Chakaia Booker: In and Out is currently on show at deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, May 15, 2010 - August 29, 2010:
Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America’s most important contemporary sculptors. Chakaia Booker: In and Out is the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition of this African-American artist’s work to date, and represents the wide range of Booker’s practice from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculptures, indoor sculpture in a wide variety of formats and sizes, drawings, and photographs.
Chakaia Booker is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. This recycled material, and the surface patterns that it creates, reference African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism. For more information…
Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists
From The Smart Set at Drexel University…
Surrealism isn’t surreal anymore. It doesn’t shock or jolt. It isn’t confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Like most big talkers, he was wrong. Surrealism didn’t ruin anything or solve anything either.
Surrealism did its best, though, to shake things up. Looking out at the madness of modern life in the early 20th century, Surrealism said, “Bring it on.” The show currently on display at the International Center of Photography, “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris,” makes that patently clear. Paris inspired the Surrealists. There was so much going on. The chaos of traffic and lights and humanity was constantly producing jarring images. Reality seemed to blur into a dream state and then back again. More…
