Sikander and Barney in concurrent shows at MIT’s List Center
Matthew Barney and Shahzia Sikander, both Season 1 artists, currently have exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Boston. Barney is best known for his work in sculpture and video, but his printmaking practice is an interesting and unexplored part of his body of work. As a result Photogravure Prints from Drawing Restraint 9 will have a lot to offer those attempting to keep up with the ever-expansive Barney mythology. Drawing Restraint 9, the latest in Barney’s ongoing metaphorical investigation of creativity, takes place on a Japanese whaling ship, and shows Barney, his life partner Bj√∂rk, and the ship’s crew ritualistically recreating his field emblem image with petroleum jelly. The prints in this exhibit are from production stills showing this sequence.
Shahzia Sikander’s Pursuit Curve is a digital animation with accompanying music by composer David Abir. Sikander uses the pursuit curve, a mathematical function which describes the progress of a chase, as a visual starting point from which to investigate the way culture, identity, and iconography interact. These brightly colored sequences, which contain suggestions of bomb blasts, fireworks, and turbans, resist easy interpretation, and challenge viewers to name what they’re seeing. The animation is currently playing continuously throughout the day at the Media Test Wall. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
Shahzia Sikander and Tim Hawkinson at MCA Sydney; Art21 videos on view
On view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Australia are two major exhibitions by Art21-featured artists: Shahzia Sikander and Tim Hawkinson. In conjunction with both of these shows, Art21 video profiles on each of these artists are running on a loop in the museum’s Resource Room.
Shahzia Sikander opened last month at the MCA and includes a major site-specific work which the artist created directly on the gallery wall.
Sikander’s work is characterised by its precision of line and delicacy of touch: from tightly structured miniature paintings to larger, more loosely formed watercolours in which pigments stain and bleed into one another. Historical tradition meets contemporary interpretation, incorporating both figurative and abstract elements. Since 2001, Sikander has also worked with digital animation, setting her miniatures into physical motion. Images break apart and reform in new hybrid permutations, while sound adds a further dimension.
Sikander was recently granted the prestigious MacArthur Award last year. She was recognised by the MacArthur Foundation for “merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media.”
Shahzia Sikander is on view at the MCA until February 17, 2008.
Yesterday, Art21 featured artist Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) opened his first Australian exhibition, Mapping The Marvelous, at the MCA.
Hawkinson has received widespread recognition for his ingenious constructions of everyday objects, often large-scale kinetic and sound-producing works, whose intricate and playful constructions engage with the human body and portraiture, incorporating mechanical components and materials such as latex, plastic, cardboard and string.
Showcased works are sculptures, photo collages and drawings from the mid 1990s to the present, all of which refer to the obsessive human need for order and containment, using maps and charts, volumes and measurements to document the world in all its excess.
The exhibition introduces Hawkinson’s extraordinary new creations—among them a bat created from shredded black plastic bags and twistie ties—as well as inflatable self-portraits, monstrous beings and fantastical structures that chatter, whistle, rotate and spin.
Mapping the Marvelous is on view through March 5, 2008.
