Video Artwork Installed at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport
|
12/16/2008 9:15:08 AM
|
BROWARD COUNTY, FL – Broward Cultural Division’s Public Art and Design Program announces the installation of an original video artwork at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Tree Rain has been installed as a permanent artwork at the new Lee Wagener Gallery in Terminal 2 by Broward-based artists Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov.
Tree-Rain (2007-08), a media artwork, is one of a series of recent works based on the massive Birch State Park banyan tree in Fort Lauderdale. “As a bilingual (American and Russian) couple, we often search for connections and common roots of our two diverse languages and incorporate literature, poetry, and text into our works,” say the artists. Tree-Rain was inspired by Russian symbolist poet, Andrei Bely’s, 1922, Glossolalia. Through a study of linguistics and a theory of the universe’s origins based on sound, it is structured on the repetition of roots, words, and sounds in many different languages. Latin and Cyrillic letters rain down, as moving text, forming words in English: mama, home, womb; in Russian: dom (home); in Hebrew: yom (day).
Scherer and Ouporov are a collaborative team who met while studying at the renowned Moscow Surikov State Academy Art Institute—one of Russia’s two institutions of higher arts education and part of the Russian Academy of Arts established in 1757 by Peter the Great. Scherer, a Fort Lauderdale native, earned a BFA from Florida State University, an MFA from Brooklyn College, and received an International Research & Exchanges Board Award to be the first American visual artist accepted into the Russian Academy of Arts during the Soviet period. At the age of 11, Ouporov won admittance into the Moscow State Academy Art Lyceum, graduated at 18, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Moscow Surikov State Academy Art Institute.
They have received national and international recognition for their collaborative works. Museum exhibitions include the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Goldman Warehouse and Bass Museum, Miami; Historical Museum of the City of Vienna; World Financial Center, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Passage de Retz, Paris; Boston Center for the Arts; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Kansas City; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Their works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University Fogg Art Museum, the Library of Congress and The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, among others. They are one of ten international artists featured in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections monograph that explores Klimt’s influence among today’s leading contemporary artists. Their work has been reviewed extensively in many publications such as Art in America, ArtNews, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and featured on PBS and Public Affairs Television. Awards include an Artist’s Fellowship, NY, Mid-Atlantic Visual Arts Grant and a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. They are currently preparing for exhibitions at the ACA Galleries, New York and The Evansville Museum of Arts and Science in Evansville, Indiana.
For more information, contact Christina Roldan, Public Art and Design project manager at 954-357-8542 or e-mail croldan@broward.org.
|
|
Return to the List of News Releases
|