SlideShow
February 27 - May 15, 2005
The Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218
T 410-396-7100
The first major exhibition devoted to slide projection opened February 27 at The Baltimore Museum of Art. On view through May 15, SlideShow brings together rarely seen slide works by artists such as Dan Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, and James Coleman in a series of 19 installations that range from single-carousel pieces to more cinematic presentations created with multiple projectors, dissolving images, and soundtracks.
Since the 1960s, artists have used slide projection as a dynamic alternative to the tradition of painting-blending aspects of photography, film, and installation art. Through the simple technology of the slide projector and 35 mm color transparency, artists discovered a tool that enabled the transformation of space through the magnification of projected pictures, texts, and images. SlideShow links experimentation with slides to broader developments in contemporary art in loosely divided sections of narrative, performance art, and conceptualism. Recent works were made just as slides are becoming obsolete (Kodak discontinued production of its Ektagraphic slide projector in fall 2004), highlighting the medium’s impact on a younger generation still captivated by its potential.
Key works in the exhibition include Dan Graham’s Homes for America, a renowned 20-slide study of 1960s American suburban tract housing; Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a 690-slide, nine-carousel installation that chronicles the lives of her closest friends in the 1980s; and Projection 4 (P), a hallucinatory slide sequence created by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss in 1997. SlideShow also features works that have not been seen in the United States for decades, such as Jan Dibbets’ Land/Sea, a spectacular six-carousel installation that projects a landscape in transition.
Other artists featured in SlideShow are: Robert Barry, Lothar Baumgarten, Willie Doherty, Ceal Floyer, Louise Lawler, Helen Levitt, James Melchert, Ana Mendieta, Jonathan Monk, Dennis Oppenheim, Jack Smith, Robert Smithson, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
CATALOGUE SlideShow is accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page catalogue by exhibition curator Darsie Alexander with essays by Charles Harrison, Professor of History and Theory of Art at the Open University, London, and Robert Storr, Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and former Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The catalogue is copublished in the United States by The Baltimore Museum of Art and Penn State University Press and distributed by Tate Publishing in the U.K. SlideShow is available at The BMA Shop, 410-396-6338.
ORGANIZER & TOUR SlideShow is organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Darsie Alexander, BMA Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs. It will travel to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (July 2-September 11, 2005) and the Brooklyn Museum in New York (October 7, 2005-January 8, 2006).
SPONSOR
The exhibition is generously sponsored by T. Rowe Price. Additional support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Suzanne F. Cohen. The catalogue is generously supported by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro.
THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
The Baltimore Museum of Art is home to an internationally renowned collection of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art, including the largest and most significant holding of works by Henri Matisse in the world. The BMA is open Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. until 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. until 6 p.m.; and during the first Thursday of every month 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. The Museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The BMA is located on Art Museum Drive at North Charles and 31st Streets, three miles north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. For general Museum information, call 410-396-7100, or visit the BMA’s web site at http:/www.artbma.org.
