CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

DARK CONTINENTS
On View: MOCA, North Miami
September 26 – November 09, 2008

The artists in Dark Continents invoke and challenge the suggested links between femininity and nature.  Referencing historical moments in the work of Gauguin and related artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the exhibition questions the aesthetics of the “primitive” and “exotic” in modern art through a contemporary lens. Dark Continents includes site-specific installations, large-scale wall murals, paintings, drawings, sculpture, video and collage.  Works by Ida Ekblad, Hadassah Emmerich, Naomi Fisher, Elke Krystufek, Marlene McCarty, Claudia and Julia Müller, and Paulina Olowska will be featured.  Dark Continents is curated by MOCA Assistant Curator Ruba Katrib. Click on Image for more information.

Selections from the Permanent Collection
On view
MOCA at Goldman Warehouse
September 13 - October 11

Featuring works from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, this exhibition explores the ways contemporary artists create self-mythologies and construct stories with their work. These narratives provide a story line for artists to follow in the conception of new work.

Some of these stories are confessional while others follow the activities and foibles of real-life or fictional characters. Most civilizations developed myths to explain the unknown—especially the mysteries of life, death and the universe. Click on image for more information.

COMING EXHIBITONS

Featuring marionettes created from found objects, Miami artist Pablo Cano’s new multi-media production, The Blue Ribbon, is his first to include film animation and audience participation. In this collaboration with Miami artist and filmmaker Clifton Childree and choreographer Katherine Kramer, Cano’s marionettes take the form of 10 masterpiece paintings and sculptures from art history, which come to life and interact with members of the audience.  The Blue Ribbon is Pablo Cano’s 11th annual production commissioned by MOCA and is inspired by a 1969 children’s story by the artist’s mother, Margarita Cano.  When not in production, the marionettes and set will be on view as an exhibition during museum hours. Click on image for more information.

This is the first major museum exhibition of Anri Sala’s videos and photographs in the United States, featuring works from the late 1990s to the present.  The exhibition is co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (Cincinnati) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and is curated by Raphaela Platow, CAC Director and Chief Curator.

Born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania, Sala lives and works in Berlin, Germany.  Several works in the exhibition reflect the social and political re-orientation that affected Albania and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the communist system. The narratives in these works devolve between the artist’s own experiences and memories, and that of the collective geographic and national. Other works focus on the ambiguity and political implications of language, different performative qualities of music, or single phenomena, such as a vibrating cymbal.

Sala’s presentations can be understood as choreographed installations in which the dialogue between the works and how visitors navigate the spaces of projected and ambient light and carefully composed soundtracks are all taken into consideration. In all of his works, Sala constructs carefully calibrated scenarios with specific cinematographic effects, especially in the play of light, shadow, and sound. An illustrated catalogue with essays by Raphaela Platow, Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA, North Miami Executive Director and Chief Curator, Svetlana Boym, and others will accompany the exhibition.  Following its presentation at MOCA North Miami, the exhibition will be on view at the CAC during summer 2009.

Featuring works by Cory Arcangel, Davide Balula, Tobias, Bernstrup, Heman Chong, Peter Coffin, Matias Faldbakken, Cao Fei, Kim Fisher, Claire Fontaine, Chris Kraus, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Nicolas Lobo, Martin Oppel, Lisi Raskin, Julika Rudelius, Mungo Thomson and others, this exhibition explores poetic and philosophical aspects of science fiction literature. Taking the novel, The Possibility of an Island (2005) by provocative French author Michel Houellebecq as a starting point, the exhibition poses existential questions about a never arriving future, addressing anxieties about aging, death, irrelevancy, culture and destruction. The artists contend with once fantastic hopes of transformation for the future; and science fiction is approached as a genre that provides insight into and diversion from the banality of everyday life. Covering themes from habitation and technology to fear and hope, The Possibility of an Island illustrates our present time through extraordinary treatments of the past, present and future.  The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and is curated by MOCA Assistant Curator Ruba Katrib.

Abstract Cinema investigates how technological innovations from the early 1930s to the present provided artists with new means to create abstract moving images.  With the emergence of new technologies, new ways to envision the world and communicate ideas have arisen in tandem. Abstract Cinema will bring together a wide range of artists who have broken boundaries by using new media in creative ways.  Abstract Cinema is curated by MOCA Executive Director Bonnie Clearwater in association with MOCA Exhibition Coordinator Kevin Arrow.

The first major solo museum exhibition of Miami-born, artist Luis Gispert, will include photography, video and sculpture and a new, site-specific, multi-media installation.  Gispert derives the inspiration for his works from his experiences growing up Cuban in Miami .  The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and is curated by Bonnie Clearwater.