February 11 – April 15, 2011
Samuel Dorsky Museum
SUNY New Paltz
1 Hawk Drive
New Paltz, NY
12561
http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum
From Huguenot to Microwave: New and Recent Works by Marco MaggiABOUT THE EXHIBITIONMarco Maggi’s obsessively minimal yet coolly detailed artworks are studies in perception that reflect back, metaphorically and physically, on the viewer. This exhibition includes recent Plexiglas-and-paper objects, altered rulers and straight edges, aluminum-foil and clayboard drawings, a video projection, and a new, large-scale installation work that traverses The Dorsky’s Chandler and North Galleries. The artist has made several new works for the exhibition and lent other, recent, works. A private collector and the Josée Bienvenu Gallery have lent the remaining works.
Maggi’s use of materials, techniques, and references evokes, but never makes explicit, the connections between culture, power, and the image that are the subject of much recent contemporary art. Surveillance mirrors are decorated—and their ostensible users’ gazes disrupted—by skeins of tiny lines. Eyeglass lenses are augmented with—and compromised functionally by—similar webs of spidery cuts. A long series of stacks of paper cut with elaborate care divides one half of the gallery from the other while it mimics the operation of a printing press and reflects—at one remove, the production of art itself—and at another remove, that of artists themselves. Time-lapse video collapses the life cycle of an apple, a humble New Paltz specimen (and visual simile for the town), into a cosmically concise epigraph for life itself.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1957, Marco Maggi lives and works in New Paltz, N.Y., and Montevideo. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Maggi earned an MFA at SUNY New Paltz in 1998.
Maggi represented Uruguay at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo; he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York; Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, Montevideo, Uruguay; Centro Colombo Americano, Bogota, Columbia; and Syracuse University’s Lubin House Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous private collections as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, São Paolo; and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at SUNY/New Paltz, is fast gaining wide recognition as the premier public showplace for exhibition, education, and cultural scholarship about the Hudson Valley region’s art and artists from yesterday, today, and the future. With more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries, the Dorsky Museum is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system.
The Marco Maggi exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions and events celebrating the museum’s tenth anniversary year. Building on the legacy of the College Art Gallery that opened at New Paltz in 1964, The Dorsky was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001. Since then it has presented over one hundred exhibitions, including commissions, collection-based projects, and in-depth studies of artists including Robert Morris, Alice Neel, Judy Pfaff, and Carolee Schneemann. Tenth Anniversary Year exhibitions will highlight The Dorsky’s focus on the art and artists of the Hudson Valley, a unique region that has served as a source of inspiration and nourished artistic creation and innovation since the time of the Hudson River School painters.
For more information about The Dorsky Museum and its programs, visit http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call (845) 257-3844.