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29/1/2014

Robert Overby - Nicole Miller

Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneve

Nicole Miller
The Death of a School

Exhibition curated by Andrea Bellini
Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents Nicole Miller – The death of a school, the video artist’s first show in Switzerland. Curated by Andrea Bellini, the exhibition will display two of Miller’s video installations: Untitled (2012) and Death of a School (2014).

Untitled (David and Darby) consists of a single-channel video and a two-channel video projection. The installation brings together the two separate personal stories of Darby – through his son CJ – and David. CJ, the son of the now dead film actor Darby Jones (1910-1986), attempts to rebuild a relationship with his father through old Hollywood film footage. In the adjacent single channel video, David — a man the artist met on the street – recounts the loss of his left arm while creating the illusion of a recovered limb through a mirror reflection; a technique used to help patients get rid of a painful phantom limb.

Miller’s videos grant these individuals a space in which they “reconstitute their dramatic losses, as opposed to representing themselves. They are specific attempts at retribution using representation as a tool”; in CJ’s case for example through appropriated and edited footage of his father’s stereotypical roles –the butler, the crazed zombie, the African chief -, usually assigned to African American actors in the early days of the Hollywood film industry.

Central to Untitled and Miller’s approach are notions of subjectivity and self-representation, especially in relation to the African American male body. Through acts of re-editing or mapping Miller locates in her subjects “a potential solace, perhaps to reach an understanding, hence, agency.”
The artist considers that it is “the passage of time that allows for a new edit or understanding of the potential of an image”; thus the importance of appropriation and storytelling in her work. It is perhaps the thirty years that now separate David from the traumatic loss of his arm that allow him to recount the event and “immerse himself in the attempt to reconstitute his arm.”

The artist’s approach is consciously collaborative. The viewer is essential to Miller’s practice as a central actor in the transformation of an image’s meaning. The process of transmission and subjective interpretation implies a constant evolution of the image’s nature. Furthermore — according to the artist — “active viewing can be used as a tool to reconstitute personal histories, or even one’s body.”

In the second video installation — Death of a school – Miller attempts to address the phantom feeling left by a school’s shutdown in Tucson Arizona. The subject is personal: her mother spent her entire career as a teacher at the school; a school sullied by the city’s political bullying and anti-immigration ideology. The installation will consist of three screens shuffling through slow pans of the school being physically shut down along with static shots of a school closed down and abandoned for good.

While David’s attempt to reconstruct his arm reveals the power of visualization, the school’s shut down disclose/represent “the death of thought in the pictured space”.

Miller was born in 1982 in Tucson, Arizona. She attended the California Institute of the Arts (2005) and the Roski School of Fine arts at USC (2009). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
Solo shows include Believing is Seeing (2013-2014, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA), The Conductor (2009, LAXART, Los Angeles, USA) and Daggering (2012, HMAAC, Houston, USA). Nicole Miller has also participated in collective exhibitions such as Made in L.A: Los Angeles Biennial (2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA), Dallas Biennale (2012, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA), FORE, The Bearden Project (Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA) and Psychosomatic Acid Test (2009, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, UK).

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Robert Overby
Works 1969-1987

Exhibition curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Curator at Large of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo.

The Centre d’Art Contemporain in Genève presents Robert Overby – Works 1969-1987, the first institutional survey exhibition of the artist’s work in Europe. The exhibition – curated by Alessandro Rabottini – is organized together with the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, Italy (where it will travel in May 2014), the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway (where it will be installed in September 2014) and with the Consortium (Dijon).

Despite his extremely prolific and diversified practice, Robert Overby remains one of the best-kept secrets of Post-War American Art, as he rarely exhibited in his lifetime. His multi-faceted artistic output – encompassing sculptures, installations, paintings, prints and collages – is a mysterious and inspiring exploration of representation, space and identity; an investigation of the human condition and its decay, beauty and absurdity.

Robert Overby (1935-1993) was born in Harvey, Illinois. For most of his life, he worked in Los Angeles as a graphic designer (remembered for the Toyota logotype still in use today) and subsequently as a practicing visual artist. Beginning in 1969, Overby developed an impressive body of work characterized by a restless experimentation with materials and processes. His most iconic early works take the form of architectural casts of doors, windows and facades made of rubber, latex and concrete; pieces that occupy a space in between sculpture, painting and installation, and that reveal a conceptual concern for a material understanding of the passage of time. The four years between 1969 and 1973 mark an incredibly productive period in which the artist created over three hundred works, which he documented in his “336 to 1. August 1973 – July 1969”, a self-published book with reversed chronology, which has been recently reprinted by JRP / Ringier.

The works produced during that seminal phase show the artist’s very personal meditation upon a number of recent and concurrent artistic practices, especially Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and post-minimalistic investigation of perceptual surfaces. However, Overby’s work quickly diverged from those experiences and developed into a more psychological and narrative approach that saw the domestic space, and architecture, as metaphorical extensions of the bodily decay. This led the artist to refer to his practice as “Baroque Minimalism”.
It is perhaps his preoccupation with the physical nature of memory that makes his work so timely and relevant, if seen in retrospect together with the works of artists who emerged in the Nineties or later like Rachel Whiteread, Kai Althoff and Seth Price, to name a few.

Starting in 1973, painting became a central medium for Overby. His figurative works explore the representation of the human body as a site where identity is transformed, theatrically expressed, and concealed. Different in scale and style, his painterly production contemplates both intimate and delicate paintings where figuration fades into abstraction, as well as more exuberant and confrontational works that deploy references to pop culture, sexuality and consumerism.

Through both an extensive selection of works, and the exhibition layout, Robert Overby – Works 1969-1987 tries to make justice of an art practice that was visually so varied but extremely coherent and consistent from the conceptual and existential point of view. In this sense many works on view can be understood as explorations of concepts like “surface” and “skin” translated as sites of transformation, being the skin of a building, the skin of a painting as a material entity or the artificial skin of a latex mask that allows one to perform multiple sexual identities. Robert Overby’s œuvre can thus be interpreted as a critique of “style” as a univocal and stable intention, in favor of an idea of art as an ongoing investigation of the human condition captured in a constant state of flux.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive catalogue documenting more than 140 works and published by Mousse Publishing. The book will also include a complete chronology of the artist’s work and life.

Catalogue published with the support of:
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève is supported by Ville de Genève

Image: Robert Overby, Bob behind Clear screen door (detail) 11 March 1971. Polyester resin. 195.58 x 102.87 x 6.35 cm

Press contact:
Inès Flammarion, External Relations and development T +41 22 3291842 F +41 22 329 18 86 presse@centre.ch

Opening: Thursday, January 30 2014, at 6 P.M.

Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève
Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10, 1205 Genève
Opening Hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Entrance fee:
Normal fee: 5 CHF
Discount fee: 2 CHF (artist, student, unemployed, senior, disabled)
Free admission on 1st Sunday of the month

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