia
The ICA is presenting the first East Coast solo museum exhibition of Gillian Wearing in the United States and Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith will include more than 50 works on paper.
Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation
Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, Gillian Wearing has emerged as one of the foremost British artists of her generation, creating video installations and photographic works that explore the odd, unsettling, and eccentric aspects of everyday life. The ICA is presenting the first East Coast solo museum exhibition of Wearing in the United States, surveying her work from 1992 to 2002. Wearing's fascination with human behavior has led her to produce work that is a cross between sociological studies and documentary filmmaking, revealing the tension between the private self and public persona that people present.
Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith
Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith will include more than 50 works on paper produced by poet, musican and visual artist Patti Smith over the last 30 years, including a recent series of large-scale drawings inspired by the events of September 11, 2001. The exhibition will also feature original manuscripts of her writing, photographs, source material for her work, and rarely seen video and film, including the short film Still/Moving, an early collaboration between Smith and her friend, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. ICA will also present Patti Smith: Words and Music, a special evening of music and poetry by Patti Smith and members of her band, at the Zellerbach theater at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, October 16. (Details to be announced).This exhibition was organized by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Traces of Friday
The discovery of a footprint in the sand and the prospect of meeting the "savage" made Robinson Crusoe revise his own self-constructed version of civilization. Human displacement across borders (physical and cultural), and what it entails in terms of affinity and confrontation is the thesis of this exhibition. "Traces of Friday" includes artists whose works address the central themes of the exhibition: personal maps (Stanley Brouwn, On Kawara, Valerie Tevere, Marti Guixe); the souvenir and the snapshot as visual surrogates for the experience of the place (Julio Grinblatt, Jonathan Hernandez & Alberto Baraya, Michael Light); random derives or planned walks (On Kawara, Francis Alÿs, Juan Fernando Herran); borders and ways to bypass them (Eugenio Dittborn);and the encounter with the other (Kim Sooja, Juan Devis).
The curator, Jose Roca, is the ICA 2002-2003 Whitney -Lauder Curatorial Fellow.
Image: Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-93
ICA
The Institute of Contemporary Art
118 South 36th Street
Sansom, Philadelphia
Phone: 215.898.7108
Fax: 215.898.5050