Intersections@5 curator Vesela Sretenovic introduces the art and artists behind the exhibition.
Tag Archives: Intersections @ 5
Spotlight on Intersections@5: Vesna Pavlovic
The Phillips celebrates the fifth anniversary of its Intersections contemporary art series with Intersections@5, an exhibition comprising work by 20 of the participating artists. In this blog series, each artist writes about his or her work on view.
Vesna Pavlovic, Untitled (Swiss Peasant art exhibition, 1957.4), 2014. Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 in. Gift of the artist, 2014. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
While exploring The Phillips Collection’s archive, I came across a group of black and white photographs and negatives taken in 1960s. These included images of an exhibition of Giacometti’s sculptural works, Mark Tobey’s paintings, and images of the former Annex façade, among others. The materiality of these large format negatives and their inevitable photographic obsolescence became the starting point of my exploration. I overlaid found analog negatives and scanned them digitally to create new photographs. Physically bringing layers of images together turned negatives opaque and ghostly looking. The study of the archive exposed the sensibility of the collection and aesthetic choices of image and text display in the museum. For me, this was an opportunity to examine photographic representation of specific political and cultural histories of the America’s first museum of modern art.
Vesna Pavlović
Spotlight on Intersections@5: A. Balasubramaniam
The Phillips celebrates the fifth anniversary of its Intersections contemporary art series with Intersections@5, an exhibition comprising work by 20 of the participating artists. In this blog series, each artist writes about his or her work on view.
A. Balasubramaniam, Hold Nothing, 2012. Cast from artist’s body, fiberglass and acrylic, 42 x 24 x 7 in. Purchase, The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2014
Hold Nothing is an effort to bring form to the formless—to realize the potential of the unseen. It is a cast from my own hands, the distance between the two edges of the work the actual distance from my body’s left and right outstretched arms. Skin, the outer layer of the body, is also revealed as an edge where the individual self ends and everything else begins. In this work, the inside (of my hands) becomes the outside (of the work). Our respect and awareness for material reality is often more than that for the non-material or the non-visible; we usually think of “nothing” as negative. I am attempting here to show that even nothing is something—even nothing has its own unique form. The result is Hold Nothing.
A. Balasubramaniam