life on
mars
55th Carnegie International
5.3.08-1.11.09
Featured Artists
- Doug Aitken
- Kai Althoff
- Mark Bradford
- Vija Celmins
- Phil Collins
- Bruce Conner
- Cao Fei
- Peter Fischli & David Weiss
- Ryan Gander
- Daniel Guzmán
- Thomas Hirschhorn
- Richard Hughes
- Mike Kelley
- Friedrich Kunath
- Maria Lassnig
- Sharon Lockhart
- Mark Manders
- Barry McGee
- Mario Merz
- Marisa Merz
- Matthew Monahan
- Rivane Neuenschwander
- Manfred Pernice
- Susan Philipsz
- Noguchi Rika
- Wilhelm Sasnal
- Thomas Schütte
- Ranjani Shettar
- David Shrigley
- Paul Sietsema
- Rudolf Stingel
- Katja Strunz
- Paul Thek
- Wolfgang Tillmans
- Rosemarie Trockel
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul
- Andro Wekua
- Richard Wright
- Haegue Yang
Audio/Video Library
Artist's Lecture: Haegue Yang
Posted 10|13|08
Artist's Lecture: Ryan Gander
Posted 09|29|08
Remainder, a new process/performance by Attack Theatre: Phase one
Posted 09|23|08
Website Design & Development:
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Attack Theatre: Remainder, Phase Two
Thurs., Jan. 8
Attack Theatre dancers return to Carnegie Museum of Art for Phase Two of Remainder, a 10-month process/performance inspired by Life on Mars.
Daily film screenings of Sharon Lockhart's Pine Flat in Carnegie Museum of Art Theater
2:00 p.m. daily
Additional screening Thursdays at 5:00 p.m.
Free with Museum admission
Running time: 138 min.
schedule is subject to change
Life on Mars High School Audience Engagement Project
Shettar's Just a Bit More: "Intimate Immensity" Visualized
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By Margaret
Transforming air molecules into canvas, Ranjani Shettar sprinkles the space of the Carnegie Museum’s Scaiffe Galleries with a delicate, geometric web of blue beeswax beads and tea-dyed thread. The piece is suspended from the ceiling from taught, horizontal strings and fills the entire room. Installed in this way, Just a Bit More (2006) would seem to be a rather static sculpture, as if the web were frozen or trapped. Its physical beauty is so entrancing viewers feel distant to the piece at first, drawn to its aesthetic qualities but disconnected from its subtler, poetic meaning. As the viewer becomes more acquainted with Just a Bit More, however, the piece’s stillness and distancing beauty give way to an intimate understanding of its formal elements. Through its feeling of growth, incorporation of organic materials, and web-like structure, Shettar’s piece evokes a sense of nature and humans’ connection to the natural world.
Although the installation hangs obediently in its own gallery room, Just a Bit More seems to be growing and moving and changing. The way Shettar has arranged the bead web in seven different curtains or layers, each one progressively longer in length as the installation recedes into the room, creates the illusion that the web is expanding. The gradation of blue beads from dark to light contributes to this feeling of evolution in the piece. Also changing throughout the installation is the visibility of the thread. In the front curtains of beads, the gallery lights are illuminating the thread and the geometric patterns it forms. Toward the back the thread is almost invisible, making the beads seem as though they are floating on their own. Infusing this sense of growth and change into her work brings to mind images of our expanding universe, waves flowing in the ocean, and the cells that make up a person’s complex individual biology. In this way, Shettar’s work guides viewers to think about the connection between different natural systems.
Shettar’s use of materials reinforces the theme of nature and systems of nature in her work. By hand-molding a natural, organic substance such as beeswax and juxtaposing that with man-made thread to make her artwork, she is expanding the piece’s dialogue about the interconnectedness between people and the natural world. The delicate handling of beeswax and tea dye—not to mention the air particles that function as this work’s canvas—bring an intimacy and ethereality to her work that could not have been achieved had the piece been constructed out of wire and metal. The intimacy of the organic materials and the human hand’s interaction with them stands in stark contrast to the installation’s distancing, almost too-perfect beauty and factory-like, expansive geometric design. Perhaps this very contrast is what makes the exhibit’s theme of “intimate immensity” such a central component of Shettar’s piece.
The web-like structure of Just a Bit More also evokes—and visually illustrates—this notion of “intimate immensity.” The web’s power lies in its associative capacity and the way those different associations relate to each other. On one hand, the lines and dots seem to form a web of star constellations, reminding viewers of the vastness and intimidating nature of unexplored space and the mysteries of the natural world. Does life exist on other planets in a form our human minds cannot even image? On the other end of the spectrum, the web evokes the image of human DNA and body cells strung gracefully together to form a portrait of humans at their most basic, elementary level. With these two associations spanning from the vast universe to the smallest things inside of us, the web becomes a visual link between the immense and the intimate, between the unknown and the familiar, the mysterious and spiritual underpinnings of nature and the concrete, scientific properties that classify us as living humans.
I sometimes think of nature as a separate entity from myself. Just a Bit More visualizes for viewers in its web of delicate, dangling beads the way the intimacy of everyday life and bodily functions is connected to the immensity of the unexplored universe and the spiritual world. It reminds us through its particular medium that the things we create and achieve as humans, even something as personal as a work of handmade art, are tightly woven into the world around us. The piece also highlights the beauty and poetry of growth and the capacity for even more change within both humans and nature.
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ErinMa 08|18|08
I love the idea that everything is connected. When I looked at this piece I thought of how large the universe is and how in the whole scope of things the Earth is just a tiny little bead in a vast space of other planets. It made me feel very small!