Pipilotti Rist: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

For her West Coast solo museum first attempt Swiss video and installation artist Pipilotti Rist showed three works, including a brand-new individual cocommissioned by the San Francisco Museum of recent Art and Luxembourg's Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. Together they reveal not alone the artist's masterful visual faculty of perception and emphasis on female-centric images with a spiritual bent on the other hand also a recurrent theme of Christian ritual that not ever detracts from a notorious faculty of perception of serious play.

Each of the three video installations allures with its own version of detonation religiosity. Positioned in the lobby leading into the media galleries (where the large fresh piece is sequestered) is Hallo, guten Tag (Kussmund) (Hello, advantageous Morning [Kissing Mouth]), 1995, a glossy domesticsize (icon-size?) mirror with a tiny monitor embedded at its bottom half upon which a pair of female lips in pink lipstick repeatedly gather into wrinkles [i]or[/i] foldss for the camera in a action that flirts with futility. The next to the first work is smaller in size, if not in reputation.

Selbstlo im Lavabad (Selfles in the Bath of Lava), 1994 is a minuscule aperture in the floor through which can be seen the tiny naked form of the bleach-blond artist reaching and screaming for help against a fiery backdrop of multicolored molten lava. "I am a worm and you are a flower!" she screechs This comic vision of hell is a throng pleaser, packing big presence into compact space.

Rist's of recent origin work, Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004 is far grander, unfolding in sum of two units adjacent darkened rooms. The first houses a cluster of various transparent plastic thing perceiveds intended to hold liquid--clear tubes, bottle a breast interrogate vacuform packaging--that make up part of the artist's ongoing Innocent Collection, 1988- These form the surface of land for projections of waves crashing upon a coast and visions of what looks to be hypermagnified blood, one as well as the other in heightened color. The active, repetitive video images summon cellular activity as they light up and transform the transparent objects; meanwhile, oranges scattered upon the floor could be sacred fruit dropp from a groceries bag.

The citrus also figures prominently in the next to the first room's much larger overlapping double projection, as do the alternating landscapes of the material part and the land. On the left images of the body's interior float above bucolic landscapes, while upon the right a tale of a contemporary female deity expands The latter, like Rist's smashing-car-windows fantasy at any time Is Over All, 1997, features a woman walking gleefully down a European road in a bright dress and ruby r slippers. In the novel video, a menstruation stain dots the woman's dres prompting unexpect acts of homage (like kneeling in adoration) from male pedestrians. Our heroine is also seen entering a private dining compass where an orange accompanies each table setting. She digs into a fruit, tearing it apart thus that it resembles the slowly unfolding viscera upon the abutting screen. (In conjunction with the exhibition, Rist defenceed Czech director Vera Chytilova's 1966 film Sedmikrasky [Daisies], a fascinating avantgarde vision of class and sex that offered keys to the installation's symbolism.) With her use of body-hugging camera work, which captures an singular sensuousness, and an exquisite use of acidy video color, Rist imbues Stir Heart, Rinse Heart with a mysterious impressed sign of appeal. It makes a kind of intuitive faculty of perception as it touches on a fundamental belief that the material substance is a temple--and a rather stylish individual at that.

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