Acclaimed artist Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation come to North Texas

DALLAS (SMU) --- Southern Methodist University’s Division of Art, in partnership with the Meadows Museum at SMU, the Fort Worth Contemporary Arts gallery at Texas Christian University, and the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, is bringing internationally acclaimed artist Eve Sussman to North Texas Sept. 14-18 for two exhibitions, a lecture and a screening of her most recent experimental film.

Sussman and her New York-based creative think tank group, the Rufus Corporation, are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. Their work incorporates diverse media – film, video, installation, sculpture and photography – and draws from theater, dance, cinema and visual art to create interdisciplinary experiences. Their projects find inspiration in sources ranging from Spanish painting to Greek modernist architecture to French new-wave film. Eve Sussman|Rufus Corporation’s projects have been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. They have been shown at galleries and museums around the world, including The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London.

The collaborative project was launched by Noah Simblist, associate professor of art at SMU. “I met Eve Sussman in Austin last fall when Art House produced a screening of her film Rape of the Sabine Women,” said Simblist. “She told me about White on White, a new film project in progress, and I wanted to bring it to DFW. I approached Christina Rees, the director of TCU’s Ft. Worth Contemporary Arts, and she proposed that we co-curate an exhibition in her gallery. I then started talking to the Meadows Museum about the project as well as the Modern Art Museum in Ft. Worth, and we ended up with this exciting institutional collaboration that will bring together multiple examples of work made by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation.”

Sussman’s visit to DFW will include the following public events:

Tuesday, Sept. 14 at 7 p.m.
Screening of whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller followed by Q&A with Sussman
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth/3200 Darnell St./Ft. Worth 76107

This screening follows the film’s June premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The experimental sci-fi film noir will be powered by code, programmed exclusively for the project, which edits the film in real time culling from a server loaded with over 2,000 film clips, sounds, and narration. The guided nature of the code causes it to pull video and audio, based on voice-over and tags written into the metadata of each file and the narrative.  The movie mixes chronology, intertwining beginning, middle or end, never repeating the same sequence, so that each showing of the film is unique. The story follows the observations and surveillance of “a geophysicist code writer held captive in City-A, a dystopian metropolis where nouveau riche capitalists preside over the dregs of communism.” The film clips will eventually be used to produce a regular full-length feature film titled White on White and an episodic series. FREE. For more information, call 817.738.9215 or visit http://www.mamfw.org/.

Wednesday, Sept. 15 at 6 p.m.
Lecture by Eve Sussman
Meadows Museum at SMU/5900 Bishop Blvd./Dallas 75205

Eve Sussman’s 2004 film 89 seconds at Alcázar is included in the Meadows Museum exhibition Spanish Muse: A Contemporary Response, on view Sept. 12-Dec. 12, 2010, which highlights works by nine contemporary artists who have been inspired by the art of Spain. 89 seconds is a single channel looped video inspired by the famed Diego Velázquez painting Las Meninas at Madrid’s Prado Museum, which depicts a tableau of members of the Spanish royal court in 1656. The film incorporates period costumes and choreography to bring to life the imagined moments leading up to the scene portrayed in the painting. FREE. For more information, call 214.768.2489 or 214.768.4677.

Saturday, Sept. 18 at 6 p.m.
Exhibition Opening: Yuri’s Office with guest Eve Sussman
Fort Worth Contemporary Arts gallery at TCU/2900 West Berry St./Ft. Worth 76109

Originally shown at the Winkleman Gallery in New York in June 2009, this exhibition includes a life-sized replica of the office of Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut and the first human to orbit the earth, as well as videos and a photo text piece. The installation is also a movie set that has been incorporated into Sussman’s larger film project in progress, White on White – a ‘60s era cinema verité thriller, inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s film Alphaville – that moves from Moscow to the Caspian. The starting point of this exhibition was the 1918 painting by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, titled White on White, which Sussman interprets as beginning a chain of failed utopias including modernist abstraction, the Soviet Union, and the space race. Yuri’s Office will be on exhibit from Sept. 18 through Oct. 31, 2010. FREE. For more information, call 817.257.2588 or visit http://www.theartgalleries.tcu.edu/.

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