CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON HOSTS VIDEO ARTIST PIPILOTTI RIST

Monday, 23 October 2006 06:02

Houston, TX – The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist, the first comprehensive U.S. survey of the seminal work of the Swiss video artist.  Organized by curator Paola Morsiani, the project brings together Rist’s most significant work from the mid-1980s to the present.  Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist is on view from October 14, 2006 to January 14, 2007, touring nationally following its Houston presentation.  Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist includes eight of Rist’s early single-channel videos, six large wall projections, one video installation with a monitor, and a video installation created for a public space.

The exhibition features a selection of significant works spanning her career, such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Sip My Ocean (1996), in which pleasurable images and music quickly become metaphors for hysteria and suffocation, and Ever is Overall (1997), in which the camera follows a female walking through city streets, smashing car windows with an iron flower as she meanders.  Through multiple video projections, unconventional viewpoints and close-ups, and large-scale installations that envelop the viewer, Rist’s work dissolves the conventional boundaries between artist and audience.

For more than twenty years, Rist has focused on the idea of the female self. By contextualizing the female body in all its sensory and biological functions, and by layering references to woman, body and landscape in her work, her installations merge feelings of desire, sensuality and fantasy with feminist politics of identity and empowerment to create an intense emotional experience.  This unprecedented examination of the development and significance of Rist’s oeuvre sheds new light on her influential and intensely personal fusion of art and visual culture, not only in her ubiquitous female characters, but also in her pioneering installations with image and sound media.

“Through her use of video, Rist combines the worlds of art history and mass culture to create her own visual language,” said exhibition curator Paola Morsiani.  “She uses this convergence to intelligently explore the power of our mind and its connection to the body as well as the pervasiveness of our sexual experience and its link to our mortality; and she expresses her profound empathy and hope for the times in which we live.” 

Pipilotti Rist was born in 1962 in Switzerland, and studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (2005 and 1997); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004); the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2000); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1998); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996).  She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Accompanying the exhibition, which is organized by Morsiani for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a subsequent national tour, will be a 150-page catalogue with essays by Morsiani and Rachel Teagle, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (where the exhibition will travel), an interview with the artist by novelist and art critic Linda Yablonsky, extensive color reproductions of exhibited work, and a comprehensive illustrated biography, bibliography and videography.

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a non-collecting institution dedicated to presenting the best and most exciting international, national and regional art of the last 40 years, and to providing a forum for the discussion and understanding of the art of our time.  Through dynamic exhibitions accompanied by scholarly publications and accessible educational programs, the Museum reaches out to local, regional, national and international audiences of all ages.  Visit : www.camh.org