As South Florida’s museums from Palm Beach to Miami present their highly anticipated offerings for Art Basel Season, the Boca Raton Museum of Art is poised to lead the pack with the world premiere of the Teiger Award-winning exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art.
The new group show was originated by Kathleen Goncharov, the Museum’s Senior Curator, and features 30 contemporary artists, including: Tony Oursler, Urs Fischer, Alfredo Jaar, Jim Shaw, Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Kaino, Christian Jankowski, Kristin Lucas, Jane Hammond, Gavin Turk, Michael Ray Charles, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Mark Thomas Gibson, Robin Tewes, Jeanette Andrews, Stephen Berkman, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Jacob Hicks, and The Yes Men.
This is the only exhibition in South Florida (and in the entire Southeast U.S.) to win the prestigious Teiger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects – among only 13 museum shows selected nationwide in the Single Exhibition category, recognizing boundary-pushing curatorial work.
The works in this exhibition crack through the looking glass of illusion and beliefs. While performative magic is certainly celebrated here, many of these artists are acclaimed for tackling the thorny issues of disinformation, hoaxes, cults, conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” and the rise of deceptive artificial technologies in our culture.
When exposed, these magical deepfakes often reveal a greater truth.
The exhibition magical is anchored by an entire gallery of phantasmagorical installations by the globally acclaimed artist Tony Oursler, celebrated for asking the pressing question: what happens when the occult is confronted by its mirror image of technology?
This exploration pulls back the curtain on modern-day deceptions, often perpetrated for political or financial gain – before our very eyes.
Today’s hoaxes, and the blatant lies posted on social media, are often fabricated with new technology yet have earlier precedents in America’s history.
The exhibition’s temporal twist juxtaposes parallels between our current struggles and the same peculiar fascinations with magical thinking during the late 1800s and early 1900s – when the deadly flu pandemic and World War I created an epidemic of fake mediums, seances, and the golden age of stage magic.
Fast-forward to today, and these artists investigate how the trauma of our own pandemic, climate change, political extremism, violence, and the disruption of societal norms are spurring belief and fascination with the paranormal.
An explosive increase in supernatural characters in popular culture, and dangerous hoaxes that are proving difficult to discredit, are rampant again now.
“Our City is honored by this national acclaim, and that this museum exhibition is the only one in the entire Southeastern U.S. selected by the Teiger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects in the single exhibition category,” said Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer. “We are proud of the stellar team at the Boca Raton Museum of Art for shining the national spotlight on South Florida’s museum scene.”
“The caliber of the contemporary artists in this exhibition is earning major attention for the new season at the Boca Raton Museum of Art,” said Irvin Lippman, the Executive Director of the Museum.
“The correlation between magic and artmaking has always loomed large, and this exhibition takes this idea one step further, revealing strong connections between today and earlier periods in history when crises led to magical thinking. Art itself is a process of alchemy, transforming physical medium into illusions of beauty, messages that have the power to both inspire and manipulate audiences.”
The largest gallery in the exhibition is transformed by Tony Oursler into an otherworldly landscape titled Creature Features.
The Museum has commissioned several new installations by Oursler, exploring what the artist calls the “delicate balance between creativity, mysticism and scientific ingenuity.” Based on American folklore, legends, and hoaxes likened to today’s urban myths, viewers will walk into a dream world where the artist’s collection of the unbelievable comes to life.
Oursler is one of the world’s foremost pioneers of video art, working with moving images, installation and projection.
His inspirations include conspiracy, mysticism, narrative evolution and facial recognition technologies. Viewers are often disoriented and disarmed upon entering his installations.
Imponderable, (film still) by Tony Oursler (5-D feature length film, 90 minutes).
Central to Oursler’s work is his endless fascination with how technology impacts humanity. For several decades, the artist has amassed a vast archive of more than 3,000 historical materials pertaining to the paranormal fringes, pseudo-science that connects to cults, and the intersection of science and the occult.
The realms of magic and illusion are generationally embedded into the artist’s DNA. Oursler’s grandfather was a magician who exposed trickery used in seances by the Spiritualists of his era, who lied to desperate widows yearning to communicate with relatives who died in World War I.
Oursler’s father founded the magazine, “Angels on Earth,” about spiritual encounters. The artist’s spirit world fascination also includes his admiration for mediums and mystics who never charged for their services, falling outside the realm of financial fraud.
In 2000, Oursler was awarded the U.S. Art Critics Association ICA New Media Award. Oursler has been selected for solo exhibitions throughout the United States and is currently one of America’s most internationally exhibited artists (with solo shows in more than 25 countries). The artist was selected to direct the headline-grabbing 2013 music video by David Bowie, titled “Where Are We Now,” featuring Oursler’s innovative use of video projection.
Imponderable, Oursler’s cinematic 5-D experience, has only been exhibited at MoMA in New York and was created using Pepper’s Ghost, a mirror illusion technique first used in the 1800s in theatrical ghost plays.
Feature Art: Imponderable, (film still) by Tony Oursler (5-D feature length film, 90 minutes).
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