Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares, Time Has No Shadows on View in Jewish Museum Lobby this November

Credit: Artwork © Valeska Soares, digital image © Charles Benton

Release Date: October 12, 2015

Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares, Time Has No Shadows on View in Jewish Museum Lobby this November

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New York, NY – Beginning November 6, an installation by Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Valeska Soares will be on view as part of the ongoing series Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings, which brings newly commissioned contemporary art to the Jewish Museum’s Skirball Lobby. Titled Time Has No Shadows, the piece features a large, vintage carpet onto which poetic texts are placed, with antique pocket watches hanging down from above. On view through April 21, 2016, the installation draws on the artist’s enduring fascination with the subjectivity of time and language, and investigates the history of Jewish migration and resettlement.

Time Has No Shadows evokes the Jewish Museum’s history as a family home, while also referencing the diasporic nature of the Jewish people. The artist was inspired by the history of Jewish migration, and the need for Jews across Europe and the Middle East to continually uproot and resettle. She was particularly drawn to the carpet, which would have been rolled up and carried from place to place, and thus has historically been a medium for creativity and storytelling. Bringing a carpet into the Museum’s lobby also recalls the building’s early history as the Warburg family’s mansion in the early 1900s, when the grand entrance was ornately outfitted with outsized furniture and a room-filling carpet.

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.

This presentation is part of the Museum’s ongoing Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings series, showcasing new works by artists from around the globe in the Skirball Lobby. The series builds on the Museum’s 1970s program called Using Walls, which featured the work of 14 up-and-coming international artists of the time such as Richard Artschwager, Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle, and others both within and beyond the gallery space of the Warburg Mansion. Now, 45 years later, the Museum is revisiting this moment in its history by showcasing new work by emerging artists from around the globe. Since the launch in 2013, the series has featured work by Claire Fontaine, Mel Bochner, Willem de Rooij, and Chantal Joffe.

The Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings series is organized by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Kelly Taxter, Assistant Curator.

 

About Valeska Soares

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.

Soares has had solo museum exhibitions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (1998); the Museu de arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2002); and the Bronx Museum for the Arts, New York (2003). She has created site-specific installations for inSite, San Diego-Tijuana (2000); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2003); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2001); and Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2008).

 

Support

Using, Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Valeska Soares is made possible by the generous support of Wendy Fisher.

About the Jewish Museum

Located on Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, the Jewish Museum is one of the world's preeminent institutions devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, offering intellectually engaging, educational, and provocative exhibitions and programs for people of all ages and backgrounds. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 works of art, artifacts, and broadcast media reflecting global Jewish identity, and presents a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed temporary exhibitions.  

 

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm.  Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors 18 and under and Jewish Museum members.  Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm and free on Saturdays.  For information on the Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at TheJewishMuseum.org.

Press contacts

Anne Scher, Molly Kurzius, or Alex Wittenberg

The Jewish Museum

212.423.3271 or pressoffice@thejm.org