The art of the up-and-coming South African artist Candice Breitz
draws on contemporary mass culture, devising new systems for
understanding reality. Published in association with the Castello
di Rivoli, this book documents Breitz's new work "Mother + Father".
Exploding the terrain of representation, Candice Breitz employs a
variety of darkly humorous and often disturbing tactics to strike
out at stereotypes and visual conventions as presented and accepted
in the media and popular culture. Breitz appropriates photographs
and visual fragments and recontextualises these in bold, sometimes
tasteless-seeming images, which radically challenge conventional
wisdom and question currently accepted assumptions. Considering
herself a "symptom" of her own time, Breitz has articulated her
artistic practice by acting directly inside pop culture, opening
up, unhinging, and fragmenting its apparent solidity, and devising
a sort of creative intervention that transforms her from mute
spectator into an active, critical voice. Conceived specifically
for Castello di Rivoli, "Mother + Father", 2005, represents one of
the artist's most complex projects to date. The work is developed
in two distinct installations. The protagonists in the first
installation, entitled "Mother", are Hollywood actresses Faye
Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts,
and Shirley MacLaine. In "Father" the six father figures have the
well-known faces of actors who include Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman,
Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voight.
Suspended in a void made up only of words, facial expressions, and
body language, the new interactions of these actors and actresses
give rise to the theatrical space of Breitz's work. Digital
simulacra, the mothers and fathers devised by the artist are
hostages, trapped within a specific emotional repertoire that
questions the canons according to which the media - television and
Hollywood - have taken over the role of parenting, training the
public to experience, through the screen, circumstances that,
instead, pertain to real life. Candice Breitz has participated in
numerous exhibitions including Re-animations, Modern Art Museum,
Oxford, Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, Tate Liverpool. She has
been invited to participate in the exhibition Experience of Art at
this year's Venice Biennale.
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