August 11, 2011

CMU's Miller Gallery Opens New Section of Pittsburgh Biennial

The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon opens a new section of the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial, Sept. 17 - Dec. 11, featuring five new installations, including sculpture, printmaking, painting, video, publications and workshops, curated by Miller Gallery Director Astria Suparak. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m., Friday, Sept. 16 at the Miller Gallery. A one-hour tour will precede the reception at 5 p.m.

Works in the exhibition include:

• “Global Cities, Model Worlds,” an installation by Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon alumna Lize Mogel of New York, explores the spatial and social impacts of “mega events,” such as the Olympics and World’s Fairs.
• Transformazium, comprised of Ruthie Stringer, Dana Bishop-Root, Leslie Stem and Caledonia Curry, creates an evolving installation with bricks from a condemned building they deconstructed near their home in North Braddock, a suburb of Pittsburgh. During the exhibition, collective members and gallery visitors will clean the bricks, transforming waste to useable resources and underlining the economic viability and environmental sustainability of “green demolition.”
• Justseeds, a worker-owned cooperative of printmakers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with several members in Pittsburgh, built a landscape overpopulated by billboards. Instead of peddling products, the handmade billboards advocate for borderless nations, indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights and compassion.
• subRosa, a collective whose core members are Hyla Willis of Pittsburgh and Faith Wilding of Providence, R.I., speculate on how feminism could affect the scientific world, as it has with art and other areas of culture. In their installation “Feminist Matter(s): Propositions and Undoings,” subRosa re-envisions lab workbenches as a series of small tables for more intimate and conversational “tea-table thinking.”
• Temporary Services, comprised of CMU alumnus Marc Fischer of Chicago, Salem Collo-Julin of Philadelphia, and Brett Bloom of Copenhagen, present “Self-Reliance Library,” a collection of recently published and out-of-print books and reference materials that the artists have found inspiring and hope will “provoke the reader, solve creative problems, or suggest imaginative directions for a range of creative practices.”

Admission to the Miller Gallery is free and open to the public. Hours are noon – 6 p.m., Tuesday – Sunday. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery/exhibitions/pittsburghbiennial2011

Pictured above is America (top image), from Justseeds installation, Josh MacPhee, 2011