smith.edu/artmuseum

Media contact: Margi Caplan, mcaplan@smith.edu

For Immediate Release (updated 4.14.16)

Smith College Museum of Art will host the 13th Annual Miller Lecture in Art & Art History

Photo by Derek Henderson Tuesday, April 26, 2016 | 7 PM

(Doors open at 6:30 PM)

Weinstein Auditorium | Wright Hall | Smith College FREE and open to all | Limited seating

Northampton MA March 25, 2016—The Smith College Museum of Art is pleased to host the 13th Annual Miller Lecture in Art & Art History. Candice Breitz, internationally known artist will present “From A to B and Back Again” on Tuesday, April 26 at 7 PM in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College. Doors will open at 6:30 PM. (Admission is free and open to all. Reserved seating is available to museum members.) Details: smith.edu/artmuseum In addition to presenting the 2016 Miller Lecture, Candice Breitz will meet with Smith students and area K–12 teachers as part of her visit to Smith. The Miller Lecture series, established at SCMA in memory of Dulcy Blume Miller, class of 1946, enables the museum to bring a leading artist, architect, or art historian to campus each year to give a public lecture. ABOUT THE ARTIST

Candice Breitz (Johannesburg, 1972) is a Berlin-based artist known for her moving image installations that explore popular culture and media’s effect on the contemporary identity. In 2013, SCMA acquired Breitz’s Factum Tremblay, a part of her Factum series. Breitz recorded interviews with seven pairs of identical twins and one set of identical triplets for the project. The series takes its name from Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), which examine the persistent differences in apparent replicas. In each work, Breitz has edited the siblings’ stories, presented side-by-side in separate videos, to run in parallel but diverge at important moments. Breitz explains her interest in this subject:

I have always been interested in the question of individuality, the question of how people become themselves. And it struck me, as it has struck many artists and scientists preceding me, that twins would be an interesting subject for a project addressing the workings of individuality.

MORE >

CANDICE BREITZ FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN

Smith College Museum of Art will host the 13th Annual Miller Lecture in Art & Art History—page 2.

Factum Tremblay explores, among other experiences, questions of gender and sexual identity while growing up with a twin. Breitz often incorporates found footage in her work, as in her acclaimed piece Mother (2005), which is composed of six large monitors, each displaying clips of a famous actress playing the role of a mother in a Hollywood film. De-contextualizing the performances, the work offers a reflection on the influence of popular culture on viewers. Other well-known works focusing on interactions with popular culture include Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) (2005) and King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) (2005), in which Breitz composes group video portraits of fans singing through the pop albums.

Solo exhibitions of Breitz’s work have appeared at museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk), and MUSAC / Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (Spain). A large-scale solo exhibition of her work will open at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in April 2016. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions including Thank You for the Music (Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki, 2012) and The Cinema Effect (Hirshhorn Museum + Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2008). She has participated in biennales, including in Venice (2005), Singapore (2011), and Dakar (2014) as well as the Sundance Film Festival (2009) and the Toronto International Film Festival (2013). The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum have both acquired her work, as have many other museums and private collections. Breitz has been a tenured professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig since 2007. Factum Tremblay is on view in the museum’s Video & New Media Gallery through May 22, 2016.

# 30 #