About the Event
The Moody opens its Spring 2019 season with four new exhibitions.
In the Brown Foundation Gallery, Michel Blazy’s site-specific installation “We Were the Robots” is a fable about resilience. It features burnt wood pallets depicting robots and animals working on the ruins of a post-apocalyptic landscape. It is a world that tries to become alive again on the consumed remains of an absurd way of life with its commercial exchanges, human relations, energy consumption, consumerism and waste. Blazy (b 1966, Monaco) is based in Paris. The Moody is proud to present the first exhibition of his work in Texas.
“Sideways to the Sun” is a a site-specific installation by Natasha Bowdoin commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts for the Central Gallery. “Sideways to the Sun” will offer a new orientation towards nature. Bringing the outside in, Bowdoin will populate the gallery with larger-than-life springtime abundance, carnivorous plants, and creeping vines, inspired by such far-reaching sources as cartoons and 1800s scientific illustrations, 1970s floral textiles, French film director George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, and factual and fictional exploration narratives. Bowdoin beckons us into the thicket, to wander deep into the potentially savage precincts of the natural world, where unknown possibilities lie in the overgrowth.
“PLANET ∞” A Film by Momoko Seto, opening in the Media Arts Gallery, is an organic tale in Virtual Reality. Explore a world in ruins where only fungi and mold grow in the middle of gigantic dried insects bodies. When a weather change occurs, rain irrigates the arid planet and floods it gradually. In the water springs an ecosystem, populated by giant carnivorous tadpoles.
“WE ARE THE ASTEROID III,” a conceptual, text-based artwork by Brooklyn-based artist Justin Brice Guariglia (b. 1974) will be on view on the Moody’s west lawn. One of a series, the repurposed highway sign features texts by Rice Professor Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English and author of HYPEROBJECTS: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, among other publications. This solar-powered LED message board – like those typically found at construction sites – alerts viewers to slow down and beware of dangers ahead. Instead of road conditions, however, the board features aphorisms calling attention to ecological issues such as “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD,” “WARNING: HURRICANE HUMAN” and “WE ARE THE ASTEROID.” Through poetry, metaphor, and humor, audiences are drawn into the conversation, prompting diverse discussions about the planetary crisis.
