MOCA celebrates anniversary with ‘Pivot Points: 15 Years & Counting’:
“To celebrate its 15th anniversary, friends of MOCA donate works to expand its permanent collection. You can see them now.
Special to The Miami Herald
Walk into the first installation that greets visitors to Pivot Points: 15 Years and Counting at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miam and you will see a room plastered over in psychedelic imagery that is splashed across the floor and covers the ceiling. The hyper collage includes paint, photography, film, a stairwell, flashing lights and music, and comes from the collective duo who go by the name assume vivid astro focus (avaf). This piece shot them to fame when it premièred at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
It’s a good introduction: The rest of the exhibit is happily chaotic as well, if not as crazy.
Pivot Points is not a curated show, it’s a collection of more than 50 works — most of which have recently been donated to MOCA from artists the museum has featured — in honor of its 15th year anniversary. That means it is filled with cutting-edge work from very contemporary artists, the basis for MOCA’s collection. Various disciplines are represented, from sculpture and installation to painting, drawing and video. While we’ve seen these artists before here, most pieces are newly acquired…
Then there are the samplings of local artists, some of the best of which are videos strung out on the last wall. There is a disturbing yet gorgeous video from Juan Carlos Zaldivar that was the 2012 winner of MOCA’s Optic Nerve experimental and art film festival. And there is a short video that demands you listen to the whole thing, from Onajide Shabaka. Called Total Disappearance, a voice-over tells us, it shows a mangrove swamp in rural Florida from which a naked woman emerged and then disappeared into the muck in the beginning of the 20th century.”
