calendario eventi  :: 

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29/5/2008

Three exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland MOCA, Cleveland

Jean Luc Mylayne

In a highly personal approach to image making, French artist Jean Luc Mylayne portrays intimate encounters with birds in monumentally-scaled color photographs. For Mylayne, these images are philosophical meditations on the relationship between man and nature. Mylayne’s artistry requires a deep understanding of the surrounding environment and birdlife. In his 30-year career, the artist and his wife and collaborator, Mylène, have travelled extensively spending months, even years, patiently following migratory routes in search of the appropriate location, atmospheric conditions, and vantage points from which to portray a variety of birds such as sparrows, starlings, and bluebirds.

This first solo museum exhibition in the United States for this renowned French photographer features twenty-three, large-scale color photographs of birds in Fort Davis, Texas where the Mylaynes lived for six months at a time from 2004 to 2007. His process, a laborious one, requires multiple days to set up the scene for each photo shoot, calibrate the cameras, and select lenses—some 50 personally designed of his own invention. After determining the optimum equipment and position, Mylayne waits patiently for hours, even days for certain birds to come in close range and become accustomed to his presence. The results are contemplative images of nature that explore perception, perseverance, time, and memory.

—Margo A. Crutchfield, Senior curator


Jean Luc Mylayne was born in Amiens, France in 1946. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Europe at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ia Ville de Paris (1995) and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne (1991 and 1994) and in America at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York (1997, 1999, and 2003) and the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe (2004).

Jean Luc Mylayne was organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. The exhibition and publication were made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Lannan Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts and its presenting partner, the Levant Foundation, and the French Cultural Services.

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Marking Time: the sculpture of Jamie Davis

A Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Exhitbition

Using wax, cotton batting, thread, and charcoal, Akron-area sculptor and installation artist Jamie Davis charts the hours, days, and years of her life in intricate works of art. Davis’s large, abstract sculptural installations explore the irregular relationship between time, memory, and experience.

For this exhibition, Davis has created two works of art that represent the passage of time. Made from thousands of individually hand-sewn, cell-shaped units, anamnesis (2008) features numerous suspended masses that represent the twenty-eight years of Davis’s life. Chronicling key events through changes in scale and color, these cloud-like forms create a literal and metaphorical account of the artist’s past. A second sculpture, cede/seed (2008), consists of 8,784 delicately sculpted wax disks, each stamped with a date corresponding to one hour between August 13, 1997 and August 14, 1998, a year Davis faced a life-threatening illness. Davis invites each viewer to select and take away a disk, an interactive process that reflects the artist’s view of time as a gift to be given and received.

—Indra K. Lacis, Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial fellow


After earning her BFA in sculpture and metalsmithing from the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron in 2003, Davis completed her MFA in sculpture in 2007 at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Davis has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OH (2005) and LUV Artspace in Karlrusche, Germany (2006), and group exhibitions at Boston Young Contemporaries, Boston, MA; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Gallery 244, New Bedford, MA; and Cleveland State University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH.

Created to honor the memory of Wendy L. Moore, an inspiring artist and native Clevelander who died in 1997, this exhibition series provides one female artist in the Northeast Ohio region with an annual solo exhibition at MOCA Cleveland. The Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series consistently showcases some of the region’s strongest talent. Past recipients of this award are Wendy L. Moore (1999), Christa Donner (2000), Tara Giannini (2001), Lori Kella (2002), Angela White (2003), Carmen Ruiz-Davila (2004), Alicia Basinger (2005), Sarah Kabot (2006), and Olga Ziemska (2007). On behalf of emerging female artists in the Northeast Ohio region, MOCA Cleveland thanks the Moore family for their generosity and sponsorship of this exhibition series.

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Michel Huelin

This exhibition presents Floating Device (2007), a video installation in which Swiss artist Michel Huelin conveys a dreamy, seductive world where nature is transformed. It is an uneasy world where the fusion of the artificial and the real ventures into new territory.

Huelin’s work in photography and video portrays the environment we inhabit as a synthetic, fluid world that exists in between real and virtual realities. Bold and vibrantly colored, his computer-generated imagery transforms familiar objects or environments into floating sequences of constantly moving and mutating hybrid forms. In Huelin’s work, interior spaces and botanical forms resembling plants and flowers are artificial constructs that coalesce in a fictitious, genetically modified eco-system. Beautiful, but infused with disconcerting subtleties, these works convey a digital universe tinged with an ethereal but deceptive serenity.

—Margo A. Crutchfield, Senior curator


Michel Huelin lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1996, his work was presented in a solo exhibition at MAMCO, Musée D’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, and has since been shown in solo exhibitions at several galleries in Geneva and Paris, as well as group exhibitions in Lausanne, Toulouse, Berlin, and London. This is Huelin’s first museum presentation in the United States.

Image: Jean Luc Mylayne

Opening may 30

MOCA Cleveland
8501 Carnegie Avenue - Cleveland

stampa

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