Tom and I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art to see the John Waters Exhibit "Indecent Exposure". Great stuff. We also saw a video installation by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin that was also great.
John Waters
Fitch/Trecartin
From The BMA's Website
Please note: A portion of this exhibition contains mature content.
The first retrospective of John Waters's visual arts career in his hometown of Baltimore presents more than 160 provocative photographs, sculptures, and video and sound works. The exhibition concludes with a gallery devoted to ephemera, including objects from Waters’s home and studio that inspire him, and three peep-shows featuring footage from his rarely seen underground movies of the 1960s.
Waters’s renegade humor deployed through his works reveals the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Exhibition highlights include a photographic installation in which Waters explores the absurdities of famous films and a suite of photographs and sculpture that propose humor as a way to humanize dark moments in history from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11. Waters also appropriates and manipulates images of less-than sacred, low-brow cultural references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, Justin Bieber’s preening poses, his own self-portraits—and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse, Divine. Other themes explored include artist’s childhood and identity, a satirical consideration of the contemporary art world, and the transgressive power of images.
Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin
From October 7, 2018 — January 6, 2019
Among the most acclaimed artists working today, Lizzie Fitch (American, b. 1981) and Ryan Trecartin (American, b. 1981) have established an expansive collaborative practice that includes video, sculpture, and large-scale installation. Their work embraces and reorders the visual and linguistic clutter of technology and media to create a frenzied meditation on the changing nature of narrative, language, and the human condition.
The two artists met in 2000 at the Rhode Island School of Design and began collaborating in 2001. Their presentation at the BMA features three frenzied films shown within sculptural theaters. These spaces— one resembling a bar; another, a gymnastics or aquatics facility—provide an evocative framework in which to encounter movies that explore the fluidity of identity achievable through contemporary technology, as well as the non-linear structures of 21st century communication.
The influential collaborators’ work has been presented at such prestigious exhibitions and institutions as the 12th Biennale de Lyon; the 55th Venice Biennale; The Stoscheck Collection; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Bonniers Konsthall; Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami; and Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
