Tag Archives: living artists

Spotlight on Intersections@5: Tayo Heuser

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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.
Heuser_Untitled

Tayo Heuser, Untitled, 2010. Woodcut, 53 x 38 in. Gift of the artist, 2011. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

My response to The Rothko Room, particularly to his painting Ochre and Red on Red, painted in 1954:

Color, lightness, fullness, sadness, spirituality, silence, movement, an opening towards a distant place. I wanted to keep still, sit down, look and listen for a very long time. Tears. It was like nothing else. The room has perfect lighting and proportions. The paintings breathed. The plain bench was good. This woodcut and sculptural drawing (among several others created in various sizes) is the result of my response to The Rothko Room.

Tayo Heuser

Spotlight on Intersections@5: Lee Boroson

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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.

Boroson_Fixed Haze

Lee Boroson, Fixed Haze, 2014. 32” diameter, acrylic, acetate, polypropylene, aluminum, stainless steel.

Fixed Haze is a sculpture inspired by the formlessness of fog or mist. In studying this material and perceptual phenomenon I looked for a way of building a modular sculpture that could be both solid and ethereal simultaneously. As one moves around the work, the clear plastic materials manipulate light in a way that allows the sculpture to react to changing conditions and viewpoints.

Lee Boroson

Spotlight on Intersections@5: Vesna Pavlovic

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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.

Pavlovic_Untitled Swiss

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