Arturo Herrera "Les Noces (The Wedding)"
Americas Society
This event has ended.
Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding) is an exhibition anchored by a digital projection—the artist's first work to incorporate sound and moving images. This two-channel projection is based on the 1923 ballet, scored by the composer Igor Stravinsky for Sergei Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes, one of the 20th century's most significant modernist experiments of gesamtkunstwerk. According to Herrera, "Stravinsky actually built The Wedding from snatches of song—some vulgar, some poetic—that accompany a wedding ritual… The text is carefully constructed through fragmentation and repetition from anthologies of Russian folklore. He built it out perfectly to his specifications, but it's based totally on nonliterary verse. So the film is based also on that kind of arrangement."
Presented for the time in New York, Les Noces, shows fragments of Herrera's own work in an ever-shifting dance of abstract black-and-white images set to Stravinksy's music. The artist worked with a computer programmer to develop software that draws randomly from this database of images to create a changing sequence in response to the pitch of Stravinsky's music. This chance-based process intentionally invokes the mutable nature of performance, as well as the transformative power of collage: no dance is ever performed exactly the same way twice.
The exhibition curated by the Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator, Gabriela Rangel, will also feature several pieces in which Herrera's fragmentation process is revealed, including one of his early collages from the 1990s, recent works on paper, sculpture, an artist's book, and cut-outs, in addition to the black-and-white photograph series from which the artist departed for the creation of Les Noces.
Arturo Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela.
Media
Schedule
from February 03, 2011 to April 30, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-02-03 from 19:00 to 21:00