MFA Grad Lecture: Anne Ellegood

Last week I saw Anne Ellegood, newly appointed senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  In her talk, she discusses two projects that she's curated: The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture and Realisms, the second half of the two-part exhibition, The Cinema Effect: Reality, Illusion, and the Moving Image, both at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.

The artists involved in the Recent Sculptures exhibition were Andrea Cohen, Bjorn Dahlem, Isa Genzken, Mark Handforth, Rachel Harrison, Evan Holloway, Charles Long, Mindy Shapero, and Franz West.  What I thought was most interesting was that Ellegood got permission to let a few of the artists into the Hirshhorn permanent collection storage and pick out works that influenced or informed their own work.  They were then able to curate mini exhibitions in the smaller galleries around where their work was installed.  I thought that was great because when you're in school you get to hear your professors and visiting artists talk all the time about artists or work they like but when you're alone at a museum you usually don't have a clue how or where anyone came up with their ideas.  And this exhibition gave museum attendee's that chance for further insight.

For the second half of her talk, she read a paper she wrote for the Realisms catalog which discusses video and digital works that investigate how traditional cinema both communicates and critiques by complicating the relationship between fiction and reality.  She screened parts of Candace Breitz two-part video installation piece “Mother + Father” as well as Omer Fast's "Godville."