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The McMaster Museum of Art

The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt

August 28, 2010 - January 8, 2011

 

Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt


Image: Alexander Pilis,The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt, 2004, film duration 4:04 min. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Co-curated by Alexander Pilis and Ihor Holubizky

RECEPTION: September 16, 6 - 8 pm

 

São Paulo-based Canadian artist/theoretical architect Alexander Pilis presents an extant video work The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt, 2004, as a “centrepiece” for a site-responsive installation at the McMaster Museum of Art. Working with Senior Curator Ihor Holubizky, he has developed and articulated a dialogue between the explicit and implicit visual texts in his video-work, and works from the Museum’s European historical, modern, and contemporary collection.
 
Over the past 25 years Alexander Pilis has explored a research praxis through exhibitions, workshops and curatorial projects under the aegis and metaphor of “Architecture Parallax”; posing questions about visual literacy and cognition, and the modernization of vision that is woven through the built environment (architecture and the city). More recently, Pilis has delved into these concerns through the modes and strategies of representation in the history of art.
 
The exhibition is mounted in the Levy Gallery: the built-in interior room and perimeter gallery resonate with the tracking format and site of the Pilis video, conceived and shot during a residency in Banff. In the video a “blind architect” repeatedly walks around the perimeter of the space, which is empty with the exception of a single reproduction of a Rembrandt portrait pinned to a wall. On the final circuit, the “blind architect” stops to view the image—hence, breaking the premise of blindness.
 

Collection works are installed along the perimeter gallery—in essence to echo the video, with the visitor tracing the “blind architect’s” path.

 

The Blind Architect Guide A Visual Guide to The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt

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Related Links:

The Blind Architect - The Artist's Site

Video: The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt - Alexander Pilis

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List of Works in Exhibition:

Collection of McMaster Museum of Art, except where noted