Vik Muniz : SMALL

Installation >>

Opening Reception
10.24 (Fri.) 18:00 - 20:00

Place：nca | nichido contemporary art
Date：Friday 24th October – Saturday 29th November 2014
Gallery Open：Tue – Sat　11:00 – 19:00 （Closed on Sun, Mon and national holidays）
Opening reception: Friday 24th October 18:00 – 20:00 (The artist will attend for the opening reception)

nca | nichido contemporary art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz.
Muniz has examined the relationship between materials and images employing diverse materials. He has also carried out large-scale projects that involve a great number of people away from his studio. This exhibition showcases a selection of works from the Sand Castle series in which castles were drawn onto individual grains of sand, and the Colonies series in which microorganisms were used to compose images. By utilizing simple images that we often see around us, and by drastically manipulating scale, the artist forces the viewer to “re-cognize” the subject of an image and to rethink its meaning.
The works presented in this exhibition were created with the assistance of an MIT synthetic biologist (colonies) and an MIT designer (Sandcastles).

On Vik Muniz’s SMALL exhibition

Vik Muniz has attracted much attention in recent years as the documentary film on his work and the use of his photography in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar exemplify. Two works of his are also included in the Visual Deception II show which will tour until next spring: Self Portrait (I am too sad to tell you, after Bas Jan Ader), a self-portrait of a crying face composed of colorful toys, and Verso (Starry Night), which faithfully reproduces the painting by Gogh in the MOMA collection down to the administrative stickers applied on the back side by Japanese shipping companies.
The inclusion of Muniz’s works in the Visual Deception show was considered early on as a good example of double images, but the Verso series which makes authentic use of classic Trompe-l'œil techniques also drew attention during the selection process, leading him to become one of the very few among the many artists to have two pieces on show.
His works never fail to trigger a progressive awareness that goes from “?” to “!”. A toy soldier made of toys, a Hollywood actress portrayed with diamonds on a black background, a portrait of Disney drawn with a drop of ink used in animation drawings—his works invite the viewer to question “what may it be?” and then to come to the realization “I see!” when he or she understands the relationship between the image and the material. Being a photographer, Muniz is highly adept at figurative expression, but his insistence in adding a twist and showing a different side other than faithful depiction brings to mind Paul Klee’s notion that “art makes visible.”
The Sand Castles series to be presented in this show also suggests playing with sand on a beach, but yet again defies our expectations being a project carried out in collaboration with cutting-edge scientific technology. The initial spark for the work came, the artist remembers, from the fact that an Intel engineer told him that it is possible to draw on a grain of sand using nanotechnology after he had spent some time sketching old castles in the Loire Valley, France, using the 19th century optical transcription apparatus camera lucida. His supple imagination that can connect nanotechnology and sketches through the associations that the word “sand” evokes, and his prodigious ability to execute his ideas form the basis of his artistic activities, and can be witnessed also in his past works which deal with a complete different scale such as the geoglyphs and cloud pictures. The other series on show, Colonies, was also produced in collaboration, this time with a biology post-doctoral fellow at MIT. It again employs nanotechnology to photograph geometric patterns created by microorganisms in a petri dish. Muniz seems to use photography in order to visualize what cannot easily be seen despite being simple or beautiful due to the too large or too small scale. The results of his works reflect changes in the current times and are often flamboyant. However, his down-to-earth dedication to artistic production as his own vocation is suggestive of his artisan-like ethics.
He could be regarded as the darling of double images due to his abilities to select forms that anyone can recognize, add symbolic meaning to them, and to turn them into beautifully sophisticated images. He also champions our times by going beyond the boundaries of genres and by presenting classical subjects using high technology. In combining polarities such as diversity of styles and consistency of method, the familiar and the high tech, the traditional and the fashionable, airborne and microscopic photography, in order to make something new visible, Muniz is a truly authentic artist.
－ Reiko Tanaka (Cultural Affairs Department, The Chunichi Shimbun / Exhibition Management “Visual Deception II”)

Vik Muniz
1961 Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works in New York.
Selected Solo Exhibitions: Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv (2014), MAC Lima, Lima (2014), Museo Banco de la República, Bogotá (2013), Centro de Arte Contemporánea de Málaga, Málaga (2012), Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon (2011), nca | nichido contemporary art, Tokyo (2010) and others. His work is part of many public and private collections internationally

SPECIAL EVENT

Special screening of the film “WASTE LAND” and Artist Talk
Date: 10.23 (Thursday) : 21:00 –
Place: Theatre Image Forum, Shibuya

“Future Labo Tohoku Exhibition” in Tokyo Designers Week
Date: 10.25 (Saturday) – 11.3 (Monday)
Forum Panel discussion: 10.25 (Saturday) 17:00 Vik Muniz will serve as panelist
http://www.tdwa.com/2014/join/future-labo_tohoku.html