2018,“ INTO the MYSTIC ”, ink,airbrush on paper, 53 x 126 inches, private collection NY
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Contact: Local to Global
November 25, 2017 – April 28, 2018
Contact: Local to Global, like the other centennial exhibitions, highlights the engagement of artists with New Mexico, the Museum of Art with artists and collectors, and New Mexico’s engagement with the national and international arts community. Additionally the exhibition looks beyond those very literal intersections and implicates larger ideas about contact such as our engagement with the land and environment, our communities’ alignment with one another, and more broadly the implications of contact such as the discovery of the New World, and space exploration.
THE magazine
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Contact: Local to Global has two interrelated components – the first of which will focus on works by artists like Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, Frederick Hammersley and Susan York who have lived and worked in the region, as well as artists and artworks with differing connections to New Mexico.
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A second component of more contemporary artworks directly address issues of land, location and environment and will include the site specific installationPollination by indigenous collaborative Postcommodity, single channel videos The Placeless Place by Berlin and New York based artists Ati Maier, and Yorgo Alexopoulos’s work Everything In-Between. Alexopoulos’ work, a 4K animation with custom electronics, was shot and commissioned in New Mexico underscoring the continued relevance of the centuries-old tradition of artists making work that is a meditation on the New Mexico landscape.
New Mexico Museum of Art
Dedicated to the visual arts in New Mexico since 1917
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PASATIEMPO
ART IN REVIEW
Three exhibitions at New Mexico Museum of Art
Michael Abatemarco
Through April 29
New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave., 505-476-5072
One need not look beyond Santa Fe to find correspondences between the art of the present moment and that of a century past. No work of art is created in a vacuum, and artistic influences are always derived from some external impetus. For every artist, the past haunts the present. That doesn’t mean, however, that the future can be discounted.
Ati Maier’s 10-minute, single-channel video The Placeless Place(2016) supports the intention behind the museum’s three current exhibitions, the openings of which were timed to coincide with its centennial in November. Maier’s video seems complementary to the exhibitions’ themes of bridging past, present, and future, and is among the last works you’ll encounter in the show Contact: From Local to Global, tucked at the far end of the museum’s New Wing Gallery.
In The Placeless Place, the figure Maier calls Space Rider — outfitted with a glowing orb for a helmet, dressed like an astronaut, and riding a horse — traverses an urban landscape, ending up in New York City’s Times Square amid throngs of people and flashing neon. At the same time, another screen shows the rider in a barren desert landscape. The juxtaposition seems to hint that the empty landscape is a place to which we’re headed or, perhaps, the place from which we came. The video is cyclical, making it difficult to know if the artist is differentiating between the past and the present or drawing a parallel between them. Though the barren landscape is more natural than its urban counterpart, the terrain nonetheless seems oddly alien. But the rider, a recurring figure in Maier’s work, inhabits both land- and cityscape, moving among the urban crowds in her outer-space uniform like a performance artist. She remains aloof and apart, mounted on her horse, seemingly a visitor from another world.
Contact: Local to Global focuses on more contemporary works in the museum, along with the intersection of those works with historic art in the collection. The museum has always looked to the broader national and international art scene, often in dialogue with local and regional art. Other themes also emerge, such as environmental concerns and ways in which artists have broached that topic. Two works in particular stand out in this regard: Homage to Nature by Sarah Charlesworth and Pollination by the collective Postcommodity.
