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19/11/2004

Inside Out

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose

Selections from the Permanent Collection

San Jose, Calif -- The San Jose Museum of Art presents Inside Out: Selections from the Permanent Collection, an exhibition which continues the ongoing celebration of our 35th anniversary. The measuring rod of a museum’s worth is not only the quality of its changing exhibitions, but its permanent collection; the art a museum chooses to preserve for future generations defines its mission and identity. Inside Out will give viewers an idea of what the San Jose Museum of Art values in the visual arts today and why.

Coupled with a concurrent show featuring 50 major new gifts to the permanent collection, this exhibition by contrast draws from gifts accumulated over the years, contrasting familiar works by artists such as Hung Liu, Robert Colescott, and Roy DeForest with new gifts of works by artists like Clayton Bailey, Ellen Carey, and Sam Tchakalian. A wide variety of paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations by diverse artists ensure that this exhibition will have something for everybody. Many of the artworks are documented in SJMA’s new permanent collection catalogue, Selections.

Highlights of the exhibition include Mildred Howard’s Abode: Sanctuary for the Familia(r) (1994). Howard uses blue glass bottles to build a repository for memory. Abode is loosely based on the “shotgun” houses of African-American slaves in the South, which were patched together from scraps and leftovers. The title of the work reinforces this idea by intertwining the Spanish word for “family,” familia, with the word “familiar.” As suggested by the title, the building resembles a home-a place where relationships are built and memories are accumulated—and a sanctuary, an environment for reflection and contemplation.

Also on display will be Brian Goggin’s stunning Desire for the Other (2004), an enormous centipede-inspired couch sheathed in red vinyl, voraciously consumes and digests a plethora of household items. Thrusting through the sculpture’s upholstery are familiar household fixtures including a table, toilet, telephone, chair, television and lampshade. Goggin created the sculpture in collaboration with Al Honig and Tom Kennedy. “Desire for the Other,” Goggin states, “is a poetic, beautiful nightmare that imbeds the viewer inside the moment where an alluring and familiar mutant, once our comfortable nest, now ransacks our home, a shadow of our fears, through the flickering lens of the imagination.” Desire for the Other suggests that there is a very thin membrane separating the improbable from the plausible. Inspired by the literature of Magic Realism, wherein fantasy co-exists with reality, Goggin also identifies with the Northern California funk art tradition, especially in their propensity for absurdity and using familiar objects in a new way. Goggin attracted national attention in 1997 with Defenestration—an NEA funded site-specific sculptural mural on a dilapidated building in San Francisco’s economically depressed South of Market district. Since then, Defenestration, with its grandfather clock, tables, chairs and couches suspended in flight from the building’s windows, has become an unofficial San Francisco landmark.

Inside Out will also feature Catherine Wagner’s spectacular Pomegranate Wall (2000), an installation of ten four-by-eight-foot light boxes arranged in a curved arc and illuminating sectional images of a pomegranate. This installation evokes a sense of wonderment in the viewer akin to the feeling that a child might have upon entering a planetarium and seeing the dizzying array of stars for the first time. The extraordinary imagery was made possible through medical resonance imaging (MRI), a diagnostic technique that provides high-quality cross-sectional images of organs and structures within the body in a noninvasive manner. Although human subjects would spend no more than 45 minutes in the machine, Wagner gathered these images over a period of six or seven hours, and as a result the detail of the images and gradations in tone are exceptional. The artist explains, “I’m using things like the pomegranate in the same way that the scientist is looking at cells. In fact, the reason I selected the pomegranate was for its interior structure which is extremely cellular looking.” Pomegranate Wall will be displayed adjacent to works by stellar new media artists Jim Campbell and Alan Rath.

Image: Mildred Howard, Abode: Sanctuary for the Familia(r) , 1994 .

San Jose Museum of Art
110 South Market Street CA 95113-2383
San Jose, CA

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