‘Geronimo’ on display at BRC

Standing 10 feet tall and nearly 16 feet wide, “Geronimo” is now on display at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

This work by John Sparagana, professor and chair of visual and dramatic arts at Rice, is part of his “Between the Eyes” series. Sparagana has pursued several series over the past decade that deconstruct and repurpose media-derived pop-culture images. For “Between The Eyes,” Sparagana enlarged his selected media image, copied it multiple times, painted an iconic modernist or pop composition into each copy, and then sliced and remixed the parts in a systematic way.

“The result is a dizzying and dense tapestry-like collage that mixes two disparate visual languages, generating a new, visually and conceptually rich condition,” said Molly Hipp Hubbard, Rice University art director.

“Geronimo: NYC Crowd, May 2, 2011/Morris Louis ‘Unfurled’ Series: ‘Mu’ (1961) & ‘Beta Kappa’ (1961)” illustrates the artist’s process on a massive scale. Viewers can experience the work both up close on the first floor of the BRC and at a distance through the main lobby window.

“From afar, tonal variations will reveal the fatigued iconography of Sparagana’s source media image, while up-close viewers will see his meticulous system of slicing and remixing,” Hubbard said. “The incorporation of brightly pigmented acrylic paint further creates a compelling tension.”

Since receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from Stanford, Sparagana has exhibited his work around the globe; his work can also currently be viewed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston exhibition “Utopia/Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage.” Sparagana’s work resides in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nelson Atkins Museum, among others. Sparagana lives and works in Houston and Chicago.

The Rice exhibition was organized by Hubbard and sponsored by Rice Public Art. An opening reception was held Thursday night, and the exhibition will be on view at the BRC through the fall semester and accompanied by a forthcoming publication with an essay by Yasufumi Nakamori, associate curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

For more information about Rice Public Art, visit http://publicart.rice.edu.

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