Wishing for Synchronicity : Works by Pipilotti Rist

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, USA
Dates: On View Through January 14, 2007
http://www.camh.or

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents first U.S. survey exhibition for Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist

HOUSTON, Texas – This fall, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist, the first comprehensive U.S. survey of the seminal work of the Swiss video artist. Organized by curator Paola Morsiani, the project brings together Rist’s most significant work from the mid-1980s to the present. Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist is on view through January 14, 2007, touring nationally following its Houston presentation.

“Pipilotti Rist is a tremendously innovative and distinctly personal voice in contemporary art. As a master of her chosen media, she uses her large and small projections to place the viewer within her world, provoking the contemplation of broad issues through her individual actions,” said Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Director Marti Mayo. “We are proud to have organized her first survey exhibition in the U.S. for our diverse regional, national and international audiences, thereby continuing the Museum’s almost 60-year tradition of presenting the best and most exciting art of our time.”

Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist includes eight of Rist’s early single-channel videos, six large projections, and three additional works. The exhibition features a selection of significant works spanning her career, such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Sip My Ocean (1996), in which pleasurable images and music quickly become metaphors for hysteria and suffocation, and Ever is Overall (1997), in which the camera follows a female walking through city streets, smashing car windows with an iron flower as she meanders.

“Through her use of video, Rist combines the worlds of art history and mass culture to create her own visual language,” said exhibition curator Paola Morsiani. “She uses this convergence to intelligently explore the power of our mind and its connection to the body as well as the pervasiveness of our sexual experience and its link to our mortality; and she expresses her profound empathy and hope for the times in which we live.”

Rist recently accepted a prestigious commission to create the visual identity for The Armory Show 2007, The International Fair of New Art, to be held next February in New York City.

Rist was born in 1962 in Switzerland, and studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.