Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art
The Boca Raton Museum of Art will present the world premiere of the Teiger Award-winning exhibition Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art, a group show originated by Kathleen Goncharov, the Museum’s Senior Curator, featuring 30 contemporary artists this November.
The works in this exhibition crack through the looking glass of illusion and beliefs. While performative magic is certainly celebrated here, many of these artists are acclaimed for tackling the thorny issues of disinformation, hoaxes, cults, conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” and the rise of deceptive artificial technologies in our culture. Among the 30 artists are: Urs Fischer, Alfredo Jaar, Jim Shaw, Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Kaino, Christian Jankowski, Kristin Lucas, Jane Hammond, Faisal Abdu'Allah, Mark Thomas Gibson, Jose Alvarez, and The Yes Men.
This timely exploration pulls back the curtain on modern-day deceptions, often perpetrated for political or financial gain – before our very eyes. Today’s hoaxes, and the blatant lies posted on social media, are often fabricated with new technology yet have earlier precedents in America’s history. The exhibition’s temporal twist juxtaposes parallels between our current struggles and the same peculiar fascinations with magical thinking during the late 1800s and early 1900s – when the deadly flu pandemic and World War I created an epidemic of fake mediums, seances, and the golden age of stage magic. Fast-forward to today, and these artists investigate how the trauma of our own pandemic, climate change, political extremism, violence, and the disruption of societal norms are spurring belief and fascination with the paranormal. An explosive increase in supernatural characters in popular culture, and dangerous hoaxes that are proving difficult to discredit, are rampant again now.
The largest gallery in the exhibition is transformed by Tony Oursler into an otherworldly landscape titled Creature Features. The Museum has commissioned several new installations by Oursler, exploring what the artist calls the “delicate balance between creativity, mysticism and scientific ingenuity.” Based on American folklore, legends, and hoaxes likened to today’s urban myths, viewers will walk into a dream world where the artist’s collection of the unbelievable comes to life.
The Museum commissioned the artist Jeanette Andrews (also a professional magician) to create a new interactive work titled magi.cia.n, inspired by the recently declassified CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, written by two professional magicians. She created a “clean room” in the museum – an enclosed, transparent box with two holes equipped with gloves used by the viewer to flip through a blank journal that visually transforms into a magic book and then into a spy craft technical manual before one’s very eyes. The installation, surrounded by black curtains, also includes a video in which Andrews oscillates between her intricate sleight-of-hand as a stage magician, and then, into a CIA agent that uses the same skills for espionage in the real world. Both of her parallel realms rely on learning secret information, rehearsing until she gets it just right, and split-second timing.
Also featured is a major video artwork by Christian Jankowski titled Magic Numbers ruminating on the parallels between magic tricks and the world of finance, and the very real power of illusion; Lindsey White’s leg of the famous illusionist Harry Blackstone suspended from the ceiling; Faisal Abdu’Allah’s Duppy Conqueror II, an Afro-Caribbean conjuror spirit; Gavin Turk’s video recreation of the infamous 18th-century Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton; the late Sarah Charlesworth’s entire Natural Magic suite of eleven large color photographs; a self-portrait by Alfredo Jaar dressed up as a magician; and the fantastical photographs by Stephen Berkman, where he resurrects a vanished world of imaginary characters using period photographic lenses from the 1800s and an archaic glass plate process.
BOCA MUSEUM Opens to the General Public on November 18 through May 12
Alfredo Jaar self-portrait, next to artwork by Urs Fischer
