PHOENIX, AZ.- Phoenix Art Museum presents Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now, a collaboration with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the largest museum exhibition in the United States to date of the contemporary Brazilian artist’s work. From March 24 through July 15, visitors will have the opportunity to see 49 diverse artworks, from installations and sculptures to photography and video, ranging in date from the mid-1990s to the present. This major mid-career survey introduces viewers to distinctive works that deal with themes of love, longing, desire, memory, and time, often incorporating experiential qualities like scent, touch, and even taste. The exhibition also substantiates Soares’ important role in international innovations in installation art. Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now originated as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

“We are delighted to collaborate with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to bring the works of Valeska Soares to our community,” said Amada Cruz, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “The Museum is proud to extend the Getty’s initiative to share the best of Latin American art with our region. This is a significant partnership for our museum, and we look forward to sharing Soares’ unique, evocative installations and other works with our visitors.”

Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now features iconic works that have come to define Soares’ artistic approach, presenting the universal themes and experiential approaches that the artist has explored for nearly three decades. Often incorporating found objects and ephemeral materials, Soares’ works act as triggers for personal memories and individual interpretations. The titular installation, Any Moment Now…, is composed of 271 out of an original 365 vintage book jackets mounted on canvas, charting the passage of time over the course of the four seasons through evocative titles like The Winter of Our Discontent, Lost Springtime, and Now or Never. Soares’ artworks can also serve as metaphors for intimate, everyday experience, as in Duet I (from the After series), two pillows carved from white marble, complete with the imaginary imprints of the heads they once cradled. The presence of scent is also a crucial element of Soares’ work. Fainting Couch is a steel floor sculpture whose surface is perforated with small holes; the Stargazer lilies hidden inside perfume the surrounding space. In this way, Soares imbues the cool, neutral characteristics of 20th-century abstract sculpture, by artists such as Donald Judd, with a deeply human dimension, opening Museum visitors to the possibility of having a visceral, even emotional experience of conceptual art rather than a primarily intellectual one. Evoking universal subject matter with a polished style, Soares’ work insists on the primacy of the viewer’s experiences and memories in creating meaning, and functions as a trigger for experience and active engagement.

Museum visitors will also have an opportunity to experience one of Soares’ works that is made to be eaten. Push Pull features giant masses of saltwater taffy dangling from specially fabricated stainless steel hooks. Performers at various stations push and pull the taffy in a continuous movement to generate continually morphing sculptures. In collaboration with Kreëmart, the artist handpicks the various taffies, each with a different color and flavor. Visitors are invited to receive pieces of each sculpture, tasting the results of this collective labor—a literal way of “consuming” the work of art. These undulating sculptures may suggest the atmosphere of carnival; Soares here explores the connotations of sugar as a catalyst for desire and excess. (See the Related Programs section below for dates and times of Push Pull.)

“Soares is at once a generous and demanding artist. She rewards visitors who linger with radically new ways of engaging with art objects, not just visually, but also viscerally and intellectually,” said Vanessa Davidson, PhD, the Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art. “This landmark exhibition celebrates Soares’ achievements and affords our visitors opportunities to become active participants, the artist’s own accomplices.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated, 190-page monograph. This catalog features 75 color plates and four texts written by exhibition co-curators Davidson and Julie Joyce (SBMA) with contributions by Jens Hoffmann (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), Rodrigo Moura (Instituto Inhotim), and Júlia Rebouças (Co-curator of 2016 São Paulo Biennial). In accordance with the aims of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the catalog serves to expand upon the goals of the exhibition by attesting to Soares’ radical innovations, connecting her work to the history of Latin American art as well as the broader international context of contemporary art, and expanding the understanding of art from Latin America in the 21st century. Any Moment Now is one of a suite of exhibitions within this initiative to be featured outside of California.