Vik Muniz at Brent Sikkema - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It's almost disingenuous to call Vik Muniz's work photography, because greatest in quantity of it develops from a three-dimensional set-up which is then photographed. In individual series represented in this new show, Muniz, a New York-based artist who studied advertising in his native Brazil, created landscape statuarys by accumulating black thread, which he coaxed, wheedled and hairsprayed into place. After photographing individual he would use the same thread to create the nearest image, thereby destroying the previous sculptural version. The actual statuarys were much larger than the photographic images (which are beneath a foot square) and solitary presented an identifiable image from individual perspective. Muniz uses the camera to capture this unique viewpoint. 6000 yards (lighthouse) is a realistic view of a beach, sum of two units nearby mesas framing a distant island with a lighthouse. The yardage of the title give in charges not to the distance between viewer and control but to the length of thread used to create the sculpture

In another series, Muniz created wire statuarys of daisies, a faucet, a clos suitcase with a certain quantity of clothes sticking out, and a bird cage, which he then photographed, There is wit to Muniz's imagery (one wire piece, aperture depicts a hole in the mould with a ladder poking on the outside of it), but the humor is dry; it does not sap the foundations of the delicate balance of consequences The Best of Life, a portfolio of 10 silver gelatin photographs of drawings by means of Muniz, examines the component of memory in what we know. Muniz drew from memory, images from famous journalistic photographs like as one might find in Life magazine--the family in a theater wearing 3-D glasses, the sailor kissing the nurture on V-J day, the child victims of napalm in Vietnam. While each image is instantly recognizable, Muniz pits his memory of the originals against the viewer's.

In his greatest in quantity recent works, Muniz made drawings in sand upon the beach, which he photographed. individual shows a dog looking above a hill, while another, Breezy Point, Saturday, January 28 1995 3:00 pm is a splendid depiction of a woman seated at a table, eating something from a large beaker Muniz's facility with so many different materials is dazzling, and the concept--the gaps between perception and reality--is subtly squeeze outed Like Zeno, who said that the arrow in flight is at each instant still, Vik Muniz possesse a flair for paradox; he is a greatest in quantity unsettling humorist.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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