Provocative, Captivating, Vexing

There is a new exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum and I stopped in yesterday to get a look at it.  It's called Past/Future/Present: Contemporary Brazilian Art from the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo. It examines the question "what is Brazilian about Brazilian contemporary art?"  The pieces in the exhibit are all by different artists who, of course are all Brazilian.  The piece above captivated me.  It's made up of a large photograph that has been broken up into multiple fragments, each hung from the ceiling over a large deep and wide space.

There is a viewing space positioned in front and the viewer is encouraged to look at the piece through the little circle pictured above.  Looking through that circle, all the pieces join together to form the original image.  It was very hard to get the camera lens to see exactly what the eye was seeing but, the top photo is the best one I got.  As you can see, it's still not completely right but I think you can still get the concept.  Looking at it with my eye, it was perfectly aligned.

This last photo shows better just how spread out the photo pieces were.  The artist is Cassio Vasconcellos.  It was created in 2002 and it is called "A Perspective".  I found it simply fascinating.  Just imagine how carefully those photos had to be hung in order to get them to come together from that one tiny vantage point.

I'll show you a few more pieces from this show tomorrow.