GROUP EXHIBITION

In a performance staged specially for the exhibition’s opening reception, AMOC artists Anthony Roth Costanzo (countertenor) and Jay Campbell (cellist) perform the legendary final lament from Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas,’ perhaps the greatest monument to neoclassicism in the operatic canon. The performance animates the themes of the show and uses the exhibition design as its set, emerging from the muslin drapes.

The cloaked space is pure and austere. The pieces on view evoke the rooms of a closed-up house in which the owner’s possessions have largely been protected with a plain cloth. As a whole, the assembly of these works forms what the Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges calls a ‘dialogue of echoes’—one that explores the tensions between the ephemeral nature of the home and the transference of memories onto what is collected within. An Expressionist lamp from 1920, watercolors of a dressing table’s surface, a triangular bed designed for the nuclear family, a self portrait in oil, a manhole cover from an experimental capital city and more are revealed as the narrative elements in an imagined life.

For Mario is named for the writer Mario Praz, whose cataloguing and anthropological analysis of every object in his own Roman apartment formed his groundbreaking 1964 spatial autobiography, The House of Life.

The exhibition presents works by Pilar Almon, Park Chan-Kyong, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Candida Höfer, Gala Porras-Kim, Misha Kahn, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot, Milano Chow, Marka Kiley, Carlo Mollino, Oren Pinhassi, Pierre Jeanneret, Katie Stout, Cynthia Talmadge, Davide Balliano, Sam Chermayeff, Ghada Amer, Anna Weyant, Thomas Barger, Kwangho Lee, and Mario Ceroli, SO — IL, and the American Modern Opera Company.