Several Columbia Artists in 'Common Space' at Oolite Arts Miami

Several Columbia artists are featured in Common Space, an exhibition on display at Oolite Arts in Miami, Florida until January 23, 2022. This show investigates the idea of space as a place for social relation and artistic production. The exhibition showcases 10 international artists based in Miami, Chicago, and New York. It includes both new commissions and site-specific installations. Despite these artists’ disparate mediums and styles, a shared motif arises, coalescing around architectural, corporeal, and linguistic themes.

This show includes work by alumnus Rafael Domenech '19, Professor Sarah Sze, Profesor Tomas Vu, and Professor Rirkrit Tiravanija. It was curated by Sally Eaves Hughes (MOD '19) (CC '13), who holds a master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. 

Tiravanija’s contribution is called Untitled (the map of the land of feeling I-III), which “presents twenty years of … travels and life experience as a visual narrative on three long-form scrolls.” Each scroll includes a print of one of three passports the artist was issued between 1998 and 2008 thus injecting the concept of state power into a piece about movement and exploration. 

Vu’s work explores futuristic landscapes “informed by technological advances and their consequences.” Working with print-making as his primary mode, Vu covers the piece’s surface with images of fauna, dense linework, and pictures of industrial machines. This gives the viewer a sense that “his paintings are a protest against the destruction of our planet and humanity.” 

Domenech “engages notions of architecture and publishing to create new pathways in which language, space, and people collide”. The piece installed for Common Space, titled plastic sunshine-opaque transparencies, is informed by Chinese folding screens, and the bright yellow see-through panels are made of plywood and construction mesh, bringing to mind the ever changing urban landscape. Flowing along the top and bottom of the screens is a text composed by the artist. These words act “like subtitles to read and interpret the room.” The artist’s text “invites viewers to pay attention to what is ignored -- how the spaces we inhabit and their structure are active sites that impact the way we feel, move, and relate to one another.” 

The show also features Sze’s graphic prints, which she began working on in the early 2000s. Day and Night explores “abstract and architectural forms in a large-scale print format,” according to the press release. These colorful, spatially exuberant pieces create a sense of chaos and organization simultaneously. Sze explains, “these works investigate movement, disintegration, and disorientation." 

Sze has four other shows on display at the moment, Flash Point (Timekeeper) in Karlsruhe, Germany, Calder Now at Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands, New Works in the Collection at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, and On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT.