Carol Bove
Momentum 1
26 May – 06 September 2004
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
955 Boylston Street, Boston
617-266-5152
www.icaboston.org
Carol Bove, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 2002-03 Photo: Fred Dott
Artist’s Talk
On June 17, at 6:30pm, Carol Bove will give an informal talk about her work in the exhibition as part of the ICA’s Viewpoints series.
ICA launches new series with an exhibition of Carol Bove’s work
The Institute of Contemporary Art announces a new series of exhibitions that present work by under-known and emerging artists from the United States and around the world. Entitled Momentum, the series is dedicated to the development of young blood and fresh ideas, helping those artists who have achieved momentum in their field gather pace in work and profile. Some of the artists will be newcomers; some will be longer-established but as yet under-explored. New York-based artist Carol Bove, whose work reflects on social, political, and artistic movements of America in the 1960s and 1970s, is the first participant in the series.
Momentum is an ongoing program, complementing major exhibitions, and developing with the museum in preparation for the completion of its new waterfront site in 2006. The series will provide an environment for visitors and artists that truly embraces risk and experiment, enabling both to test new waters. At times, the environment will be central to the work created, the ICA on Boylston Street and its future home on the waterfront providing a perfect location for the exploration of urban life, social context, and architectural character.
Momentum 1/Carol Bove is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, for which she will present new work created specifically for the ICA as well as a number of past works. Following her fascination with the 1960s and 1970s, Bove delved into the ICA’s archives, researching its renovation and opening in the mid-1970s. This research led to the artist’s modification of the exhibition space to reveal the original interior details that have been modified or covered up in the ensuing years and a sound element: a reading of the 1969 Alan Watts science fiction story The Future of Ecstasy by a French Count who attended the 1975 opening of the ICA. Watts’s story addresses people of the period during which it was written from the perspective of the year 1990.
Bove’s interest in interior design from these earlier decades is reflected in an assemblage of shelves, books, and magazines and the design of a bench from a piece of driftwood found near her Brooklyn home, which are included in the exhibition. One of Bove’s largest shelf pieces to date, What the Trees Said adapts a vintage shelving unit by modernist designer George Nelson as the support for an assemblage of stacked, propped, and open books, mostly first edition publications. The piece gets it title from one of the included books: an account of “life on a new age farm” by Stephen Diamond. It documents the life of a group of anti-war activists who set up a commune known as Montague Farm in Massachusetts in 1968.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1971, Bove lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich in Switzerland (2004), Hamburg Kunstverein in Germany (2003), Team Gallery in New York (2003), and Art Basel|33 in Basel, Switzerland (2002). Bove has also been featured in numerous two-person and group exhibitions including The Joy of Sex: Carol Bove and Charles Raymond at Cubitt in London (2004); Influence, Anxiety, and Gratitude at the List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T., in Cambridge, MA (2003);and Plastic, Plush and Politics: Echoes of the 70s in Contemporary Art at Stadtische Galerie Nordhorn in Germany (2003).
Artist’s Talk
On June 17, at 6:30pm, Carol Bove will give an informal talk about her work in the exhibition as part of the ICA’s Viewpoints series.
Momentum 1/Carol Bove is supported by a generous grant from the Barbara Lee Family Foundation.