Albrecht Dürer + Virginie Mossé
Slow Art Month
March 3 – April 28, 2018
In our main space, we are presenting three pieces by Albrecht Dürer : “The Fall” (c. 1511), “The Ascension” (c 1511) and “Erasmus” (c. 1526). Books about Dürer are on display as well as magnifying glasses so that visitors can view the woodcuts and engraving in more detail ( an idea that we “borrowed” from The Hammer’s Museum’s Dürer exhibit in 2006).
On the opposite wall, we are presenting the photographic work “Hotel Europa” by contemporary French artist Virginie Mossé. At first glance, her piece is a beautiful still life of an ornate basket, overflowing with fruit and delicacies in the style of the Dutch nature morte artists. On closer inspection, viewers discover that the food is in a state of very advanced decay.
So, on one wall we have Dürer, whose success was largely based on the invention of the printing press, and Mossé, whose work addresses the impact of technology on our environment and ultimately on our “modern” quality of life.
In the spirit of Slow Art, we highly recommend the black and white high definition film “Visitors” by Geoffrey Reggio. Mr. Reggio is best known for his “Qatsi” trilogy: “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance” (1982), “Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation” (1988) and “Naqoyqatsi: Life as War” (2002) .
While the “Quatsi” trilogy evoked the destruction of nature through humanity’s headlong embrace of ( and race into ) technology, in “Visitors”, time slows to a near-standstill as the film peers into humanity’s troubled soul, glimpsed through individual faces – human, cyborg, and ape. “Visitors” presents “moving stills” that linger on the screen for 70 seconds (most current films average cuts of four to six seconds long). As Mr. Reggio described, ”To see a film like this will ask one to slow down. It makes a lot of people nervous because we live philosophically – and practically – on a time clock. However, if you can let that go, you can live in a timeless moment”.
Our “Slow Art” day will end in readings from “Slow Art” by Arden Reed who was a frequent visitor to Mayeur Projects and a good friend of many artists and arts educators in the Santa Fe area.
