MMoCA Newsletter, Winter 2018

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EXHIBITIONS JOSÉ CARLOS TEIXEIRA: ON EXILE Imprint Gallery • Jan 13–Mar 4 and Mar 9–May 20 Currently based in Wisconsin, Portuguese multimedia artist José Carlos Teixeira is intimately familiar with the complexities of immigration—from confronting feelings of displacement to undertaking the challenges of learning a new culture. In his artwork, Teixeira creates video installations that investigate larger notions of belonging and exile. José Carlos Teixeira: ON EXILE is a two-part exhibition featuring video essays the artist produced between 2016 and 2017. As with his previous projects, Teixeira explores the concept of Otherness in the two films that comprise ON EXILE. Derived from psychoanalytical, anthropological, and postcolonial theories, Othering refers to a process whereby societies establish majority and minority identities, or social categories, as binary opposites. An individual or group is subsequently deemed “not one of us,” which in some cases results in the devaluation, dehumanization, or even persecution of people classified as Other. Teixeira, however, reverses the human tendency to demonize those who seem different or unfamiliar by giving voice to members of stigmatized communities: individuals with mental illness in his film ON EXILE: Fragments in search of meaning (2016, on view January 13–March 4), and Muslim refugees living the United States in ON EXILE: Elsewhere within here (2017, on view March 9–May 20). Teixeira’s work teeters between documentary cinema and video art. His approach to art relies on group participation, extensive interviews, and collaborative performance. The artist’s interview process operates as both an exchange of experiences and an art form. Focusing on the voices and firsthand stories of his subjects, Teixeira opens up a psychological space for intimate narratives to unfold, and a cinematic space for shared creation and authorship. MMoCA OPENING FRIDAY, MAR 9 • 6–9 PM 4 BIG Main Galleries • Nov 4, 2017–May 6, 2018 BIG presents over thirty large-scale artworks from MMoCA’s permanent collection, including works by Sam Gilliam, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jennifer Steinkamp. More than other formal elements in the visual arts, scale demonstrates the capacity of the artwork to respond to a specific location and call into play the role of the viewer. Above all, the works of art in this exhibition have the ability to astonish. Generous funding for BIG has been provided by Nancy Mohs; JoAnne Robbins and David Falk; the Theda and Tamblin Clark Smith Family Foundation; Cathie and Jim Burgess; Hooper Corporation and General Heating & Air Conditioning; J.H. Findorff & Son Inc.; Nancy Doll and Michael Bernhard; Dane Arts; Bell Laboratories; Karen and Craig Christianson; a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts; and MMoCA Volunteers.
EXHIBITIONS & NEWS IRENE GRAU State Street Gallery • May 5–Aug 5 Irene Grau is a Spanish conceptual artist who challenges the boundaries of painting, the perception of color, and the limits of space. Taking the act of painting beyond the studio and off the canvas, she enters into the landscape to discover moments when the power of pure color alters our awareness of the world around us. In a solo exhibition on view in MMoCA’s State Street Gallery from May 5 through August 5, 2018, Grau will present a new body of work she began last summer during her five-week artist residency in Madison. Grau’s work is grounded in the history of plein air painting, an in-situ practice of landscape painting based on direct observation that was initiated by artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These Impressionist leaders ushered in future experimentations in modernist artmaking, including the most simplified expression of formal abstraction: the painted monochrome. Playing with the concept and process of plein air painting, Grau traversed the landscape not to recreate specific scenes on canvas, but to identify existing instances of monochromatic abstraction. She discovered a vernacular form of mark-making in the vibrant, color-coded lines and shapes spray-painted across the streets and sidewalks by utility workers. Appearing random and cryptic to the untrained eye, this sanctioned graffiti points to the subterranean infrastructure that powers our city. By reframing the overlooked details within our everyday surroundings, Grau transforms a standardized mode of communication used by public works departments across the country into a series of monochrome paintings—plein air paintings not of landscape, but in it. MMoCA OPENING FRIDAY, MAY 4 • 6–9 PM NEW ACQUISITIONS Works on Paper by Bruce Conner Thanks to a donation from the Conner Family Trust, MMoCA received a gift of 21 offset lithographs produced by American artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008). Originally a Midwesterner, Conner moved to San Francisco in 1957 at the beginning of his artistic career. He remained there, except for a year-long trip to Mexico in 1963 to find himself (aided by a variety of psychedelic mushrooms). He became one of the most prolific postwar artists. His career spanned nearly 50 years and he worked in almost every medium from painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, printmaking, to film—often hybridizing them into unique configurations. The impetus for the suite of lithographs gifted to MMoCA was to preserve and perfect a set of felt-tip ink drawings Conner made from 1964 to 1969. To make one of the drawings, Conner would sit for hours without lifting his pen off the sheet of paper—only stopping when his pen would run out of ink. The resulting image is a labyrinth of lines that resemble topographical maps or microscopic organisms in a petri dish. While the process of making the works was meditative for the artist, he was also consumed by the desire to create images of high contrast such that the viewer’s eye would oscillate between detail and whole, creating a sense of motion. As felt-tip pens were relatively new to the market at the time, Conner wasn’t aware that the ink on the paper had a tendency to brown over time, leaving his once high contrast drawings muddy and faded. In 1970, Conner selected Kaiser Graphics in California to begin the process of recovering and improving upon his faded ink drawings. While he originally sought to improve the varied tonality present in the drawings, he also altered existing lines and changed the orientation and size of the prints, producing a new set of images that are closer to his original concept. The result is an intimate set of prints that invite the viewer in to reflect on the artist’s obsession with precision and ultimately, preservation. OPPOSITE: José Carlos Teixeira. ON EXILE: Elsewhere within here (video still), 2017. Single-channel video with sound, 70 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. • Ed Paschke, Suture, 1985. Oil on canvas, 42 x 80 inches. Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism. ABOVE: Irene Grau, preliminary documentation image taken during artist residency, summer 2017. • Bruce Conner, #209, 1970. Offset lithograph, 11 1/8 x 7 1/2 inches. Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Gift of the Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2017 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 5
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Page 7 and 8: THURSDAY, MAR 22, 1-1:45 PM GALLERY
Page 9 and 10: EVENTS MMoCA OPENINGS Save the date
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MMoCA Newsletter, Winter 2018

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