Streamlined: Belterra, Amazónia / Alberta, Michigan curated by Edward Hayes Jr., showcases the work of Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, who investigates the promises, legacies and failures of modernity, globalism and utopian idealism. In this upcoming exhibition, showcased in MOLAA’s Project Room, a space dedicated to showing site-specific projects by emerging Latin American artists, Tossin’s work examines the cultural and economical exchanges between the United States and Brazil.
The opening reception is Saturday, January 17 at 3:00PM while the exhibition will continue through April 26, 2015.
In Streamlined, a video and sound installation compares two Ford Motor Company towns: Belterra, a rubber plantation village in the Amazon forest and Alberta, a sawmill town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Built at the same time in 1935, each town produced rubber and wood for the manufacturing of the Model T in the United States. The installation establishes a sense of place, showing how specific cultural characteristics invaded and changed these formerly equivalent, pre-planned towns.
Moacir dos Anjos from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco in Brazil and a chief curator of the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010, said, “Tossin’s installation seeks to excavate evidence of a form of work and life that remained from a past that was once modern, and that currently belongs only to the time of now. The artist acts as an ‘interpreter’ of what remained of the two cities invented by Henry Ford – slowly transformed ever since their creation, discarding or incorporating things and meanings – to offer her own interpretation of those changes, through images, for public debate.”
Clarissa Tossin received her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts (2009) and B.F.A. from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in Brazil (2000). Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including, most recently, Site Santa Fe 2014: Unsettled Landscapes, Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles and Bringing the World into the World at The Queens Museum in New York.
The Museum of Latin American Art is located at 628 Alamitos Ave and is open Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday from 11:00AM to 5:00PM and on Friday from 11:00AM to 9:00PM. Admission: $9.00 General/ $6.00 Students (w/ID) and seniors (65+) Members and kids under 12, Free. Free Admission every Sunday sponsored by Target. For more information about the museum, please call (562) 437-1689 or visit the musuem’s website.
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