On Feb. 13, the Rose Art Museum will see five new exhibits featuring the works of Chris Burden, Mika Rottenberg, Wols and Charline Von Heyl, Mark Boulos, Josephine Meckseper, Mary Reid Kelley and Maria Lassnig.

The museum will also be displaying some of Chris Burden's models of bridges in addition to a highly anticipated outdoor installation that will be coming to the Rose at the beginning of the next school year, "Light of Reason." The Burden exhibit will be held on the upper level of the Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg Gallery. In an interview with the Justice, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Christopher Bedford said that he hopes that the exhibition in the Fineberg Gallery will give context to the outdoor installation. He noted one of the things he appreciates about Burden's work is his impressive use of "materials that we're all familiar with, whether those things are toys or refurbished antique lamps."

Meanwhile, downstairs, the Lois Foster Gallery will hold an exhibit with works by Mika Rottenberg, a multinational video artist who has lived in the United States as well as Israel and Argentina. "The way [Rottenberg] is able to intertwine sculpture and the moving image is unusually sophisticated and very new," Bedford said. Rottenberg is interested in elements of the corporeal, especially the obese, intertwined nature. She has said that in her art she is interested in the idea of "labor as a process between a person and nature." As Rottenberg is a relatively young artist and takes on very new ideas, Bedford sees her as a model for what a Brandeis student could become in a few years.

Rose Video 02 and Rose Video 03, both to be viewed in the Mildred S. Lee Video Gallery, are part of a larger initiative at the Rose to expanding the museum's video collections and tracing the development of the medium of videos from the 1960s, according to Bedford. Last semester the program premiered with Rose Video 01 by Omer Fast, "5000 Feet is the Best."
The first of the videos, Rose Video 02, shows successive four-week screenings; the first, by Mark Boulos (All that is Solid Melts into Air, 2009) has already been screened but the second by Josephine Meckseper (Mall of America, 2009) will be on view from Feb. 14 through March 16. Rose Video 03 will exhibit videos by Mary Reid Kelly and Maria Lassnig. Rose Video 02 will run through March 16, and Rose Video 03 will begin screening on March 25. Bedford said that Prof. Lori Cole (FA) was instrumental in choosing the artists and pieces for Rose Video 02 and Rose Video 03.

In an email to the Justice, Cole commented on the pairing of the Boulos and Meckseper videos. "Through diverging documentary strategies, Boulos and Meckseper reveal the disembodied nature of consumption, undermining our complacency and forcing us to gaze at the circulation of commodities. By pairing these artistic propositions, Rose Video [03] seeks to expand the conversation about power, inequality, and consumption that these works initiate," she wrote.
Regarding Rose Video 03, Cole said that she "was interested in drawing a historical link between Lassnig's work [in the early 20th century] and that of contemporary artist Mary Reid Kelley, whose videos are also drawing-based, and centralize her body, as she performs pun-filled ballads evoking women's experience of history. The pairing is intended to explore film's and video's relationship to other media-performance, drawing and poetry-and to reflect on the trajectory of feminist video art."

Another video installation, Rose Projects 01A: The Matter that Surrounds Us, features artists Wols and Charline Von Heyl, and will be viewed on the lower level of the Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg Gallery. Wols, a German artist from the first part of the 20th century, is known for his paintings in which he dripped thick layers of paint on the canvas and then scratched into the paint. A New York Times article on her show at the Petzel Gallery in New York says that "Charline von Heyl is one of the more intriguing, and least predictable, abstract painters working right now" and notes that "she develops her paintings in shallow but high-contrast layers that evoke the printmaking studio and the computer screen." The preview on the Rose' s website notes that "at once visceral and visual, each one of these works of art is something we've never seen before."

Bedford told the Justice that the mission of the Rose is very much in line with the University's dedication to social justice and these new exhibits will aim to strengthen this focus. Steering away from the extremely abstract works of Jack Whitten and Andy Warhol, the new exhibits at the Rose promise to present a very unique array of art in a diverse range of media. I, for one, am extremely excited to see these distinct exhibits come to fruition.
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