Norton Museum Of Art Exhibitions to Explore Global Issues Through Video & Photomontage

The Norton Museum of Art will offer two exhibitions this summer that bring different approaches to looking at the world around us.

First up: Surroundings: Video Encounters of Nature, which opened Saturday, July 27, explores the impact of climate change.

We all are experiencing the effects of climate change, which the United Nations says is the result of human actions. As atmospheric shifts continue to cause extreme weather conditions, interventions from local to international levels aim to target and halt this ecological crisis. Despite those efforts, a 2021 global survey of individuals ages 16 - 25 revealed participants overwhelmingly reported that climate-related anxieties negatively impact their daily lives or outlook on the future.

With that in mind, emerging curators Sarah Bass, Tiera Ndlovu, and Pamela Solares organized an exhibition that highlights three contemporary artists who have created environmental portraits through moving imagery and film. Surroundings: Video Encounters of Nature engulfs viewers in textures, movement, and forces witnessed in nature, creating a cinematic experience for all audiences. Each segment is presented in successive 8-week-long installations, and each video work will be paired with an object from the Norton's Collection.

The series begins with Donna Conlon's From the Ashes (De las cenizas), a closeup encounter with a hummingbird that reminds viewers of life's fragility and humans' impact on the natural world. It is on view through Sept. 22. The series continues with Carolina Caycedo's Esto no es Agua/This Is Not Water, in which Las Damas waterfall in southern Colombia comes to life in a kaleidoscopic dance, restoring a sense of agency to the body of water. It is on view Sept. 28 - Nov. 24. The exhibition concludes with Nadia Huggins' Circa no future, an interrogation of the notions of displacement and free will through the marine environment (Nov. 30 - Jan. 26).

"Observing the hummingbird in From the Ashes (De las cenizas), with the color and shimmer of its feathers in both stillness and flight, makes us contemplate how our actions could affect such a captivating creature," said Sarah Bass, Curatorial Operations Assistant and curator of the first installment of Surroundings. "This exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to view nature through different artistic perspectives, promoting reflection, discussion, and action related to the environment and climate change."

As a cultural institution, the Norton serves as a venue to explore universal experiences, including how humans connect to the Earth.

If Surroundings invites us to look at the natural world in a new way, Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage invites us to take a different approach to photographic imagery.

Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage, open Aug. 3 - Nov. 17, explores the technique of cutting out, reshuffling, and layering multiple photographs from disparate sources to create photomontages and collages.

A term coined by Berlin Dada artists John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann at the beginning of World War I, the photomontage was originally conceived as a form of social and political critique.

With further developments from Cubist and Surrealist artists, both techniques gained widespread appeal for their capacity for abstraction, experimentation, and narrative building. Photomontages and collages can create both seamless compositions, as well as generate new relationships and dialogues between individual pictures.

Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage presents these photographic techniques as enduring forms of artistic engagement, highlighting several new acquisitions and contemporary examples from the Norton's Collection, as well as a selection of special loans.

Artists represented include Romare Bearden, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Helander, Florence Henri, Oliver Herring, Barbara Kruger, Juan Logan, Martha Rosler, Lorna Simpson, and Sara VanDerBeek.

"The storytelling here goes far beyond the collages and scrapbooks many of us have created," said Lauren Richman, William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography. "Photomontage allows us to see new realities through the eyes of artists who have reinterpreted found images. The juxtapositions can be by turns amusing and heart-rending."

Helander's Macintosh Moda, a 1986 collage on board, explodes with playful images.

But in Rosler's Beauty Rest, circa 1967 - 1972, a happy American family lounges on a mattress in an advertising image that's placed atop a photograph of a bombed-out building.

"Here, Rosler explores the dichotomy between mainstream American life, where most people could live in relative safety witnessing the impact of war through their television screens, and the suffering experienced by tens of millions in Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War," Richman noted.

These hybrid forms can point us to the foundations of our contemporary digital experience, as such widespread and rapid access to information continues to change and accelerate our ability to cut, mix, and paste each day.

Pictured:

Bruce Helander (American, born 1947), Macintosh Moda, 1986. Collage on board. 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Murray J. Robinson, 87.6

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