Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares
The Jewish Museum’s exhibition series bringing site-specific works of art to the Museum’s main lobby continues this fall with artist Valeska Soares’ Time Has No Shadows (2015), a work that attempts to give form to the passage of time and connect its ungraspable infiniteness with the slipperiness of language and the instability of meaning.
Soares’s artworks are often assembled from antiques and used materials, like those included in this work. This process of recirculation gives new life to the discarded and disused, and adds to the stories accumulated across their scratched and faded surfaces. In Time Has No Shadows, poetic texts are placed on the carpet in a spiral shape, with a subtly-altered antique pocket watch hanging above each text. These revisions and alterations add yet another layer to the enigmatic histories of these timeworn items, inviting visitors to contemplate their own narratives for the installation and the objects within it.
About the artist
Born in 1957 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Valeska Soares is a contemporary sculpture artist who currently lives and works in New York City.
Using organic and man-made elements, Soares produces ephemeral sculptures that reference spirituality, mortality, eroticism, time, and language. The depth and complexity of her work is magnified by the use of intimate materials such as clay, flowers, perfume, pocket watches, and antique furniture. Soares received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Universidad Santa Úrsula, Rio de Janeiro, and a postgraduate diploma in the History of Art and Architecture from the Pontifical Universidad Católica. Soares transitioned to a fine art practice and had her first solo exhibition in 1991 at Rio’s Espao Cultural Sprig Porto. Shortly after, she moved to New York and completed an MFA at the Pratt Institute.
Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares is organized by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Kelly Taxter, Assistant Curator.
About Lobby Artist Commissions
Since 2013, artists from around the globe have been invited to create new art or adapt a work for placement in the entrance lobby. The project builds upon Using Walls, a 1970 exhibition of commissioned artworks installed both within and beyond the gallery space of the Museum’s Warburg Mansion. That series, curated by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, began with the premise that the wall is not just a surface on which to display a work of art, but can be a component of it. Among the participating artists were Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle, Mel Bochner, and Richard Artschwager.
This exhibition series is organized by Kelly Taxter, the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum.
Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares is made possible by the generous support of Wendy Fisher.

Artwork © Valeska Soares, digital image © Charles Benton