Free Admission During “Carmageddon II” Sept. 29-30
Opening weekend for exhibitions Zarina: Paper Like Skin and Graphic Design: Now in Production.
The Hammer Museum will offer free admission to all visitors Saturday, September 29 and Sunday, September 30 during “Carmageddon II” when a portion of the 405 freeway will be closed for two days. Museum hours on Saturday and Sunday are 11am-5pm. Visit metro.net/405 for more information about 405 closures.
September 29 is the opening day for two major exhibitions at the Hammer— Zarina: Paper Like Skin and Graphic Design: Now in Production. Also, on September 30 at 2pm, the artist Zarina will be on hand for a conversation with curator Allegra Pesenti. Admission and events are free.
Zarina: Paper Like Skin
September 29 – December 30, 2012
Zarina: Paper Like Skin is the first retrospective of the Indian-born American artist Zarina, featuring approximately 60 works dating from 1961 to the present. Paper is central to Zarina’s practice, both as a surface to print on and as a material with its own properties and history. Works in the exhibition include woodcuts as well as three-dimensional casts in paper pulp. Zarina’s vocabulary is minimal yet rich in associations with her life and the themes of displacement and exile. The concept of home—whether personal, geographic, national, spiritual, or familial—resonates throughout her oeuvre.
A Conversation with Zarina
Sunday, September 30, 2pm
Join the artist Zarina and curator Allegra Pesenti for a conversation in the galleries.
Graphic Design: Now in Production
September 29, 2012 – January 6, 2013
This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely used tool. With the rise of accessible creative software and innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, graphic designers are becoming producers, deploying their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences. Featuring work produced since 2000 in the most vital sectors of communication design, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, posters, and branding programs, showcasing recent developments in the field, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.
Also on view:
A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome
September 15 – December 9, 2012
The Hammer presents an exhibition of a selection of paintings, drawings, and preparatory studies for Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing before Herod, one of the most important and well-known paintings in the Museum’s collection. The exhibition includes approximately 50 works from the collection of the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, displayed together with the Hammer’s painting. These related works from the Moreau Museum include variant paintings and compositional studies, as well as individual studies for the various figures, architecture, and decorative elements included in the Hammer’s painting. The Hammer is the sole American venue for the exhibition.
September 11, 2012 – January 20, 2013
Lucy Raven uses animation as the foundation for her explorations into the relationship of still photography to the moving image. During her 2011 Hammer Residency, Raven embarked on an ongoing investigation of the invention, growth, and mainstream acceptance of 3D cinema, from its roots in early animation to the current global infrastructure that has been established to support its new-found popularity. In the process, she began to amass an exhaustive archive of film and sound test patterns. Key to achieving high-quality image and sound, these test patterns are usually seen only by projectionists. Raven’s new works press these esoteric image and sound fragments into use as both raw material and subject-matter unto itself, freighted with the patina of analog cinema in a digital age. Hammer Projects: Lucy Raven will feature three new works that promise to broaden our view of the perceptual potential and depth of meaning to be found in the technologies of photography and moving images.
Hammer Projects: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu
September 22, 2012 – January 6, 2013
Collaborators since the late 1990s, Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu create provocative works that take as their subject some of the most compelling and complex issues of our day, from stem cell research and plastic surgery to terrorism and other forms of violence like rioting and dog fighting. Sometimes creating a direct confrontation with their viewers, their works often tap into common fears and anxieties and challenge particular worldviews. They tease out these issues by placing their viewers in the midst of strange situations: a self-propelled garbage dumpster that crashes into gallery walls, lifelike sculptures of elderly world leaders in wheelchairs bumping into one another, and a tall column comprised of human fat removed during plastic surgeries, to describe a few. The single work on view in their Hammer Project—I Am Here (2006)—grapples with the political complexities that inform East-West relations and the lingering conflicts that have deeply affected our relationship to the Middle East. By bringing these issues to the forefront, the artists shed light on prejudices and worries that might otherwise stay dormant. Hammer Projects: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu will be the first presentation of the duo’s work in the United States.
Your Land/ My Land: Election '12
September 30, 2012 - November 18, 2012
Jonathan Horowitz’s Your Land / My Land: Election ’12 serves as a convening space where visitors can watch and discuss the unfolding presidential election and its aftermath. Presented simultaneously at several museums throughout the country, the installation uses red and blue carpeting to divide the gallery into two distinct spaces. Fox News is broadcast live on a monitor in the red zone, while the monitor on the blue side is tuned to MSNBC, directing our attention to the increasingly rigid two-party system that defines US politics today. As the artist notes, in spite of movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy, the country remains “swathed in red and blue with no purple in between.”
