Simon Starling at the Bass Museum

From Jul 15th through Sept 13th, 2009.

The exhibition Simon Starling: Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird) is on view in the Henri and Flore Lesieur Pavilion at the Bass Museum. This exhibition is comprised of one large-scale installation, sound, and two photographs. In this installation conceptual artist Simon Starling (b. 1967 Epsom, England) explores the relationships between craft, material, technique, social history, association and memory.

Starling’s Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird), is comprised of two scale models of prefabricated single-family houses that are pinned to the ceiling by tree branches. They are each a one fifth-scale recreation of existing homes located outside San Juan, Puerto Rico. Built in the 1960s, these houses were part of a  postwar philanthropic effort in developing countries financed by the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation.

Overlapping traditions, geographies and historical narratives, Starling combines the modernist theories of architect Simon Schmiderer, and Austrian composer and theorist Arnold Schonberg (born Vienna, 1874; died Los Angeles, 1951) who, in both of their respective fields, created rigid systems based on modular logic which were intended to enhance creativity. 

Bass Museum of Art
2121 Park Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139
305.673.753
www.bassmuseum.org

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