The American Center for Art & Culture is pleased to announce 20/20: Accelerando, an exhibition by Lita Albuquerque, opening October 16, and on view through November 11, 2019.
This free exhibition will be open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday, from noon to 7 p.m, with nocturnes on Thursdays until 9 p.m.
The exhibition marks the first time the video installation, 20/20: Accelerando, is shown outside of the US west coast. The work has been previously exhibited in 2016 at the University of Southern California Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and in 2017 at Converge 45, Portland. 20/20: Accelerando is sourced from a narrative Albuquerque wrote in 2003 entitled GenIus Remembered.
20/20: Accelerando is sourced from a narrative Albuquerque wrote in 2003 entitled GenIus Remembered. The writing follows the story of the human journey. The video chronicles a 25th century female astronaut’s odyssey to Earth in 6000 BC on a mission to seed interstellar consciousness.
“Where was I? And why was I awakening at this moment, on this planet?”
Albuquerque often creates works with musical and rhythmic processes in mind. For 20/20, the female astronaut sings the names of the 99 brightest stars in the sky. To bring this song to life, Albuquerque collaborated with composer Robbie C. Williamson and linguist and singer Cassandara Bickman. Their combined efforts produced the sonic experience of the work, as well as the score of the performance that intitated the first iteration of 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art.
Albuquerque works within large scales of time and space. Her 2006 major work, Stellar Axis: Antartica, exemplifies the artist’s continued consideration of planet Earth as a sculpture in space. This concept feeds into the prelimary influences which trace the trajectory for 20/20: Accelerando. In Stellar Axis, Albuquerque created a star alignment with blue spheres atop the white ice landscape in Antartica. In 20/20, a bed of salt fills the space beneath the video’s screen, and glass spheres filled with water and honey are placed atop to enhance and materialize the film’s central themes and content. Salt is a frequent material choice in Albuquerque’s work for both its material purity and its aestehtic relationship to Stellar Axis, and to Albuquerque honey is the nectar of stars.
The female astronaut, Elyseria, is played by choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque, who is also the artist’s daughter and collaborator in multiple works. Albuquerque has been developing the featuring character through writing, sculpture, performance and film, frequently referencing the figure within a continuum of installations, such as in Particle Horizon in 2014 at the Laguna Art Museum, hEarth in 2017 at Desert X, and Transparent Earth I, in 2018 for the Biennale Safiental Valley in Switzerland.
Albuquerque has created new series of pastel drawings specifically for the exhibition, the installation will be accompanied by footage of the original performance of 20/20: Accelerando from the USC Fisher Museum of Art in 2016. Hosted in the home of former American icon, Mona von Bismarck, the American Center for Art & Culture will also conduct Look & Learn interactive guided tours held in French and English, to promote American art and culture within France.
As a child, Paris was a second home to Albuquerque, having grown up in both Paris and Tunisia, before settling in Southern California. Albuquerque studied art and art history at the University of California, Los Angeles and Otis College of Art and Design, and has been working since the 1970s, with major exhibitions held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Fred Weisman Museum of Art, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Her work is often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements. She has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal. Her installations often incorporate natural elements such as star alignments, the line of the horizon, wind and light.
Albuquerque represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. She is on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design and is represented in Los Angeles by Kohn Gallery.
FILM CREDITS
Jasmine Albuquerque as Elyseria
Salvador Alvarenga Ochoa as Medicine Man
Reo Sachs as Child
Lita Albuquerque Artist, Writer, Director, Executive Producer
Robbie C. Williamson Assistant Director, Composer, Editor
Marc Breslin Creative Director, Director of Photography
Jasmine Albuquerque Choreography
Cassandra Bickman Tonal Language and Vocals
Sara Sachs, Marc Breslin Costumes