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Michael Joo at MIT; Glexis Novoa at WAM
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Glass beakers, compressed salt blocks, synthetic tears, an aluminum aircraft fuselage, cast-resin elk antlers, and hydrochloric acid are only a few of the "ingredients" that go into the art of Michael Joo, whose sculpture, video, and installation art has been transfixing the artworld since the early 1990s. "Michael Joo," a new exhibition featuring over 60 works, opens at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center on October 16, with Joo in attendance to give an artist’s talk on November 1 at 2:30 p.m., prior to the opening reception. MIT is a fitting venue for Joo, who studied biology at Wesleyan University as an undergraduate and whose art draws heavily on the materials and methodology of the sciences. But though his checklist may read like the recipe for a mad science experiment, the real focus of Joo’s art goes far beyond the laboratory. A second-generation Korean-American, Joo was born in 1966 in Ithaca, New York, and was raised there and near Minneapolis. For over a decade, he has used his scientific training as a springboard for examining race and gender, religion and the media, and identity and consciousness, to name just a few of the issues on this artist’s mind. In his seminal work Saltiness of Greatness (1992), for example, which will be in the MIT show, Joo stacked blocks of compressed salt to form 3D graphs purportedly representing the relative energy consumption of four Asian figures well known to American popular culture: Genghis Khan, Tokyo Rose, Bruce Lee, and Mao Zedong. The work ostensibly displays the "objective" results of research into each character’s diet, historically recorded activities, and sexual habits; however, the ultimately speculative project is more revealing of the limits of scientific inquiry, the baseness of shared human attributes, the distortions wreaked by abstracting the body, and the fascination with the lives of exotic figures than it is conclusive of any theorem or hypothesis. At MIT, Joo will premiere an epic, three-screen digital-video installation called Circannual Rhythm (pibloktok) (2003), shot on location in Alaska, which involves psychological, metaphysical, and geopolitical themes too dense to untangle in words, as is the case with much of his work. But then, that should be a good thing when it comes to art. In an essay to be published in the show’s catalogue, critic and curator Daniel Birnbaum describes his first encounter with Joo’s art: "His work was puzzling and seemed to me philosophically hermetic, yet visually I was won over immediately. This, I thought, is the world as we know it: the substances, the machineries, the elastic identities of a new ontology." Anyway, there won’t be a test. Landscape is hardly an unusual subject in an art museum, but when Cuban-born artist Glexis Novoa sharpens his pencil to create one of his site-specific, meticulously rendered graphite landscapes directly on a museum wall near you, take notice! Novoa, who has lived in Miami since 1995, is working in residence at the Worcester Art Museum to create a long horizontal wall drawing; his detailed imagery juxtaposes real and imagined, ancient and modern architectural structures. The finished work will read as a slim, unbroken horizon line spanning the museum’s entire Contemporary Gallery, with an effect that is both minute and huge, documentary and invented. It opens for viewing on October 17, with a free, public artist’s talk and opening reception on October 16 at 6:30 p.m. "Michael Joo" is at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, October 16 through January 24, with an artist’s talk on November 1, 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., followed by an opening reception at 4 p.m. Call (617) 253-4400. Glexis Novoa will be at the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, October 17 through February 22, with an artist’s talk and opening reception on October 16 at 6:30 p.m. Call (508) 799-4406.
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