NYC Opera Presents PARALLEL PERCEPTIONS, 10/27-11/21

Beginning on October 27, New York City Opera will present Parallel Perceptions, a contemporary art exhibition that features the works of six visual artists that have been paired with productions from City Opera's 2010-11 season, including Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place; Richard Strauss's Intermezzo; Donizetti's The Elixir of Love; three one-act operas (Monodramas) by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg, and Morton Feldman; and Stephen Schwartz's Séance on a Wet Afternoon.  Curated by accomplished artist and photo editor Naomi Ben-Shahar, the exhibition will take place during the fall and spring seasons and includes a series of additional paintings, sculptures, and photographs by Charles Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Tina Barney, Isaac Julian, Dash Snow and Kehinde Wiley.

The fall exhibition will be accessible to ticket holders from October 27 through November 21 in the David H. Koch Theater, featuring additional works by Kehinde Wiley, Tina Barney, and Charles Ray.  A free public viewing will be held on Wednesday, November 3 from 6 to 9pm.
 
The exhibition will return in the spring, this time featuring additional works by Isaac Julian, Pipilotti Rist, and Dash Snow.
 
"The visual arts are central to City Opera's mission to serve as a meeting place for all the arts. Opera needs artists from every discipline to redefine what it is and what it can be," said City Opera General Manager and Artistic Director George Steel.
 

ABOUT THE WORKS
 

Charles Ray
Untitled Sculpture, 1997. At a salvage yard, Ray purchased a vehicle that had been involved in a fatal crash. Made by pure chance, the form was created by speed and impact, through the collision of material, space, and time. After dismantling the wreckage and casting each piece in fiberglass, he rebuilt it as one would a hobby kit. The color lends a flatness and stillness despite the violence of the incident that produced the original. Haunting and silent, Untitled Sculpture is a frozen memory of a dramatic life changing event, dissected and revealed to the public eye. Leonard Bernstein's final stage work, A Quiet Place, examines the impact of a similar catastrophe on the lives of an entire family.
 

Pipilotti Rist
Homo Sapiens, 2005. Addressing themes of gender and feminine sensibility, Rist's Homo Sapiens captures a young woman in a moment of introspection. She is sprinkled with grass clippings, alluding to her environment and her connection to nature. Although her gaze seems to be cast toward the viewer, her expression shows that she is searching within herself. In much the same way, Monodramas explores realms of the subconscious made visible in these groundbreaking pieces of work. 
 

Tina BarneyThe Brocade Walls, 2003. Barney's photography captures a vanishing world of upper-class Anglo-American life within a closed society, revealing private moments to the viewer, often focusing on the tension between appearance and reality. The Brocade Walls is at once an intimate and candid slice of life. The subjects, like Richard Strauss's characters in the lighthearted opera Intermezzo-a renowned conductor and his hotheaded wife- are both distinguished and comical. At the time it was written, Intermezzo exemplified a new genre of opera that celebrated everyday - even bourgeois - scenes like the one captured in amber in Barney's photograph.

Isaac Julien
Love, 2003. Preoccupied with questions of history, memory, and displacement, Julien's photography and film installations speak to topics of race, class, culture, desire, and memory, either bringing people together or setting them apart. His image evokes the overwhelming force of love, which inspires the timid hero in Donizetti's The Elixir of Love to overcome barriers and win the object of his desire.
 
Dash Snow
Untitled, 2007. Snow's photograph suggests a sense of loss, a connection with the supernatural, fragments of memory, and hopeful vigilance, all key elements in Schwartz's Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Himself an unschooled, self-made artist obsessed with notoriety, Snow catapulted into the spotlight of the New York art scene with his rebellious antics.  Both his body of work and his career reflect a burning desire for recognition shared by the opera's ambitious psychic.

Kehinde Wiley
Portrait of Andries Stilte, 2005. Referencing imagery from the streets of Harlem and
other urban centers, Wiley is a master of updating time-honored medium and subject  
matter. His larger-than-life figures blur the boundaries of traditional and contemporary
modes of representation, creating new rules in the context of portraiture and historical
painting.  His portrait captures perfectly New York City Opera's role of infusing traditional 
grand opera with New York swagger.

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