Nine artists whose work is characterized by fragility, beauty, pictorial vividness, intimacy and attention to materials will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art(SFMOMA) in Present Tense: Nine Artists of the Nineties, part of the Museum's New Work exhibition series. Organized by SFMOMA curators Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture; Janet Bishop, Andrew W. Mellon associate curator of painting and sculpture; and John Weber, Leanne and George Roberts curator of education and public programs, Present Tense will be on view from September 13, 1997 to January 13, 1998.
The artists in Present Tense-eight of whom are living and relatively early in their careers-include Janet Cardiff (Lethbridge, Canada), Iran do Espirito Santo (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996, b. Havana, Cuba, worked in New York), Jim Hodges (New York), Charles LeDray (New York), Gabriel Orozco (Mexico City and New York), Jennifer Pastor (Los Angeles), Kathryn Spence (San Francisco) and Steve 'Nolfe (San Francisco). Their works vary widely in scale and media, but they all show an intense fascination with craft and materiality derived from such internal explorations as loss, intimacy and the pssage of time. The intent of this exhibition is not to provide a sweeping survey of contemporary art, but rather to examine new directions in the art of our time through the interrelated work of artists whose careers have matured in this decade.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) is the first artist of the group to have received significant attention from the art world, and his work serves as a genesis for the connecting ideas in the exhibition. First seen in SFMOMA's new building during its 1995 inaugural exhibition Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document, Gonzalez-Torres' work attempts to bridge the gap between personal revelation and the public realm. His untitled pieces evoke the loss and memory of loved ones, including two portraits made from cascading candies; fourteen framed photographs, subtitled ''Vultures"; and a string of brilliant white lights. Gonzalez-Torres is at the same time elegiac, evoking early and tragic death, and fundamentally hopeful, reflecting the artist's desire to make the world a better place.
Sharing with Gonzalez-Torres a romantic imagination that often seeks expression through mundane materials, Jim Hodges focuses on personal relationships in a body of work that alsoexamines the fragility of nature. His spider webs made from chain contrast the delicacy and impermanence of the subject with the durability of the material, exploring the relationship ofthe physical world to the passage of time. In No Betweens, a large curtain of artificial flowerpetals meticulously sewn together by hand, Hodges joins natural beauty and artifice,monumentality and intimacy.
Charles LeDray's art takes the form of meticulously crafted objects that LeDray altersthrough scale and repetition, laden with symbolic meaning. Milk and Honey consists of twothousand unique, inch-high porcelain vessels placed in a six-shelf vitrine; Come Together incorporates a rainbow of tiny, hand-stitched clothes. In a new piece presented for the firsttime in this exhibition, LeDray crafted a miniature ladder made from carved human bone andplaced it under a bell jar as a kind of laboratory specimen of both biological matter and manmade artifice. An additional series presents invented souvenirs for the Seattle World's Fair,which the artist visited as a boy.
In contrast to LeDray's diminutive symbolic objects, Jennifer Pastor's work is marked byexcess. Her subjects are archetypal products of nature, but through Pastor's art reality,unreality and hyper-reality collide. The room-size installation Four Seasons featuresrepresentations of fall, winter, spring and summer with traditional seasonal symbols altered inscale and proportion to create a surprising spectacle of kitschy nostalgia that serves as ametaphor for the passage of time.
Gabriel Orozco's work is characterized by its lack of spectacle. Orozco works in two mainforms: photographs using found objects and sculptures intended to interact with theirsurroundings. Naturaleza recuperada (Recaptured Nature) uses rubber reclaimed from thestreets of Mexico City to create a sculpture reminiscent of the massive stones from a pre Hispanic ruin. In the photograph Migration, Orozco has superimposed plasticine balls over aNational Geographic photograph of cranes flying over a sandbar. Using modest and oftendisposable materials, Orozco juxtaposes old and new, conveying an open-ended questioning of
time.
The she-specific installations of Iran do Espirito Santo also juxtapose references to time,space, the natural and the cultural. For Present Tense, do Espirito Santo is creating walldrawings that allude to the three-dimensional spaces of the SFMOMA galleries and their architectural elements. A few sculptures placed within the galleries will contain fragments ofthe Museum's architecture, forming displaced and altered spaces within a space. The intent isto create interiors where time and memory, observation and perception become unstable, both melded together and held in suspension.
Steve Wolfe, one of two San Francisco artists in the exhibition, uses personal objects as an expression of memory and temporality. Wolfe fabricates objects-such as books, record albums, and cardboard cartons containing "personal" collections-to create both a self-portrait and a profile of a generation. In Untitled (Rosy/Veuve Clicquot/Fortress Apple Cartons), three cardboard cartons filled with what appear to be books are actually fabricated and painted constructions. On closer inspection, one can detect that the ensemble is perhaps too beautiful, the colors too vibrant, the cardboard forms too perfect to be just someone's collection from a garage sale. This observation sets loose a delightful play of visual and verbal games that are at the core of Wolfe's meticulous fabrication.
Another San Francisco artist, Kathryn Spence, creates objects that recall personal treasures and childhood memories. Her mud animals use actual stuffed animal toys that are encrusted with layers of earth and thus appear to be hiding from exposure to the adult world. Spence distorts scale and perspective through her large color photographs of toy cars loaded with tiny pieces of debris and secured with packing tape. These mutations o( childhood toys are at the same time comforting in their recollection of a more carefree age and disturbing in their intimation of unwanted baggage from childhood.
Finally, a commissioned piece by Janet Cardiff uses both sound and sight to explore ideas of space and time. After having visited the Museum to observe its visitors and videotape the building, Cardiff is creating an audio and video experience of SFMOMA and its neighborhood incorporating simulated views through two telescopes that give the visitor the sense of peering behind the scenes, into a conversation on the street below or at the faraway hills south of the city. Cardiff's main interest is in playing with perceptions of reality, highlighting difficulties in communication, metaphorical barriers, and connections produced by architectural structures.
Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties will be accompanied by a brochure that features essays by two guest authors-New York artist and art critic Julie Ault and San Francisco journalist Bill Hayes-and an introduction and entries on the artists by the curators.
The New Work series is supported by the Collectors Forum of the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art.