overview

Curatorial Statement

A paradigm shift in contemporary art is rare and hard to recognize at its inception, but that is what curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco have done in The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial. The curators will present a new sensibility in the art of our time, a mingling of up-to-the-minute technology and traditional visual arts (painting, drawing, and sculpture) with dance, music, and film. The fundamental form of this new work is animation, uniting the technological (the camera) with the hand-made (drawing). The Dissolve will trace the development and reinterpretation of moving image techniques in wonderfully surprising juxtapositions.

In 15,000 square feet of exhibition space, imaginatively designed by renowned architect David Adjaye, the exhibition will feature historic work from the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Fleischer Studios, as well as seminal works by masters of the moving image genre – Paul Chan, William Kentridge, Raymond Pettibon, Martha Colburn, Kara Walker and Federico Solmi. An emerging group of exciting newer voices will be showcased to bring us the most recent developments in experimental forms.

Among the many highlights of this biennial will be two SITE-commissioned pieces, offering important artists in the field opportunities to push their practice in new directions.

MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner, dancer, and choreographer Bill T. Jones has been commissioned to create a live performance piece for presentation at the Lensic Performing Arts Center combining dance, movement, and video. A tenth anniversary updating of Ghostcatching, a work that animates Mr. Jones’s body as three-dimensional, computerized drawings, will be featured at SITE for the duration of the exhibition.

sarah lewis: biography

Curator of SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial

Sarah Lewis is a writer and a doctoral candidate at Yale University in the Department of the History of Art. A former Critic at Yale University School of Art, she received degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University and has held curatorial positions at the Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sarah has published widely, writing for Art in America, Artforum, Callaloo, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Venice Biennial, The Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Guggenheim Museum. She was appointed as a member of President Obama’s Art Policy Committee in 2008, a Trustee at the Brearley School, and is a Founder of Expressive Rights of TruthAIDS. Sarah lives in New York and New Haven.

Photo: Frank Stewart click image to view fullsize

daniel belasco: biography

Curator of SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial

Daniel Belasco is a curator and art historian specializing in postwar and contemporary art and design. He is the Henry J. Leir Associate Curator at The Jewish Museum, New York, where his exhibition Reinventing Ritual, opened in September 2009 and will travel to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Daniel has contributed texts to several contemporary art catalogues, including Robert Storr’s Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque for SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial. Daniel has published essays and reviews in numerous journals and catalogues including Art in America and Art News, and is currently completing an exhibition on feminism and painting, opening at The Jewish Museum in September 2010. He holds a PhD and MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA from Amherst College; he lives in Brooklyn.

Photo: Herb Lotz click image to view fullsize

adjaye associates: biography

Architect of SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial

David Adjaye is now recognized as one of the leading architects of his generation in the U.K. He formed a partnership in 1994 and quickly developed a reputation as an architect with an artist's sensibility and vision. His ingenious use of materials, bespoke design and ability to sculpt and showcase light engendered high regard from both the architectural community and the wider public. He reformed his studio in June 2000 as Adjaye Associates and has since gone on to win a number of prestigious commissions. Adjaye has also co-presented two television series of Dreamspaces for the BBC, a six-part series on contemporary architecture. In June 2005, he presented the TV program Building Africa: Architecture of a Continent. He then pursued a personal project documenting each of Africa's capital cities, which culminated in a book and exhibition in 2010.

As a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond/Smith Group, Mr. Adjaye is the lead designer for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will be built on the National Mall in Washington.

See more images at Adjay Associates Website

Photo: Steven Heller click image to view fullsize