In late November, I noted here that the Norton Museum of Art had gone exhibition-hunting during the week Miami Beach turns into an art fair. Curators Cheryl Brutvan and Charlie Stainback set out to visit booths at all of the fairs surround Art Basel Miami Beach and come home with an exhibition — curated in five days and hung in about ten days.
The exhibit was opened on Wednesday, with the intention of providing a “snapshot” of “contemporary artistic practice without the pretext of a biennial survey” and showcasing “some of the most engaging work being made today.”
Today’s Art Daily brings us up to date on what seemed a bit like Mission Impossible:
Within just a few hours, an exhibition theme emerged. The show will turn on the concept of information exchange and how we communicate with one another – especially relevant within the current news cycle which is focused on the dramatic actions of the website WikiLeaks….
The artists represented include well-known names such as Roxy Paine and Liza Lou, as well as emerging artists Luke Butler and Allyson Strafella.
…To illustrate the theme, The Norton selected artwork that plays on the subject of information exchange, such as Julian Montague’s faux series of books made from digital prints and old books entitled Volumes from an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man. Artist Kim Rugg obscures information in the highly detailed, reconfigured paper piece entitled The Story is One Sign, where she carefully papers over a specific front page of The New York Times creating 30 examples of the same page, yet each one reveals only a single letter, or punctuation.
The revelation of information can be seen in its extreme with David Shapiro’s 24-foot long September 2010,Receipts, created by his skillful, trompe l’oeil renderings of his personal expenses – for each month. Without a political statement, but focusing on a world in turmoil, Liza Lou’s remarkable Offensive/Defensive, 2008, is made of thousands of glass beads in brilliant colors evoking the composition of a prayer rug….
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art