Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art
November 15, 2023 – October 13, 2024*
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida
*Creature Features and Imponderable 5-D have been extended for viewing until October 13th, 2024.
As South Florida's museums from Palm Beach to Miami present their highly anticipated offerings for Art Basel Season, the Boca Raton Museum of Art is especially poised to lead the pack with a one-two-punch this year: the world premiere of the Tieger Award-winning exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art, and the sleek new high-speed rail station just blocks from the Museum's front door, luring visitors with a quick escape off the beaten path from the art fairs. The new group show, originated by Kathleen Goncharov, the Museum's Senior Curator, is the only exhibition in all of South Florida (and the entire Southeast U.S.) to win the prestigious Tieger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects – among only 13 museum shows nationwide in the Single Exhibition category, recognizing boundary-pushing curatorial work.
The works in this exhibition crack through the looking glass of illusion and beliefs. While performative magic is certainly celebrated here, many of these 30 artists are acclaimed for tackling the thorny issues of disinformation, conspiracy theories, cults, “alternative facts,” hoaxes, and the rise of deceptive artificial technologies in our culture. When exposed, these deepfakes often reveal a greater truth. According to the Tieger Awards page, this year’s competition “Acknowledges the uncertainty, fear, and loss in our time of enormous change. The awards support innovative curatorial work committed to experimentation and creativity in exhibitions, championing curators who engage in the pressing conversations of our time. Curators are thinkers and leaders who play multiple, changing roles in their communities.”
The group show opens November 15 through April 14, and is anchored by an entire gallery of phantasmagorical installations by the internationally acclaimed artist Tony Oursler. Oursler is celebrated worldwide for asking the pressing question: what happens when the occult is confronted by its mirror image of technology? Among the 30 artists are: Urs Fischer, Alfredo Jaar, Sarah Charlesworth, Christian Jankowski, Glenn Kaino, Michael Ray Charles, Jim Shaw, Gavin Turk, Kristin Lucas, The Yes Men, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Mark Thomas Gibson, Jeanette Andrews, Faisal Abdu'allah, Jane Hammond, and more.
This timely exploration pulls back the curtain on modern-day deceptions, often perpetrated for political or financial gain – before our very eyes. Today’s hoaxes, and the blatant lies posted on social media, are often fabricated with new technology yet have earlier precedents in America’s history. The exhibition’s temporal twist, juxtaposes parallels between our current struggles and the same peculiar fascinations with magical thinking during the late 1800s and early 1900s – when the deadly flu pandemic and World War I created an epidemic of fake mediums, seances, and the golden age of stage magic. Fast-forward to today, and these artists investigate how the trauma of our own pandemic, climate change, political extremism, violence, and the disruption of societal norms are spurring belief and fascination with the paranormal. An explosive increase in supernatural characters in popular culture, and dangerous hoaxes that are proving difficult to discredit, are rampant again now.
“Our City is honored by this national acclaim, and that this museum exhibition is the only one in the entire Southeastern U.S. selected by the Tieger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects in the single exhibition category," says Scott Singer, the Mayor of Boca Raton. "We are proud of the stellar team at the Boca Raton Museum of Art for shining the national spotlight on South Florida’s museum scene.”
Tony Oursler is one of the world’s foremost pioneers of video art, working with moving images, installation and projection. His inspirations include conspiracy, mysticism, narrative evolution and facial recognition technologies. Oursler’s video art is celebrated for transcending traditional screens, TV monitors and surfaces. His work jumps out at viewers via visual experimentation.. His work has been described by his gallerists as harking back to camera obscura and psychedelia – through the surreal environments he creates with bots and intimate digital effigies, optical devices, sculptures, ethereal talking automatons, and his ever-evolving multi-media practice. Viewers are often disoriented and disarmed upon entering his installations Central to Oursler’s work is his endless fascination with how technology impacts humanity. For several decades, the artist has amassed a vast archive of more than 3,000 historical materials pertaining to the paranormal fringes, pseudo-science that connects to cults, and the intersection of science and the occult.
The realms of magic and illusion are generationally embedded into the artist’s DNA. Oursler’s grandfather was a magician who exposed trickery used in seances by the Spiritualists of his era, who lied to desperate widows yearning to communicate with relatives who died in World War I. Oursler’s father founded a magazine titled Angels on Earth, dedicated to spiritual encounters.
The artist’s spirit world fascination also includes his admiration for mediums and mystics who never charged for their services, falling outside the realm of financial fraud. The largest gallery in the Smoke and Mirrors exhibition is transformed by Oursler into an otherworldly landscape for museumgoers, the likes of which no one has ever seen before.
Viewers will walk into a dream created by the imagination, where the artist’s collection of the unbelievable comes to life. The Museum’s special commission of new installations by Oursler is titled Creature Features, exploring what the artist calls the “delicate balance between American creativity, mysticism and scientific ingenuity.” The installations, including several new works never exhibited before, are based on American folklore, legends, and historic hoaxes that can be likened to today’s urban myths, conspiracy theories, and deepfakes.
Imponderable, Oursler’s cinematic 5-D experience, has only been exhibited at MoMA in New York and was created using Pepper’s Ghost, a mirror illusion technique first used in the 1800s in theatrical ghost plays, amusement parks and side-shows to make “spirits” materialize on stage. The film’s narrative is based on Oursler’s real-life family story and his collection of paranormal ephemera.
Other installations in Oursler’s Creature Features landscape include: Fairy (an audio-visual fantasy projection of a performance by Katiana Rangel); Cardiff Giant (Oursler’s never-before-seen life-size recreation of one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history); Flatwoods Monster (a re-living of the 1952 legendary UFO extraterrestrial folklore encounter); Alice Cooper Head (inspired by The Amazing Randi’s infamous creations for Alice Cooper’s concert tour in the 1970s); Crystals (created in part with artificial intelligence, exploring the digital divine, 5-D technology, near-death experiences, and hallucinogenic states); Charles Doyle Fairy Painting (based on the fantastical paintings of Victorian-era fairies and other fantasy themes by the father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and Merma (described as “beautiful in a horrifying way”).
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2023/11/17/boca-raton-museum-art-smoke-mirrors-exhibit-tackles-the-art-of-fake-news-hoaxes/
https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/boca-raton-museum-of-art-to-out-fakes/