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News Release Curator's Statement By Douglas Fogle “Life on Mars,” the 2008 Carnegie International focuses on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. Foregoing any universal answers to this question, the artists in the exhibition investigate particular aspects of the human condition, moving along paths that are both introspective and worldly while poetically traversing the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy. The question, “Is there life on Mars?” is a rhetorical one posed in the face of an increasingly accelerating world where global events—political, social, natural, and economic—seem to challenge and threaten to overtake our most basic forms of everyday existence. Rather than a literal search for extraterrestrial intelligence, this question might be seen as a metaphorical quest to explore what it means to be human in this radically unmoored world. Moving from the micro to the macro levels of experience, this exhibition proposes to look at the multiple perspectives and myriad responses to this 21st-century dilemma from artists from all over the globe. Today, a concern with the question of what it means to be human can be found in contemporary art everywhere. Many of the younger artists in the exhibition have inherited a legacy that seeks to produce the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest rather than the monumental. One sees in their work not a discredited universal humanism but a real connection to the human condition expressed with an economy of means that is at once fragile and powerful. Life on Mars is a collective self-portrait of humanity colliding with the economic and political events that define the grind of daily existence. Questions of our survival are humorously and poignantly brought to the fore in films, installations, paintings, sculptures and photographs that search for the sublime in the banality of everyday life. Support Located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh and founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895, Carnegie Museum of Art, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, is nationally and internationally recognized for its distinguished collection of American and European works from the 16th century to the present. The Heinz Architecture Center, part of Carnegie Museum of Art, is dedicated to the collection and exhibition of architectural representations and to the study of all aspects of the built environment. For more information about Carnegie Museum of Art, call 412.622.3131 or visit our web site at www.cmoa.org.
Contact: Tey Stiteler |
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