Hi everyone, 
New Exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland
Last weekend marked a series of important milestones for my institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. We launched our Fall exhibitions, held our annual benefit Gala including an art auction, and celebrated the 5th anniversary of our new Museum building. Fundraising in the Museum world is nothing short of difficult, and always something new. With each project you have to find sponsors and patrons who are interested in the specific artists or ideas the exhibitions feature. On the other hand, a yearly benefit gala is an opportunity to bring together a large group of collectors, gallerists, Museum supporters, and corporate partners to raise money for the museum without a specific project as the focus.
Our three new exhibitions: A Poethical Wager and Phil Collins: my heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught, and Jason Salavon: Rainbow Aggregator, opened on the evening of October 6th. **Disclaimer, Phil Collins is not the famous British musician, but a very well known contemporary artist by the same name: Phil Collins (b. 1970, Runcorn, UK).
A Poethical Wager features a host of exciting international artists working, more or less, in abstract forms to comment on and take ethical stances on socio-political events and the complex and often invisible systems that make up the essential structure(s) of our society. Artists include: Doug Ashford (b. 1958, Rabat, MA); Abbas Akhavan (b. 1977, Tehran, IR); Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City, MX); Lara Favaretto (b. 1973, Treviso, Italy); Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo, EG); Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois); Jumana Manna (b. 1987, Princeton, NJ); Oscar Murillo (b.1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia), Tariku Shiferaw (b.1983, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia); Mario GarcÍa Torres (b. 1975, Monclova, Mexico), and Emanuel Tovar (b. 1974, Guadalajara, Mexico). Many of these artists came to Cleveland to install their artwork, attend the opening, and our celebration weekend. It was quite the party, and marathon!
Phil Collins: my heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught, features six listening booths housing 7” vinyl recordings of original songs that the artist created in collaboration with guests of a homeless shelter in Cologne, Germany, as well as with Collins’ vast network of musicians. To make this work, Collins installed a phone booth with a free line at the shelter, available to all for unlimited local and international calls, with the agreement that the conversations would be recorded and made anonymous. The selected recordings were shared with a group of musicians, including David Sylvian, Scritti Politti, Lætitia Sadier, Maria Minerva and Damon & Naomi, Planningtorock, and others, who used the telephone booth audio to create new songs played on record players in the listening booths.
Finally, Jason Salavon: Rainbow Aggregator. Jason Salavon (1970, Indiana) is a Chicago-based artist who designs computer programs and software that reconfigures data from the Internet such as search results, news headlines, and social media trends. Through photographic prints, digital animations, and real-time software installations, Salavon presents new ways of seeing and understanding the flow and construction of information in contemporary culture.
Rainbow Aggregator is a continuous real-time representation of trending information and topics sourced from Twitter and Google. The digital animation is created through custom-made software that translates trending topics into an abstract composition of vibrant colors and ever-changing streams of text. On random occasions, sections of the web-code connected to each trending word or phrase appear throughout the digital animation.
Stay tuned for my next post, which will feature more of the programmatic content that took place around MOCA Cleveland's Fall openings, Benefit Gala, and 5th Anniversary!