calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/2/2010

Three Exhibitions

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break
curated by Sabine Eckmann

Sharon Lockhart is well known for her formally strict and conceptually precise films and photographs that often explore social subject matter. As much as her photographs reveal cinematic qualities of staging and casting, so too do her films frequently engage a static camera and angles that recall photographic practices. To create the works in Lunch Break, Lockhart spent one year in Bath, Maine, at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector US naval shipbuilding company—observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines. The resultant film installations and series of photographs focus on the activities of these workers during their time off from production.

Lockhart’s work in this exhibition crosses boundaries and complicates distinctions between film, photography, and documentation in provocative ways. Her visual representations are devoid of sentiment and yet deeply humane, intimate in their focus on everyday situations while reflecting broader global conditions through their historically grounded approach. Created within the political and economic context of global capitalism in the twenty-first century, in which the industrial working class of the United States is shrinking if not disappearing altogether, Lunch Break captures a moment in time that may soon become a thing of the past.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break is curated by Sabine Eckmann, director and chief curator, and is on view from February 5 to April 19, 2010.

Artist Bio
Sharon Lockhart received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1993. She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Rockefeller fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts.

Exhibition Catalog
A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition. The catalog includes essays by Sabine Eckmann, Mark Godfrey, and Matthias Michalka, an interview by filmmaker James Benning in which Sharon Lockhart discusses her creative process, and an interview with architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena conducted by András Pálffy.

Related Materials
Watch an excerpt of Lunch Break (2008) or download a Connections Guide here >>

Exhibition Tour
The exhibition will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art, where it will be on view from July 10 to October 17, 2010, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view from May 21 to September
6, 2011.

Exhibition Support
Support for Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break was provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; James M. Kemper, Jr.; the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Helen Kornblum; and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Kemper Art Museum

.........................................

Allison Smith: Needle Work

Allison Smith is known for creating large-scale installations that critically engage popular forms of historical reenactment, along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions, to redo, restage, and refigure historical memories. Her work often draws on “living history” museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence.

Allison Smith: Needle Work centers on Smith's recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II. Appearing crudely fashioned, from textiles such as canvas and twill tape as opposed to the more familiar industrial black rubber, these early masks — which Smith first encountered while visiting the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — struck her as meticulously, even lovingly, crafted, yet also functionally inadequate to their task. The exhibition also includes staged photographs in which masks are worn, held or otherwise positioned as props, variously evoking survival, cruelty, modesty, camouflage and disguise. Representing another tradition of wartime needlework are four large silk parachutes — printed by Washington University’s Island Press — suspended from the ceiling.

As the inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Smith developed Needle Work in conjunction with multiple visits in fall 2009 to participate with Washington University faculty member Lauren Adams in her interdisciplinary course “Past Perfect, Present Tense,” which investigated the use of historical research as a strategy within contemporary artistic practice.

Allison Smith: Needle Work is on view from February 5 to April 19, 2010, and is curated by Lauren Adams, assistant professor of painting in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Exhibition Support
Support for Allison Smith: Needle Work was provided by Bunny and Charles Burson, the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Art Endowment Fund, Washington University’s College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Artist Bio
Smith is an assistant professor of sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has exhibited in venues throughout the US and abroad, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; the Arario Gallery in Cheonan, South Korea; and the P.S.1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. In 1999 she earned an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and in 1999-2000 she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Exhibition Catalog
A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition. The catalog includes an essay by Wendy Vogel and interviews with the artist and faculty member Lauren Adams.

Kemper Art Museum, College of Art Gallery

...............................................

American Indian Art and Iconography

American Indian Art and Iconography brings together over twenty-five art objects and artifacts made by the indigenous peoples of North America. This Teaching Gallery exhibition, drawn from the Museum's permanent collection, explores the ways in which the imagery on the pottery, baskets, stone and metal work, and copper plaques conveys sacred meaning, tells a story, or communicates beliefs while also providing insight into the daily life and rituals of each culture represented. The exhibition is divided into sections based on the strata of the cosmos that the iconography represents—the Upper World, Middle World, or Lower World.

This Teaching Gallery exhibition is presented in conjunction with the course “American Indian Art and Iconography” offered by the Department of Anthropology and University College in spring 2010, and organized collaboratively by Carol Diaz-Granados, research associate in the department of anthropology; James R. Duncan, former director of the Missouri State Museum; and Carol Epstein, member of the National Council of Arts and Sciences.

Kemper Art Museum, Teaching Gallery

Image: Sharon Lockhart, still from Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Skinker & Forsyth Boulevards (Washington University) - St. Louis USA
Monday, Wednesday, & Thursday: 11-6
Friday: 11-8 Saturday & Sunday: 11-6
Closed Tuesday and University holidays
The Kemper Art Museum is always free and open to the public.

stampa

permanent link