SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.- The exhibition Stir Heart, Rinse Heart: Pipilotti Rist is now open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on view until Sunday, September 12 , 2004. Known for saturated colors, sensual images, and an unconventional use of space and scale, Pipilotti Rist’s video installations are at once tangible and boundless — witnessed in the here-and-now, but full of interpretive possibility. Rist’s newest work, Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, commissioned for this exhibition, is a multichannel video installation that incorporates found objects hung from the ceiling to diffuse the light of the video projection and create a reflective environment to be navigated by the viewer. The exhibition also includes two of the artist’s earlier works: Hallo, Guten Tag (Kussmund) (Hello, Good Day [Kissmouth]), 1995; and Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava), 1994.
This is the first solo exhibition on the West Coast of works by this celebrated Swiss video artist. Integrating performance, music, sculpture and video in unprecedented ways since 1988, Rist has established herself as one of the most acclaimed practitioners in her field. Drawing from diverse sources—contemporary video art, commercial film, self-appropriation and recycling of her own imagery—Rist is fluent in a visual language that exuberantly embraces aspects of mass media and experimental video, playfully confronting the high/low debate. Architecture, time and the role of video as an element of spatial installation are central to Rist’s work.
Rist was born in Rheintal, Switzerland. Zurich is currently her home base, though she has been a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles since the fall of 2002. Her work has been exhibited regularly in European museums and international biennials since 1988, but there have been few opportunities to see her work in the United States. Perhaps best known for her Public Art Fund commission Open My Glade, 2000, a series of one-minute videos that aired periodically between April and May of 2002 on screens over Times Square, she also received the Premio 2000 award at the 1997 Venice Biennale and was a finalist the following year in the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize competition.
Rist conceives the video medium, in part, as a kind of equivalent to painting and often describes her work as “paintings behind glass that move.” Her ironic, often mischievous sensibility questions the way we perceive the moving image. As producer, director and performer, Rist invents her own imaginary spaces that envelop the viewer like a compelling invitation to play voyeur to someone else’s daydream.
The show is organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA curator of media arts.
