| Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 |
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From December 13, 2003 through February 7, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000, a sustained aesthetic inquiry by a distinguished American artist into the relationship between art and the museum. The exhibition was organized by Maurice Berger and the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Wilson's mock museum installations, into which he places provocative and beautifully rendered objects, explore the question of how the museum consciously or unconsciously perpetuates prejudice. |
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| Rebecca Morris: Frankenstein |
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From December 13, 2003 to February 7, 2004, the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Rebecca Morris: Frankenstein. In response to the warm gray concrete block walls and brown steel beam architectural space of the Project Room, Morris created a series of large-scale paintings in black, gray, and brown. Morris uses large-scale canvases to explore her architectural approach to space within a painting. Foreground, middle ground, and background are assiduously, even aggressively defined. With color fields, grids, dense stylized beams, and groupings of patterns, Morris's intensely intelligent abstract paintings confront the viewer with the rawness of congealed paint skins and metallic spray paint textures. |
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| Parrot
Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel September 13–November 15, 2003 |
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A survey spanning thirty years of production by one of the key figures in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Parrot Talk was organized by curator and writer Michael Duncan. MacConnel's paintings, sculptures, and collages explore the full range of contemporary visual culture, drawing on everything from Matisse to The Simpsons. Mixing high and low sources with abandon, MacConnel relishes the juxtaposition of modernist images and ideas with their sources in so-called primitive cultures. His works of the 1990s explore the wild mix in Third World countries of traditional artifacts and Western consumer detritus. Drawing on the Western traditions of painting and photography in conjunction with African house-painting patterns and Chinese schoolbook illustrations, MacConnel is able to conjure a genuinely multi-cultural style. |
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| VIRGIL
MARTI: Grow Room Project Room September 13–November 15, 2003 |
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For the site-specific installation, Grow Room, Virgil Marti, in his first solo West-Coast exhibition, covered the walls of the Project Room with ornately flowered and stylized web patterns printed on highly reflective Mylar sheets—a material often associated with growing marijuana in hydroponic gardens. Marti transformed the raw interior of the space into a hypnotic cocoon in the historic tradition of a Rococo Hall of Mirrors. Within this luxurious, glowing rec room environment, Marti suspends an enormous cast resin chandelier that is part antler, part flower, subverting virile hunting lodge sensibilities by way of Marie Antoinette. |
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| ROSAMOND
PURCELL: Two Rooms May 17–August 9, 2003 |
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From May 17 to August 10, 2003, the Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms. The intersection of art and science comprises Purcell's gesamtkunstwerk; Two Rooms is the culmination of this life-long inquiry. Purcell's photographs and installations celebrate the beauty and recast the meaning of even the most mundane objects, creating lush visual tableaux and intricate microcosms out of everything from old books and scrap metal to teeth and stones. Two Rooms offered large-scale recreations of two collections, one historical, that of seventeenth-century natural philosopher Olaus Worm (1588-1654), the other contemporary, that of Purcell' s found objects. Though both were compiled by avid collectors, each was amassed for different reasons—Worm to explain, define, and categorize the world; Purcell to question those very classifications. This was the first major installation of her work in the United States. | |
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| ABBY
DONOVAN Project Room : Tick Tock June 7–August 9, 2003 |
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Using language—both popular and literary—Abby Donovan's sculptures probe how we "read" meaning. Donovan creates hand-wrought, heaped, and sometimes physically frail words and phrases out of such diverse materials as cloth, latex, clay, foam, and cement, affording the viewer an entirely new way of experiencing communication in general and words and phrases in particular. Abby Donovan: Tick Tock premiered in the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art from June 7 to August 9, 2003. In this body of work, Donovan looked to sources from Cervantes to Kafka to physically re-invent language—piling, stuffing reflecting, and sewing words—in a surprising variety of ways. | |
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| JOEL
MORRISON Project Room April 5–May 31, 2003 |
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Joel Morrison brought his latest body of work to the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art from April 5 to May 31, 2003. From the roughly–hewn to the finish fetish, the witty to the serious, Morrison uses materials as diverse as tape, fiberglass, cast aluminum, and found objects in his sculpture. His work embraces a long tradition of figurative sculpture, architecture, and gestural painting, along with a healthy dose of cheeky irony. | |
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| ALFRED
JENSEN Concordance January 25–April 19, 2003 |
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The Santa Monica Museum of Art presented “Alfred Jensen: Concordance,” an exhibition of selected major paintings from 1960–1980 by this acclaimed abstract artist. The exhibition was organized by the Dia Center for the Art’s curator Lynne Cooke. Renowned as one of the past century’s most singular and original abstract artists and shown in major international exhibitions world-wide, Jensen’s work has not until now been examined in a comprehensive solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Although an active painter since the early fifties, it was only in 1960 that he discovered his mature artistic voice, after repudiating an early fascination with abstract expressionist form and color in favor of an art based exclusively on the diagram. In such key works as Cycle Ending, Per I-V (1960) and Parthenon (1962)—with their signs drawn from Mayan systems of calendrical and numerical computation, their palette from Goethian color theory, and informed by patterns that echo Guatemala’s landscape, architecture, textiles, and other cultural artifacts—Jensen developed the parameters of a vision that would define his work over the next twenty years. | |
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| LAUREN
BON Project Room : Hand Held Objects January 25–March 22, 2003 |
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The Santa Monica Museum of Art launched the 2003 Project Room season with Lauren Bon’s Hand Held Objects, a series of abstract, biomorphic sculptures that obliquely reference parts of the human body. Spare yet sensual, exposed yet mysterious, the objects in the exhibition were actually handled by visitors. | |
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