"Locus" by Quisqueya Henriquez, at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through July 31, 1999, info @ (412) 231-3169
"Locus" is a site-specific installation by artist Quisqueya Henriquez that examines the environment and place. The piece consists of a series photographs adorning the walls and rubber markers extended over the floor. The masked, detailed photographs of sites, objects, symbols, and close-ups of body parts, function like views through windows, recollection of places and things. The floor pieces are meant to be stepped on: the shaped rubber arrangements create points for three viewers to interact in relation to each other with the correlating photographs on the walls, and thus, to draw a narrative from the complex interactions. This three-way communication completes the installation, playfully referring back to the human bodies that live through the experiences.
Henriquez (b.1966, in Havana, Cuba) is closely associated with the Cuban avant-garde generation of the 1980s. She was born in Cuba, has lived in Miami and now resides in the Dominican Republic. Created out of minimalist-style industrial materials, her installations are rich with layers of meaning. About this piece at the Mattress Factory, the artist says that viewers are needed to complete the work. She sees the viewer's body, which is in the present, as a link in time and place between the images.





"Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson", April 11-July 11, 1999 @ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
"Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson", curated by Siri Engberg, will feature the artist's most recent single-and multiple-projection film installations, as well as photographic pieces related to film projects. Lorna Simpson has been well-known since the mid-1980s for her provocative photographs, paired with text, that address issues ranging from racial and sexual identity to notions of the body, to interpersonal communication and relationships. She studied film and fine arts and began her career as a documentary photographer. Soon, she found herself "tired of the viewer's approach to looking at documentary images." Interested in the way a photograph is "read" she began to create conceptual compositions pairing minimalist black-and-white images with text.
In Simpson's earliest works she used an African-American model, often wearing a simple white dress. A fairly unpersonal character that invited the viewer to interprete the image and its text. In the mid-1990s Simpson began creating editions whose photographic imagery and texts were printed on panels of felt of the sort used on printing press beds. Often hung in groupings to create large-scale images or multi-image tableaux, the visual fragments combined to create an identity or narrative. What began as an interest in the figure has given way in Simpson's more recent work to an interest in space and narrative, a shift coinciding with her recent explorations in the medium of film. In 1996, during a residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, she created Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, a seven-projection film piece screened simultaneously on three walls. Each projection presents differing narratives delivered by characters who move in and out of what may or may not be an interlinking story. The following year Simpson made Call Waiting, a short black-and-white single-projection work that centers around notions of communication and relationships, presenting characters whose lives are woven together through a series of telephone conversations and interrupted calls.



"Directions-Juliao Sarmento", feb 4-June 20, 1999, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, for more info call (202) 357-2700
"Directions-Juliao Sarmento: Fundamental Accuracy" introduces a new body of work by this Portuguese artist (b. 1948) who made a strong showing at the 1997 Venice Biennial. Known for his "White Paintings", Sarmento creates pale, delicately pictographic images that provide fleeting glimpses of sometimes disturbing human intimacy: an index finger points to or penetrates a wound, a dress is partly removed, a hand rests on a shoulder. For the exhibition, Sarmento has created both paintings and sculpture in which faceless women dressed in black and white assume poses and gestures that straddle tenderness and violence. The pieces, works not yet seen by the public, are the artist's variations on one of his large compositions displayed at the 1997 Venice Biennial.
In his 25 years as an artist, Sarmento has consistently focused on human existence and emotion, with sidelong glances to narrative traditions. Launching his career as a filmmaker and photographer in Lisbon in the mid-70s, just as the ultraconservative regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was waning, he looked first to Andy Warhol's media imagery and the films of Federico Fellini and Luis Bunuel. In the 1980s, he made large multimedia collages combining gestural painting and appropiated images. These gave way to the present decade's understated"white paintings" informed largely by literary sources-Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary and the letter of James Joyce, for instance, as well as Casanova's memoirs.