by Amanda Davis
Staff Writer
Towers of vibrantly colored and transparent shapes emerge from the floor like huge columns of rock candy. Curving wooden sculptures vaguely resembling furniture careen at unexpected angles. A skateboard bears dozens of tiny human and animal figures, as if enacting a skater version of the Noah’s ark story.
In past weeks, these curiosities have been visible through the windows of the Faulconer Gallery. Of course, they are more than simple curiosities. These and other works of art will be showcased in the new exhibition opening tonight, Layers of Brazilian Art.
The show, curated by Faulconer Gallery Director Lesley Wright, includes over 60 pieces by 24 artists whose work encompasses four decades of Brazilian art. According to Wright, a category as broad as “Brazilian art” encompasses more than just a geographical area.
“Given that we’re living in a global world, a lot of the artists are very sophisticated and know a great deal about international art. It’s not like they’re just living in Brazil and not aware of what’s happening in the world,” Wright said. “One of the big puzzles for me was how do I find art that’s ‘Brazilian?’ So I ended up just looking for the best art that they’re showing in Brazil by Brazilian artists, not necessarily picking art that looked quintessentially Brazilian, because how would you do that anymore?”
The decision to focus on Brazilian art was influenced by Grinnell alumnus and trustee Gregg Narber ’68. Narber, who is on the Board of Trustees’ Fine Arts Committee, studied as an exchange student in Rio de Janeiro and subsequently lived and worked in São Paulo.
When the Fine Arts Committee was planning an exhibition for 2003, Narber suggested contemporary Brazilian art and offered to act as a guide and host in Brazil.
As the title of the exhibition implies, the pieces themselves entail many layers of meaning. Wright pointed out several pieces that are physically composed of layers such as the rock candy-like sculptures, sculptures actually made of a conglomeration of transparent objects. They are called Coluna de Transparência (Columns of Transparency).
Another dimension of the show’s multiple layers involves the artists themselves. “I could have just chosen to do the youngest, most current artists,” Wright said, “but I found that so many of them had studied under the artists who are now the older ones, that you couldn’t really tell the story without having both some of the older generation and the younger . . . so there’s a layering of generations as well.”
When selecting pieces for the exhibit, one of the Brazailian aspects that Wright sought to capture was the country’s urban energy. “I wanted to really announce from the beginning that this is not about jungle Brazil,” she said. “This is about city Brazil.”
The exhibit includes the work of some very “playful” artists, Wright said. To illustrate, she highlighted the Noah’s ark skateboard, which is actually called Missamóvel, translated to mean “portable mass.”
The figurines on the skateboard include both Mickey Mouse and a dashboard Jesus, symbols of the diverse influences on Brazilian art ranging from religion to commercialism.
Other works contain similarly familiar images arranged to create something more. One work, called To Be Continued . . . (Latin American Puzzle), is composed of images of people and things such as Eva Perón, Carmen Miranda, Che Guavara, guns and fruit. “What the artist has done,” Wright explained, “is taken all these images that are all our stereotypes about Latin America . . . and done them as puzzle pieces. And the owner of the puzzle can combine them in any order he or she wants.”
The same artist created the pieces of sculpture resembling furniture. Walking around one of them, Wright pointed out the line of sight in which the piece stopped being vaguely recognizable and became quite clearly a ladder.
“If you stand in the right place it clicks and then you go around it and it’s totally abstract,” she said. “They’re all about perception and what you can represent as reality and what you can’t represent.”
One of Wright’s hopes is that the exhibition will challenge preconceived notions about Brazilian art. She believes that visitors “will come away with any stereotype they walked in with undermined. I don’t think it conforms to any stereotype . . . about what we might think Brazilian art would be.”
Wright, who has traveled several times in Brazil, also hopes that people coming to the exhibit will get a sense of experiencing its culture first-hand. “I guess I hope [visitors] will have something of the experience I had when I was down there, which is that in some ways, this all seems sort of familiar, and yet it’s all got its own spin somehow,” she said.
“It’s complicated enough that it’s hard to pin down, but that’s part of its fascination.”
The exhibition opens today with a reception from 5-7 p.m. in the Bucksbaum Rotunda. Installation artist Ana Maria Tavares will also be giving a talk about her work on Sunday, Feb. 2 at 2:15 p.m. in the Faulconer Gallery.
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