The schedule for next years SMoCA’s exhibits is out and features some great art.

Thirty Years of Collecting: A Recent Gift to the Museum

Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin Translucent Book, 2001 chromogenic print Photo by: Tim Lanterman

September 4, 2010 – January 23, 2011
Thirty Years of Collecting: A Recent Gift to the Museum showcases approximately 100 new works of contemporary art given this year to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art by Don and Carolyn Eason. Santa Fe-based collectors, the Easons purchased art throughout their relationship and this wonderful collection is a testament to their shared vision and passion for contemporary art. Daring art collectors, the couple sought out the work of both established and lesser known artists. For example, Kenneth Noland and Ken Price are both represented in the collection alongside the art of John Tinker and Bill Metcalf. In an interview published before Don Eason’s death, the couple described their collection as favoring “the maverick, the quirky, the slightly off.”

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

southwestNET: photography and video
Modernity and Its Discontents

Michael Williams, Street Photograph, 2005. Inkjet print, 9 x 13 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Michael Williams.

October 9, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Making photography in the moment requires constant vigilance of the artist—using the camera to intuitively respond to the world around them. Artists Michael Perkins, Christian Widmer and Mike Williams, each developed their work over the course of a decade, across the globe, as they express and critique the quotidian expression of daily life. Underlying is meaning expressed by the relationship of many photographs together rather than depending on one singular image. Each artist investigates the symbols of our culture—replete with conspicuous consumerism, new technologies and the widely-accepted truth of modernity: the usurping of religion by science.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jean Shin and Brian Ripel: Unlocking

October 9, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Jean Shin sees value in the things most of us discard. She creates elaborate and dynamic sculptures and installations using immense accumulations of materials ranging from empty plastic prescription pill bottles, to losing lottery tickets, to forgotten trophies and draws meaning from these materials and reformats them in order to call attention to the complex social contexts these materials conjure.

For the upcoming exhibition, SMoCA has invited Shin and long time collaborator Brian Ripel to spend time researching the local Arizona community and create new artwork. The project will focus on something we all possess—keys. Shin and Ripel have discovered an uncanny visual relationship between the horizontal profile of traditional keys and the Arizona landscape. Keys offer up a range of social meaning; much can be gleaned about trust and intimacy when we examine the range of people with whom we share our keys. Shin and Ripel will map a vast network (both personal and professional) of people based on the keys they share. In addition to creating artwork modeling this interconnected network of individuals, Shin and Ripel will also involve the community by collecting old keys that people no longer use. These keys hold yet additional meaning, hinting at places that we once inhabited but for one reason or another remain attached to emotionally, the lost spaces we all have in our lives. The end result of both the mapping and collecting activities will build on this visual connection to the landscape and take multiple forms in the space of the exhibition from drawing, to sculpture, to video projection. It will offer multiple perspectives on the ways in which we are connected to one another and will reveal layers of meaning embedded in the social community and the physical environment that we share.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sponsored by SmithGroup, Paul Giancola and Janis Leonard Design Associates.

Bridges: Spanning the Ideas of Paolo Soleri

Paolo Soleri, New York Pulse Bridge, 1988. Colored pencil on paper, 29 x 27 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation. © Paolo Soleri.

October 9, 2010 – January 23, 2011
Paolo Soleri’s first important drawing was a bridge sketch exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1949 while he was still a student at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. This fall Soleri will complete his first built bridge at the Scottsdale Waterfront, commissioned by Scottsdale Public Art. Bridges: Spanning the Ideas of Paolo Soleri will take a single important aspect of Soleri’s career as a means to understand his vision for creating better livable, more sustainable communities. This exhibition of drawings, models and video documentation will provide a unique opportunity to see the mind, hand and beauty of one the world’s pioneers in bridging a more holistic, elegant and pragmatic future.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with Scottsdale Public Art.

Sponsored by SRP.

Dance with Camera

Oliver Herring, Joyce and Davis, 2005. DVD, 6:22 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Max Protetch Gallery, New York.

