Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares

Exposición / Jewish Museum / 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St / Nueva York, New York, Estados Unidos
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Cuándo:
06 nov de 2015 - 24 abr de 2016

Inauguración:
06 nov de 2015

Organizada por:
Jewish Museum

Artistas participantes:
Valeska Soares

       

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Descripción de la Exposición

This month, The Jewish Museum opens an installation by Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Valeska Soares as part of the ongoing series "Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings," which brings newly commissioned contemporary art to the Jewish Museum's Skirball Lobby. Titled Time Has No Shadows, the piece features a large vintage carpet onto which poetic texts are placed, with antique pocket watches hanging down from above. On view through April 21, 2016, the installation draws on the artist's enduring fascination with the subjectivity of time and language, and investigates the history of Jewish migration and resettlement. Time Has No Shadows evokes the Jewish Museum's history as a family home, while also referencing the diasporic nature of the Jewish people. She was particularly drawn to the carpet, which would have been rolled up and carried from place to place, and thus has historically been a medium for creativity and storytelling. Bringing a carpet into the Museum's lobby also recalls the building's early history as the Warburg family's mansion in the early 1900s, when the grand entrance was ornately outfitted with outsized furniture and a room-filling carpet. Soares's artworks are often assembled from antiques and used materials, like those included in this work. This process of recirculation gives new life to the discarded and disused, and adds to the stories accumulated across their scratched and faded surfaces. In Time Has No Shadows, poetic texts are placed on the carpet in a spiral shape, with a subtly altered antique pocket watch hanging above each text. These revisions and alterations add yet another layer to the enigmatic histories of these timeworn items, inviting visitors to contemplate their own narratives for the installation and the objects within it.

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