Another Victory Over the Sun

    January 20 - March 11, 2012

Spencer Finch, Between the Moon and the Sea, 2010, water, wood, balloon light, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Opening Reception: 
Friday January 20, 2012
Artist's Talk with
Scott Johnson at 7 PM
Opening remarks at 8 PM

Miguel Calderòn
Spencer Finch
Scott Johnson
Juan Muñoz
Erin Shirreff
Melanie Smith
David Zimmer

Curated by Nora Burnett Abrams & Adam Lerner for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver)

 
Another Victory Over the Sun offers an experience where art frames architecture.During this exhibition, all the natural light in the Main Gallery at KW|AG will be blackedout, allowing many of the works of art to act as their own source of illumination. The resulting environment with be immersive, an invitation for a theatrical encounter between the audience and works of art.

Melanie Smith/Rafael Ortega, Still from Xiltla, 2011, 35 mm film transfer, 24 min, 40 sec. Courtesy the artists and Collection Charpenel and Fundación CIAC, AC.

The title of the exhibition refers to the 1913 opera, "Victory Over the Sun," a cornerstone for modern art which celebrated the power of human creativity to invent new worlds. The original opera, with sets designed by the influential Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, evinced the desire to transcend the visible world, striving instead to arrive at a state of pure feeling. Written by the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, the opera's text is nonlinear, separating language from logic and conventional meaning.

Museums often operate in the same way as theatre: the museum building is a stage on which visitors become performers moving through space and encountering works of art. Removing the incidental light in the exhibition space further announces the unfolding drama. Writer Brian O'Doherty once described the "white cube" spaces of museums and galleries as sites in which "…we see not art but the space first." Another Victory Over the Sun inverts this idea by creating spaces where the white cube of the gallery disappears in a series of discrete environments.

Central to the exhibition is an installation by Spencer Finch. Visitors will encounter a dock and reflecting pool designed to stage the Japanese activity of looking at a full moon by gazing at its reflection in the water. The dock, pool, and moon suggest a naturalist landscape, but they do so, ironically, through a highly artificial presentation. Miguel Calderòn presents a video of a panther in a dark room, experienced only as a glimpse of gnashing teeth and the sound of threatening growls. Both works present completely immersive environments in which the viewer becomes both a participant and a performer.

Scott Johnson's glass sculpture and Erin Shirreff's video projection combine illusion with a critical look at the aspirations of modernist architecture. Working in the territory shared by video and installation, both David Zimmer and Melanie Smith offer glimpses of the natural world made uncanny through fragmentation and displacement.

Blending playfulness with an interventionist gesture, Juan Muñoz's Waiting for Jerry establishes the dynamic tension that often results when fear and anticipation mingle in the dark.

Another Victory Over the Sun was curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Adam Lerner and originally presented at the MCA Denver.

Juan Muñoz, Waiting for Jerry (detail), 1991-2001, Wall, light and audio soundtrack, 5 mins 2 secs. Courtesy the Estate of Juan Muñoz and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Photo: Peter Cox.

Another Victory Over the Sun - Evite