January 15, 2011 – May 1, 2011
Spanning films from the 1960s to today, Dance with Camera explores the visual and conceptual connections between Hollywood musicals, avant-garde cinema, postmodern dance and MTV. The installation envelops the viewer in a space akin to a movie theater. Both choreography created and transformed by the camera lens and movement designed for the camera’s frame often exist concurrently in a single artwork. Traditionally, dance has been considered ephemeral; the camera provides means to fix dance in time. Including internationally-renowned artists Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean, Maya Deren, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dance with Camera proves that the camera is not simply a recording device, but stage and audience simultaneously.

Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania. ICA is grateful for primary funding from an Anonymous donor and acknowledge additional support from Jody and John Arnhold, Babette and Harvey Snyder and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance.  Further funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation, Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania

Sponsored locally by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation.

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other

Rivane Neuenschwander: Belong Not Belong, 2008 Suite of 9 c-prints Each approx 18 x 12 inches

February 12, 2011 – June 5, 2011
Covering over ten years of Rivane Neuenschwander’s practice, this ambitious exhibition aims to spotlight her unique contribution to the narrative of Brazilian conceptualism as well as the expanded field of her highly individualized art making. Working in a variety of media, the artist is involved in a uniquely humanist project in which national tropes and international scenarios reside in close harmony.

Neuenschwander’s practice merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, and participatory actions. Her authorship of the work is primary, but she also functions as an editor, collaborator, social organizer, and commissioning agent. Motifs that repeat with regularity include mapping, measuring, colonization, and categorization. The natural world is often the determinant for the realization of a work, such as drawings exposed to equatorial rains as they morph into exquisite continental maps and videos highlighting the industriousness of ants and beetles while reveling in the manic organizational systems that parallel those of the real world.

This first comprehensive survey exhibition of Neuenschwander’s work includes five major installations, four films, twenty-five sculptures, four suites of works on paper, one progressive performance, one suite of photographs and one sound work. SMoCA plans to include an additional work form a Scottsdale collection: Mapamundi.

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other has been organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in collaboration with Irish Museum of Modern Art. The presentation of the exhibition in Scottsdale has been made possible by The Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation and Paul Giancola.

Koinos Kosmos/Idios Kosmos:
Negotiating the Shared and Personal in the Contemporary Comic Book

Jon Haddock, Being Careful (detail), 1997, ink on paper, 3 1/4 x 3 ¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Jon Haddock

May 21, 2011 – October 2, 2011
What is normal? In a world beyond the comics of superheros and villains, a handful of artists utilize the frame of a comic as a platform to explore the tension between the isolated, reality of the individual and our collective reality. In Koinos Kosmo, widely-recognized comic artists such as Chester Brown, Rory Hayes, John Porcellino, Jim Woodring and Basil Wolverton compress this tension into a two dimensional world. These artists employ the comic to examine their (often) lonely existence. Although at times painfully idiosyncratic, the artists’ obsessive, almost Sisyphean efforts are also heroic—presenting oneself naked and vulnerable to the world. This exhibition was conceived by Phoenix-based artist Jon Haddock and SMoCA in conjunction with the tandem exhibition, Idios Kosmos.

Entering into Haddock’s installation Idios Kosmos visitors will move through an intricately constructed black and white world comprised of vast wall drawings and activated life-size cutouts—a comic in the form of a three dimensional museum installation. In concert with Koinos Kosmos, this exhibition explores the divergence of the protagonist’s personal world from the shared. Drawing inspiration from the artists in Koinos Kosmos, Haddock also pays homage to the idiosyncrasies and technical virtuosity he has long admired in their work.

Haddock, internationally renowned for his politically provocative and timely work, consistently employs the comic book format as a vehicle for addressing the intimate questions that concern him.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Architecture + Art:
Lead Pencil Studio [working title]

June 25, 2011 – fall, 2011
Second in SMoCA’s groundbreaking series Architecture + Art, this exhibition will continue the challenge of considering how we live with the heat of the Arizona summer. Trained as architects, Annie Han and Dan Mahalyo (partners who collaborate as Lead Pencil Studio) often work in the realm of the museum in their ongoing efforts to explore the intersection of architecture and art. Their subtle, poetic sensibility explores notions of volume, time and memory as they are imbued in architectural spaces. They will create a new installation for this exhibition.

Recipients of the New York Prize Fellowship 2009/2010, The Rome Prize for 2007/2008 and a prestigious Creative Capital grant in 2005, Lead pencil Studio is based in Seattle and has exhibited internationally.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.