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Westchester County Business Journal • ARTSNEWS
FEBRUARY 2020
ROVING DIRECTORS For our "Roving Directors" feature, we ask Westchester arts professionals to go into the community and give us their take on another institution's on-view exhibition.
Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art by Michael Gitlitz, Executive Director at Katonah Museum of Art
Upon entering the exhibition, How We Live: Selections from the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection, on view at Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) through December 6, 2020, any illusions of peaceful, domestic bliss are shattered by an overwhelming, ten-foot-tall robot by Nam June Paik, Global Encoder. The sculpture’s machined parts, and seven televisions that make up the head and body, seem to turn the idea of domesticity inside out. We are clearly at the mercy of this “domestic” figure. It will show us how we live, and we shall tremble in fear and wonder. So too are we presented like primitive figures before the majestic oversize goddess Che Yah (Greatest Love) by Anne Samat, an intricately woven assemblage of rakes, utensils and yarn, all fashioned into an awe-inspiring deity. Domesticity meets the divine. This is not “how we live” curated by Norman Rockwell or Hallmark, but rather Omar LopezChahoud and Nicola Tezzi’s clever
visions culled from an extraordinary collection. It is a powerful and wonderfully destabilizing exhibition. Works of every media and scale present a dizzying array of several dozen commentaries on contemporary culture and society, on our relationships to our environment and to each other. While there are some massive and forceful statements in largescale works, relief is found in encountering the fact that some of the most moving works in the exhibition are the most diminutive. Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth’s Mocacine presents a painful composition: an intimate drawing of a figure placed on a small wood pallet, partially obscured by worn moccasins, the whole of which is further pinned down and crushed by a stone. Not just drawing or shoe crushing. Soul crushing. On the other end of the emotional spectrum is a small Bruce Nauman neon, Human Sexual Experience. In its X-rated yet banal depiction of two hands making the gesture of copulation, it is one of the artist’s
Global Encoder by Nam June Paik (photo credit: Maksim Akelin)