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Architecture+Art: 90 Days Over 100°

May 22, 2010 - September 19, 2010

Gallery 4, SMoCA

In keeping with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s mission to champion innovation in contemporary art, architecture and design, SMoCA launches a new series: Architecture + Art. This new programmatic series will invite architects to create site specific installations in response to the museum space and the specific environmental context of Scottsdale, Arizona. With Architecture+ Art, SMoCA aims to draw on important local and international architectural legacies. Building upon the success of past SMoCA projects such as the architecture competition and exhibition Flip-A-Strip and in the spirit of ongoing programs such as MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program in New York or London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Architecture+ Art will offer a platform for architects to explore the boundaries of art and architecture and push forward the practice of architects working in the art museum setting.

SMoCA inaugurates the Architecture + Art series with 90 Days Over 100° by Phoenix-based architects Atherton | Keener. The collaborative team of Jay Atherton and Cy Keener focuses on creating meticulously researched built environments that expand the intersection of perception and time. These constructions merge static forms and changing phenomena with the sole intention of creating an opportunity to witness the unexpected. Atherton | Keener’s investigation of natural processes builds upon a long tradition, beginning with one of Arizona’s most noteworthy figures, artist James Turrell, and his examinations of light, space, celestial events and perception. They also draw from the temporal and aesthetic aspects of nature in the vein of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s physically immersive theatrical representations of the natural within built environments, as well as architect/artist Maya Lin’s acute observations and incorporations of natural materials and geometries in her work.
For their installation at SMoCA, Atherton | Keener will assemble a temporary orchestration of frozen water and channeled sunlight within the context of Museum space over the summer in Arizona, where the temperatures regularly exceed 100° for over 90 days. The installation will explore temporal and physical qualities inherent in material phase change from solid to liquid. The piece will transform over the course of each day. Light intensity and color will evolve as water melts, drips and collects. The project aims to alert visitors to the relationship between water and electricity in this highly constructed desert environment.

ABOUT THE ARCHITECTS:
Atherton?Keener recently completed the Meadowbrook Residence, a structure that chronicles diurnal and seasonal changes in desert light, as they unfold on an urban site in Phoenix. The building is organized around three sculpted rooms, each opening to a different cardinal direction, and each protected by a diaphanous screen. Jay Atherton is fascinated by things unnoticed. The formative years of his youth transpired in the mountainous solitude of a Korean monastery. He has completed formal education in architecture, receiving degrees from Arizona State University, and The University of California, Berkeley and has worked under established practitioners in the US and Europe, including Studio Daniel Libeskind, Will Bruder Partners and Jones Studio. Cy Keener is intrigued by natural phenomena. He has ventured beyond a few of the remaining edges of the built environment into high granite peaks, glacial valleys, and forested slopes where the unmitigated can still be experienced. He has a degree in classics and philosophy from Colorado College, spent a year studying ancient philosophy at the University of Oxford and earned his Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

Atherton and Keener, 90 Days Over 100°
Installation view of tunnel
Photo: Bill Timmerman

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Spyhopping: Adventures with Sue Chenoweth and the permanent collection

May 22, 2010 - September 19, 2010

Galleries 3 and 4, SMoCA

Part board game come to life, part art

installation— this exhibition is infused with Phoenix based artist Sue Chenoweth’s profound and uniquely creative way of seeing the world. Chenoweth simultaneously draws from concepts as diverse as The Game of Goose (a board game that dates back to Renaissance Italy) and the social practices of "spyhopping," which is a behavior where Gray whales thrust their bodies above the surface of the ocean to get a good look around. The installation will combine a new series of paintings by Chenoweth with a selection of works from SMoCA’s permanent collection. This delightful and innovative approach to showcasing the Museum’s permanent collection will transform the gallery into a world unto itself, a world in which artworks serve as windows into imaginative narrative possibilities.

Sue Chenoweth, Ziggurat and Chipmunk detail, 2009.
Gouache, acrylic, graphite, Letraset on paper, 30x44 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Sue Chenoweth.

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Re-imagining the West: selections from the permanent collection

June 12, 2010 - August 22, 2010

Gerard L. Cafesjian Founder's Gallery, Michael and Ellie Ziegler Gallery and Virginia Ullman Gallery, SMoCA

Experience artworks from the last one hundred years that both reinforce and challenge the mythology of the American West. Grapple with competing histories of the West that alternate between representing the landscape as a romanticized Eden to critically examining issues like urban sprawl, environmental hazards facing the modern West. Enjoy artworks like Lon Megargee’s sincere American Impressionist landscapes of the 1920s and survey Matthew Moore’s 2008 critical video portrait of water’s journey through our Valley. The exhibition, which acts as an archaeology of SMoCA’s collecting history, will shed light on the values underscored by "the West’s Most Western Town."

Lon Megargee, Camelback Mountain Scene, ca. 1920’s, oil on board on canvas. 34 ½ x 38 ½ inches.
Bequest of the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Dallas P. Richeson, 1998.004.14. © Lon Megargee.