Maya Lin headlines fall art offerings
Aug 26, 2007 By David Bonetti
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The fall season seems particularly promising in the visual arts, especially in the area of contemporary art.
The show I most anticipate is "Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes," an installation at the Contemporary Art Museum of three, gallery-scale environmental works by the artist/architect/designer best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the exhibition "explores how we see, and come to understand, landscape in a crucial time," the Contemporary says.
In these three new works, which viewers are encouraged to walk on and through, Lin investigates the notion of landscape as both form and content. Like all of her work, the installations promise to be formally austere and charged with elemental meaning.
As a shout out to the Lou, Lin has created a new work that will debut here, based on the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The wall relief will be made out of tens of thousands of straight pins.
As with all of its shows, "Window | Interface" at the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University asks viewers to put on their thinking caps. The second in the ongoing series "Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics," the exhibition features videos, photographs and digital projects by 17 internationally celebrated artists, who explore "the roles of windows and interfaces as both boundaries and sites of transaction between machine and mind, data and perception, the world of the body and the world of the imagination," according to the museum.
The show includes work by top artists, such as Doug Aitken, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gary Hill, David Hilliard, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Jeff Wall, who seldom or never have been shown locally.
The exhibition, as does the rest of the series, aims to stimulate discussion about the ways technology has changed our lives and our ways of seeing, as expressed through art objects.
Another solo show I am looking forward to is "Tony Tasset" at Laumeier Sculpture Park. A mainstay of the Chicago art scene, Tasset has not shown here before. As a way to celebrate its 30th anniversary, Laumeier has found a good way to serve the local art community while toasting its longevity.
Tasset uses his environment, his family and himself as subject and inspiration. With wit and wisdom, his work investigates "the trappings of modernism, postmodern theory, pop culture and the universal emotions associated with love, loss, frailty and beauty," according to Laumeier.
The exhibition, which includes video, photography and sculpture, will occupy indoor galleries and feature a new, commissioned sculpture outdoors in Laumeier's sculpture park.
Sheldon Art Galleries is one of the few places in the region that regularly shows important contemporary and historical photography. Its fall show, "Anthony Hernandez: The Seventies and Eighties," features a major West Coast photographer whose work has consistently explored the intersections of race, class and other social concerns while maintaining the most rigorous formal standards.
Hernandez created a buzz in the '90s with large color images of homeless encampments; this exhibition includes work from the previous two decades that added something distinctive to the important American tradition of street photography.
It's in with the old at St. Louis Art Museum
And not just any old stuff: The big show is "Beyond the Maker's Mark: Paul de Lamerie Silver in the Cahn Collection." That's quite a mouthful, but don't let the title scare you away.
Paul de Lamerie was the leading British silversmith of the early 18th century. His clients included London's leading merchants, as well as Prime Minister Robert Walpole and King George I. The most spectacular of many spectacular objects is a tureen in the shape of a green turtle. I can hardly wait.
What makes the exhibition a local affair is that it is owned by art collectors Paul and Elissa Cahn. And if you think that might be the only reason the museum is showing it, you're wrong.
The show opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and will move from here to Sydney, Australia, proving its international appeal.
The Art Museum's other fall show is also of local interest. "George Caleb Bingham: The Making of 'The County Election'" features drawings that Bingham made for the triptych "The County Election," one of his most important and ambitious paintings, which is in the museum's collection.
2 exhibitions will focus on design
Two architecture and design exhibitions also promise to be interesting.
The St. Louis Art Museum moves into futuristic territory with "Currents 101: Patrick Jouin," an exhibition of furniture by a French designer who defies traditional manufacturing techniques. The chairs and other functional objects in the show were made through a printing process. Modeled on a computer, the objects are fabricated using a technique called stereolithography in which the design is "printed" in resin, layer upon layer.
Oh, brave new world, that hath such machines in it!
A little more down to earth is "Architecture for Humanity: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Projects" at the Sheldon Art Galleries. Featuring the designs of architecture firms in the Southeast, it should remind us that good design is responsible design.
Schmidt will show Nutt's quirky works
The undisputed highlight of the fall gallery season should be "Jim Nutt: Drawings and Prints" at Schmidt Contemporary Art. The most important Chicago artist of his generation (he was born in 1938), Nutt takes months to complete one of his quirky paintings: miniatures of surreal, cartoony humanoids who just happen to exhibit characteristics similar to those of your friends and neighbors. Nutt rarely has enough new work for a solo gallery show, but he is honoring St. Louis by sending a recent cache of drawings here.
[From POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC] |
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