Share the News
The Baltimore Museum of Art announced this week that a “spaceship” will soon be landing in – where else? – the newly christened John Waters Rotunda in the museum’s Jacobs wing.
The spaceship will be the sole object in a new exhibit by Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger that opens on June 6 and runs through October 3. Entitled “The perpetual sense of Redness,” it will be the inaugural exhibit in the John Waters Rotunda, previously known as Gallery 2 of the Jacobs wing, and officially renamed this month in honor of the local writer, filmmaker, and visual artist.
Toranzo Jaeger, 33, describes herself as a “queer woman of color.” Born and raised in Mexico, she moved to Germany to study and make art and is now once again based in Mexico. In a press release announcing her exhibit, the BMA describes Toranzo Jaeger’s piece as “an electric car and spaceship hybrid” that serves as a “potent symbol and platform through which to consider the complexity of identity comprised of race, indigeneity, gender and sexuality.”
The release goes on to call the installation “an unclaimed site for hope and escape, removed from the impossible paradox of the colonized indigenous person suspended in a continual state of resistance.”
Museum leaders announced last year that the BMA would name two areas after John Waters in recognition of his decision to donate his personal collection of fine art to the museum after he dies – 288 works by others and 87 works by himself. It will make the BMA the largest repository of his work, including prints, sculptures, mixed media and video pieces.
In addition to the Rotunda, directors announced plans to rename restrooms in the museum The John Waters Restrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Waters specifically asked for the restrooms to be named after him. A ceremony to name them is expected to take place later this year, pending approval from local public health officials.
The museum is also planning a major exhibit of the collection donated by Waters, sometime in the next several years. “They don’t get all the work until I’m dead, but we’re going to have the show of it before, hopefully,” he said last month, just before turning 75.
Anne Mannix Brown, Senior Director of Communications, said this will be Toranzo Jaeger’s first exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, but it’s not her first spaceship or car.
According to the museum’s press release, the artist will devise a “multi-panel contained structure” using “hinged and folded canvases” to create the electric car and spaceship hybrid.
This will also be Toranzo Jaeger’s first solo show at a major public art institution, as opposed to a private gallery or a group show, and her first work combining oil paint and embroidery.
As part of the commission, family members of the artist “were employed to craft the embroidered canvas,” which Toranzo Jaeger has “painted, stretched and configured into the hybrid structure” that will be presented as a free-standing object, viewable from all sides.
Is there a rendering that could help explain this three-dimensional object?
Unfortunately, no, Brown said, because the piece was designed specifically for the BMA and the artist is working on it up to the last minute. It hasn’t been determined, Brown said, whether it will become part of the museum’s permanent collection.
“She’s still creating it,” Brown said. “The paint is still drying.”
A 2017 work by Toranzo Jaeger, shown above, was exhibited by Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, entitled Hope the Air Conditioning Is On While Facing Global Warming (part 1). It has ergonomically-sensitive seats and gull-wing doors like those on the DeLorean in Back to the Future. The one at the BMA will have gull-wing doors, too, but will be larger than the one in New York.
“The carefully constructed canvases of The perpetual sense of Redness are hinged with gull-wing-like doors in mid-flight to reveal front and back,” said Leila Grothe, associate curator for Contemporary Art at the BMA and curator for this exhibit, in a statement.
“The fractured picture planes are a nod to the devotional altarpiece and the craft of embroidery – often carried out by authorless female workers and often excluded from the great halls of art,” Grothe continued. “Painted rearview mirrors expose desires within the vehicle, using the notion of looking backward and forward simultaneously as a metaphor for the psychological tension that is her complex hybrid identity.”
Grothe said the artist uses the car as a symbol in her work because it falls outside of any one particular culture.
Her paintings “complicate the fast and furious assumptions of car culture and turn an unblinking eye towards queer female desire,” she said. “By maneuvering through conventional signifiers of masculinity and power, her decadent paintings collapse traditional depictions of hyper-sexualized femininity – often employed to market the masculine appeal of a vehicle – and reclaim the latent power of the car as a site for female desire, pleasure and sex.”
By using the visual vocabulary of slick cars and the forms of the female body in the painted canvases she assembles, Toranzo Jaeger creates metaphors that shift gender and power roles, the museum release notes.
“Each panel is connected with representations of organic and inorganic links, specifically painted blood vessels and the pipes and tubing of a car engine. As visitors circle the piece, the artwork progresses endlessly from sunrise to nightfall, never arriving, never leaving, and is laden with allegory creating a passageway to visceral human experience—to the redness of pain, love, and the inner machinery of being.”
A recent article in queerculture.com also notes Toranzo Jaeger’s use of the car as a symbol of sexuality. It says her practice “deals with the representations of masculinity and femininity in the visual culture of late capitalism, in which the car serves as the stereotypical symbol of male power and domination and a psychological space in her paintings.”
The article goes on to say that the artist “meticulously recreates the anatomy of the interior of the vehicles of the future, their…engines and other mechanical systems, reconstructing the semiotics of the order of domination.”
Toranzo Jaeger talks about subverting the process and “preciousness” of painting by taking painting off the walls, deconstructing it and penetrating it with the last remains of her pre-Colombia heritage, embroidery. The quest for autonomy is a strong theme in her work.
“As a queer woman of color, I feel a sense of urgency to …create conceptual spaces to decolonize and free ourselves from the heteronormative,” Toranzo Jaeger said in a Q&A with queerculture. “It is my intent to decolonize myself, to live in the paradox of the art world…In anything that I use as a subject, I will always try to make it as queer as I can.”
The Rotunda was formally named during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 13, with Waters in attendance. Christopher Bedford, the museum’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, and museum board chair Clair Zamoiski Segal made remarks to about 20 guests of the honoree, then hosted an outdoor reception. The guest list was limited to comply with the city’s guidelines for crowd sizes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gallery’s west wall now bears a brushed stainless steel plaque that reads, simply, John Waters Rotunda. Waters does not have any say over which artists are chosen for exhibits in the John Waters Rotunda or what works will be displayed. Brown said the space will be used to showcase “early- and mid-career” contemporary artists selected by museum curators.
The first exhibits also reflect the museum’s efforts to promote diversity. After Toranzo Jaeger, the next artists to show work in the space will be Thaddeus Mosley, an African-American sculptor, and Elle Perez, a trans artist whose work touches on themes of gender identity, intimacy, vulnerability and the relationship between seeing and love.
“There will be a bunch of solo artists’ installations by a variety of contemporary artists working in all kinds of media,” Brown said.
Waters, who is hosting a double feature drive-in movie event for the Maryland Film Festival tonight, declined to comment for this article. Brown said museum curators are under no obligation to show shocking or filthy or sex-oriented works of art in the space just because it’s named after Waters, who has often championed people who don’t always adhere to the norms of society.
“There’s not a specific intention of having things that are particularly wacky or sex-related.”
She did say the first exhibit, depicting a queer Mexican artist’s vision of a futuristic electric car and spaceship hybrid reflecting her ideas about male and female sexuality, is the sort of out-of-this-world creation the space can accommodate – and perhaps an indication of what’s to come.
“It’s perfect for the John Waters Rotunda.”
Ed Gunts is a local freelance writer and the former architecture critic for The Baltimore Sun.
Share the News
"artist" - Google News
May 21, 2021 at 08:30PM
https://ift.tt/3hMydmf
Newly christened 'John Waters Rotunda' will feature Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger - - Baltimore Fishbowl
"artist" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FwLdIu
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Newly christened 'John Waters Rotunda' will feature Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger - - Baltimore Fishbowl"
Post a Comment