Valeska Soares: ANY MOMENT NOW...

VALESKA SOARES Any Moment Now... October 12 – November 23, 2014 | 11 Rivington St & 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is delighted to present two new installations by Valeska Soares, on view from October 12 – November 23, 2014.

The large-scale installation Any Moment Now... is on view at 195 Chrystie and gives the exhibition its title.  It consists of 365 unique dust jackets whose titles reference time.  The book covers include literary classics, plays, and pulp fiction; from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Morning After to Now or Never.  The different circumstances to which each of the titles alludes create a poetic meta text about the unfathomable event that is time.  The 365 dust jackets are mounted on linen and hung salon style, covering the entire gallery.  The exhibition space becomes a subjective library of keeping time and the physicality of its passage.  Any Moment Now follows Soares’s investigation of the potential of language as a formal and conceptual aid in the creation of unstable narratives.  Text and illustration, image and abstraction, design and typography all become a part of a thoughtful examination of continuously shifting narratives.

The 2014 work titled Ouroboros is on view at the gallery’s 11 Rivington Street location.  The piece is composed of three elements: a brass track in the ceiling, a gold chain, and an antique pocket watch.  The pocket watch has hands that indicate minutes and seconds, but the hour hand has been removed.  Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery by a delicate wire, it executes an almost imperceptible movement of rotation in space, turning at the speed of one revolution per hour.  Ouroboros presents yet another exploration of the relation between time, space and their possible configuration. The title of the piece alludes to the symbolic representation of wholeness or infinity, which commonly consists of a snake or a dragon swallowing its own tail.

Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Valeska Soares has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY since 1992.  She will be the subject of a major traveling museum survey in 2017, curated by Julie Joyce and debuting at The Santa Barbara Museum of Art as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative.  Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions for the artist include Belle Haleine: The Scent of Art at Museum Tinguely, Basel; Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo at the Museum, Contemporary Art, Chicago; Permission to be Global at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Blueprint at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.  Soares’s works are included in important museum collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., The Guggenheim Museum, NY, The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA and Tate Modern, London.  Soares has participated in various surveys and exhibitions of international art, including the Sharjah Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Venice Biennale.