Intersections Contemporary Art Projects

Intersections artist John F. Simon Jr. discusses his installation at the Phillips, Points, Lines, and Colors in Succession, on view October 17, 2013 through February 9, 2014. Inspired by the progression of movement in the natural world, Simon's four-part installation in the Phillips house stairwell incorporates drawing, software, and computer-generated fabrication. The works, evoking meandering lines, steep curves, and improvisation, engage with Wassily Kandinsky's Succession (1935) in the Phillips's permanent collection.

Intersections artist Bernhard Hildebrandt installs and discusses his work, A Conjugation of Verb, on view June 27 through September 22, 2013. Using images of El Greco’s The Repentant St. Peter(c. 1600–1605 or later) from the collection, Baltimore-based artist Hildebrandt explores baroque themes of high drama, spectacle, and spatial movement. By converting a series of images into a video sequence, the artist connects painting, photography, and film.

Silverthorne uses rubber to create floral reliefs and objects typically found in an artist’s studio. Her sculptures, along with the modernist still lifes from the collection with which they are interspersed, are vanitas—meditations on the brevity of life.

Intersections artist Xavier Veilhan discusses his exhibition (IN)balance, on view at the Phillips November 3, 2012 through February 10, 2013. The first major museum presentation of Veilhan's work in the U.S. and the most extensive Intersections project to date features 18 recent pieces in several media that reflect a balance between natural and social forces, new technologies and historical styles. Veilhan's large resin sculpture, The Bear (2010), greets visitors on the corner of 21st and Q Streets. The exhibition is supported in part by the Institut Français—Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Composed of intricate ink and acrylic drawings on canvas that cover the café walls, One Day, After the Rain follows the movement of sunrise to nightfall, paying homage to Arthur Dove’s landscapes in The Phillips Collection. Sandra Cinto creates dreamlike environments with her art. “I am interested in passages of time marked by sun and moon, day and night, and the movement of water,” she says. “I chose the language of drawing because of its immediacy and direct character. My intention is to propose an immersive experience through color and form.”

Ecliptic—three interrelated large-scale drawings made of yarn looped over thousands of nails—investigates spatial perception and engages the architecture of the gallery. The installation, like much of Shotz’s work, is inspired by science, referencing the solar system and the perpetual rotation of planets. At once monumental and delicate, flat and three-dimensional, Ecliptic transforms the room into a weightless environment.

Sk(in) is a two-part sculptural installation—the first, massive yet delicate, suggests tree branches and occupies the courtyard; the second extends indoors, to rupture the "skin" of the gallery walls.

In The World Series, deSouza responds to Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series (1940−41) with 30 photographs taken on his travels and audio recordings of his experiences and memories.

In Lunar Bower, panels of fabric are sewn together and stretched across the café, suggesting the ethereal night skies in Albert Pinkham Ryder's paintings. Light is given a corporeal presence as it filters through the hanging sculpture.

Sk(in) is a two-part sculptural installation—the first, massive yet delicate, suggests tree branches and occupies the courtyard; the second extends indoors, to rupture the "skin" of the gallery walls.

The Coronation is a three-channel video with sound, projected on three 52-inch plasma monitors. Wall-mounted and arranged like a triptych, the work alters the architecture of the gallery and establishes a visual dialogue with Georges Rouault's Tragic Landscape, 1930, from the permanent collection. The Coronation isa pictorial narrative, in which the Pyes, who come from Canada, explore issues of gender and identity. In three separate scenes that unfold simultaneously and evoke panels in an altarpiece, the couple is shown in a series of physical transformations against an Edenic landscape, as they come together and separate. The Pyes have exhibited their work, nationally and internationally, including at The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada. Their work has been screened in numerous film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada; the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland; and Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. Their work will be shown at Curator's Office, Washington, D.C., concurrently with the installation at the Phillips.

Andile Ndlovu of the Washington Ballet responds in dance to Barbara Liotta's sculpture, Icarus, and Maurice Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello performed by Yvonne Lam and Ignacio Alcover. Ndlovu and collaborator Septime Webre, artistic director of the Washington Ballet, use the abstract forms of the artwork and the mythical character's backstory as inspiration. Performed as part of The Phillips Collection's INTERSECTIONS series January 14 and 21, 2010.

Jae Ko's large, three-part installation, "Force of Nature," created for the Phillips, is made from rolls of kraft paper, often used for wrapping and packing, that the artist re-rolled and stacked against the walls in different configurations. Envisioned specifically for the area connecting the Goh Annex and the Sant Building, one section of the installation fills the space between floor and ceiling, and then spills down the wall beside the stairs; two other stacks descend gradually, like gentle slopes or streams. Force of Nature dwells on both the beauty and power of natural forces within an architectural setting. Ko works exclusively in paper. Experimenting with different kinds of paper (from rice paper to newspaper to adding-machine paper), she rolls, cuts, glues, soaks, and dyes it, manipulating her material into sculptural forms. Her sculptures encompass wall reliefs and floor pieces, made of large bundles of paper that are either stacked rigidly against the wall or fall naturally according to the whims of gravity. Ko finds inspiration in nature, and her forms readily evoke organic matter-tree rings, tornadoes, twisted hair, seeds. Born in Korea, Ko lives and works in Washington, D.C. She received a B.F.A. from Wako University, Tokyo, Japan, and an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Washington Convention Center, all in Washington, D.C. Ko's work is also currently on view at Marsha Mateyka Gallery.

Kate Shepherd is best known for large, vertical, mostly monochrome paintings in hi-gloss enamel on wooden panels. Using intense colors, delicate lines, and multiple perspectives, she suggests structures and patterns - wallpaper, steps, lace, a cage, for example - that create illusionary three-dimensional space. Her work in the former dining room of the Phillips house incorporates painting and sculpture and focuses on architectural details. Shepherd earned a BA from Oberlin College in Ohio and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she lives and works. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and her work is featured in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Regi Müller's work is about maintaining a tension between chaos and order through random distribution of geometric shapes. In her earlier work, she used a grid and dice to achieve chance placement of the pieces; now she uses a computerized system. This spring she transform the museum's Vradenburg Café by installing hundreds of peach-colored urethane Caps on its walls and windows. Trained as a textile and graphic designer, Müller lives in New York City. She is the winner of numerous awards and honors and has exhibited in her native Switzerland, as well as in the United States. Music by Serge Uberto.

Meyers explores two-dimensional space in an exquisitely detailed wall drawing composed of thin, tremulous lines. The drifting whirls of at the time being, drawn around an archway in the Goh Annex, move toward each other, meeting above the arch and creating optical vibrations. The color, movement, and energy of the drawing relate to the brushwork and colors of Vincent van Gogh's The Road Menders (1889), a painting in the collection.

Tayo Heuser translates the luminosity of Mark Rothko's paintings into three dimensions with large-scale wall-mounted sculptures of glowing, colored forms drawn in ink, designed to rise along the spiral flow of the Goh Annex stairwell. The work was created in response to both the architecture of the stairwell and the paintings in the museum's Rothko Room. Music composed and performed by Julian Shore.

Conceived as a portrait of human energy and inner strength and as a symbol of flight and aspiration, this large-scale sculpture is made of strings and stones and suspended from the ceiling. Icarus is paired with portraits from the museum's permanent collection, including Eugène Delacroix's Paganini, Amedeo Modigliani's Elena Povolozky, and Chaim Soutine's Woman in Profile.