Special Exhibitions
Into The Light
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Special Exhibitions |
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Into The Light |
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About the Exhibition In the 1960s, the projected image became a crucial element for a generation of artists eager to create a new language of representation. Moving beyond the limitations of sculpture, drawing, and painting, they began to use film, video, slides, and holographic and photographic projections to measure, document, and abstract the parameters of physical space. Incorporating large-scale moving images into three-dimensional environments, these artists engaged ephemeral matter, such as space, light, and time, as raw material for making art.Into the Light is the first museum exhibition to explore this previously uncharted history and comprises the largest presentation of reconstructed early film and video installations to date. Many classic works in film, video, and slide installation from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s are being seen for the first time since their initial creation. Bringing together sixteen installations - most previously known more by reputation rather than actual experience - Into the Light includes works by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Simone Forti, among others, that transform the museum galleries from a static environment into an active, experimental field. The new, projection-based work the artists in this exhibition produced in the 1960s and 1970s was informed by concurrent movements, including Performance, Process and Conceptual art, and Minimalism. In Process and Conceptual art, it is often the artist's idea behind the creation of the work, rather than the resulting object, that is considered most important. The major shift affected by Minimalism was an insistence that the viewer reconsider sculpture and space in relation to his or her own body. The early projection-based installations presented here explore such issues of physical and psychological space and include the viewer as an active participant. Some combine architectural and psychological elements to create alternately stable and disorienting environments; others make reference to pure cinema, anticipating the current, ubiquitous preoccupation with film among contemporary artists. Into the Light reveals, for the first time, the roots of this interactive, cinematic form and demonstrates the continuing power of these early works to transform our understanding of narrative, the body, sculpture, and space. Page 2 of 6 | On the next page: Catalogue |
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