Supermodels at MASS MoCA
by Jennifer Dalton
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"Studio View"
Marilyn Weiss
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The eight month-old Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is kicking off the year 2000 with an exhibition of artists' models--and they don't mean the lovely young women Picasso and other artists have painted through the centuries.
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"Supermodel" is an exhibition of contemporary photography by artists who create and photograph their own sets, models and environments. Many of the artists included in "Supermodel" fashion miniature architectural settings out of mundane supplies and then photograph their models, making it look to the viewer (at least at first) as if the site depicted is a real office, building or street.
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"Central Park Building"
Carmen Einfinger
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Thomas Demand, an artist from Berlin, meticulously crafts environments out of paper. His subjects range from banal office interiors to painstaking recreations of historically important sites, such as Jackson Pollock's famous barn. To the casual viewer, his photographs look like they were taken of actual full-size environments.
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In Miles Coolidge's work "Safetyville," the artist photographs a model town by that name built at 1/3 scale, to teach children traffic safety.
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"Downtown Uniondale"
Alice Zinnes
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"Portrait of a DJ (B)"
Guillermo Marin
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"Supermodel" forces viewers to examine documentary-style photography's checkered past when it comes to providing accurate representations. Although photographers have always manipulated the scenes they "document," it has only been recently, with the development of computer manipulation techniques, that viewers have begun to question photography's ability to tell the whole "truth."
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For more info, check out: www.massmoca.org (this opens a new window).
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Read our archived Art in the News |
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