moniquemeloche x Design.Lab Miami: DISCO
Curated by Monique Meloche, organized by mmprojects
Realizing the power of the disco ball both aesthetically and culturally and its current resurgence in our popular landscape, Monique Meloche has curated a group exhibition of artists who explore different concepts of installation with the literal assistance of the mirrored disco ball.
DISCO features the work of the following 5 international artists:
John Armleder (Switzerland)
Carla Arocha (Belgium)
Nelson Santos (US)
designlab.miami
January 19 - February 17, 2001
John Armleder will do site-specific work featuring readymade oversized Disco balls - either 1 room with four 4-foot diameter disco balls or a hallway piece like his current MOMA installation - continuing his exploration of performance and the readymade.
Carla Arocha will adapt her 1995 installation Orchid with 10 new fashion/body oriented pattern paintings on painted walls, patterned carpet floor piece, mood lighting and central spinning disco ball updating her "Disco mausoleum."
Nelson Santos would create a video installation exploring disco's inherent affiliation with homoerotocism.
John Armleder (Swiss b. 1948, lives Geneva)
Global, 2001
Armleder has worked for more than thirty years, starting off in the 1960s as a performance artist in the Fluxus inspired Geneva group Ecart ("trace" spelt backwards). Rather than work out of a studio, he travels, producing shows on the road, using gallery shows in response to particular spaces, opportunities, and possibilities. Armleder resists pigeonholing. The Swiss artist draws on, juxtaposes and merges styles and procedures from modernist art, modern design and modern life: constructivism, art deco, suprematism, action painting, minimalism, op art, disco, Hawaiian music and monster movies all find a place in his work. His appropriations are neither simple affirmation nor deflation; instead he keeps both possibilities at play, in check. By avoiding either adopting or directly critiquing the dogmas associated with his sources, Armleder rehabilitates as much as satirizes, offering new possibilities in new arrangements. Many of his works conflate two distinct traditions of modern art: formal abstraction and the readymade, for instance juxtaposing found and bought objects (often furniture and musical instruments) with paintings, or discovering "found" paintings. During the summer of 2000, he transformed the approach to MOMA’s Café/Etc. on the mezzanine level of the Museum with an installation of over-sized disco balls and a wall painting. Twelve rotating, mirrored spheres are hung in parallel rows at eye-level; each lit by a pair of spotlights. Viewers are enveloped in the disorienting, whirling atmosphere created by the flickering, infinite spots of light around the room. Armleder, who has been incorporating disco balls in his works since the late 1960s, dislocates and recontextualizes these popular cultural signifiers, suggesting that we consider these objects simultaneously as sculptures and as readymade props that combined to create a strangely silent party room. Armleder too will adapt his installations using oversize disco balls ranging from 20"-48" in diameter for each site.
Carla Arocha (Venezuelan b. 1961, lives Antwerp)
Orchid, 1995/2001
Arocha will reinstall/update her 1995 installation from the Hartnett Gallery at the University of Rochester in NY (originally her MFA project from the University of Illinois at Chicago). Orchid creates the almost impossible space of a “disco mausoleum.” An elegiac reflection on a time whose styles of music, dress, and attitude have been largely disavowed or repressed by those who “survived the 70s.” Orchid is much more than disco’s tombstone. It is an elegant intertwining of high and low cultures, parodying and paying homage to both forms simultaneously. Carl Andre meets the Bee Gees, for example, in the lavender square carpet element on the floor. The color the walls (from which the installation derives its title) suggests Easter: a holiday that encapsulates death, burial, and resurrection in one weekend. Arocha mirrors this symbolically by giving the space its won tripartite division, with a piece on the floor (burial), on the wall (Christ’s death on the cross), and the heavenly disco ball (ascension and resurrection). Representing fabric patterns characteristic of dancing clothes within the recognized format of the portrait painting (oval), Arocha commemorates, perhaps, the disco age gone by. Despite the funereal undertones of the installation, however, the piece ultimately remains humorous and light, presenting the dialectic of humor and sorrow that often accompanies mourning.
Nelson Santos (b. 1969 San Leandro, CA, lives Brooklyn) creates personal and political work in a variety of media all sharing homoerotic undertones. Here Santos will present work that has been in progress since 1999 from previous shows at Bodybuilder & Sportsman and bona fide galleries in Chicago. Featured will be Disco Balls (Love to Love You Baby) -- a small white monitor perched atop a white platform plays a continuous loop of what appears to be an undulating disco ball – a glittery mass in close-up, moving to Donna Summer’s disco anthem. As the tape progresses, it becomes clear that the image is of glitter-bedecked testicles.