Exhibition includes monumental works by: Kiki Smith, Catherine Chalmers, Matthew Ritchie, Young Sun Lim and Tim Hawkinson

MASS MoCA's Performing Arts Series also Explores Relationship between Art & Science: Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Lava, and Other Artists Featured

(North Adams, MA) -- MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, will present the major special exhibition, Unnatural Science, opening on June 3, 2000. The exhibition brings together contemporary works that use the discoveries, inventions, and methods of science as a springboard for fantastic aesthetic and intellectual investigations. Unnatural Science, will be on view through March 15, 2001. It is the second major installation at MASS MoCA, which opened to the public in May 1999.

Unnatural Science features fourteen works by fifteen artists, including several room-sized installations, all of which are united by an idiosyncratic approach to scientific authority. The pieces were created between 1987 and 1999 by such artists as Kiki Smith, Matthew Ritchie, Catherine Chalmers, Steina Vasulka, and Lim Young-sun . Many of these works remain in the artists' personal collections and have rarely been exhibited due to their great size. The scale of MASS MoCA's unusual exhibition spaces enables it to bring together the monumental and complex ensemble of work in Unnatural Science,, an exhibition that literally could be shown nowhere else in the world. Among the artists and works in Unnatural Science, are:

Kiki Smith - Constellation
Smith explores state-of-the-art astronomy as it was 500 years ago, a period when tracing the constellations was still a scientific preoccupation. The work incorporates glass stars and large glass animals, complete with scattered bronze scat, on a circular field of dark blue Nepal paper.

Steina Vasulka - Borealis
Electronically manipulated sounds and ../images of the stark Icelandic landscape - water, waves, volcanic rocks, and geological formations -- - are projected onto panels surrounding the viewer. The result is a strangely familiar but disorienting and uncomfortable view of nature.

Young Sun Lim - Room of the Host
Two hundred imaginary zoological specimens made from silicone gel are suspended in illuminated glass jars filled with translucent oil. The jars themselves hang from the ceiling of a darkened room. Each specimen whirls in its liquid, emitting chirps and snippets of song that stop the moment a visitor approaches.

Matthew Ritchie - Stacked
Ritchie's large, complex drawings are diagrammatic illustrations for an intricately wrought narrative about the Big Bang and the origins of the Universe. In this continuing project, which Ritchie has been working on for years, he seeks to unravel all the governing theories of existence while recognizing the complete absurdity of such a pursuit.

Catherine Chalmers - Food Chain
Chalmers set in motion a four-step food chain in her New York apartment and then photographed the resulting cycle. Caterpillars eat a tomato, then they are eaten by a praying mantis, which mates with -- and is devoured by -- a female praying mantis, which in turn is consumed by a frog. Thirty 3 x 5-foot digital C-prints document these very normal, yet surreal, gruesome, and riveting encounters.

Thomas Grunfeld, Misfit (St. Bernhard), 1994 Mixed media (Taxidermy), 24" x 47" x 28", The Saatchi Gallery, London

Thomas Grunfeld - Misfit (St. Bernhard)
The creatures in Grunfeld's Misfit series of fantastic animals are produced with taxidermy so seamless that they appear instead to be the results of bizarre experiments in genetic engineering. With Misfit (St. Bernhard), Grunfeld taps into the anxiety surrounding recent successes in cloning animals and in genetically modifying food. The other artists participating in Unnatural Science are: Janine Antoni, Fischli + Weiss, Eve Andree Laramee, Natalie Jeremijenko, Michael Oatman, and Gary Schneider.

In addition, MASS MoCA has commissioned a major new work from artist Tim Hawkinson that will be exhibited concurrently with Unnatural Science. The new piece - like Hawkinson's previous kinetic sculptures -- explores the properties of the physical world and the body, and gives the eerie sense of exposing living, functioning organs. His previous works in the same vein include: Organ, a sculpture of colored electric wire that is actually the "nervous system" of a Hammond organ; and Pentecost, an enormous fabricated tree that sprouts branches, each adorned with a life-size human figure.

Sara East Johnson's Troupe LAVA in Lava Love

Performing Arts Series
As part of MASS MoCA's mission to catalyze a dialogue between the visual and the performing arts, the Center will present a series of dance and theater performances, concerts, films, children's events, feasts and workshops that explore the themes tested by the artists in Unnatural Science. The series will begin on June 2 and continue into the fall.

Program highlights include:

Geometry of Miracles by Robert Lepage - June 2 and 3
In this visionary fusion of dance, music, media, and theater, Robert LePage, one of the foremost artistic creators of our time, asks us to explore the life and work of both Frank Lloyd Wright the great American architect and Georgi Gurdjieff, the Russian spiritual leader in new and thought-provoking ways.

Cybernations - June 24
Cybernations explores the many aspects of the often controversial world of multi-user domain games (MUDs) bringing together some of the leading scholars, social critics, and artists who are experimenting with game design and technology.

Bang on a Can's Carbon Copy Building - August 4 and 5
This revolutionary new opera combines the line-drawn set of cult cartoonist Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and The Jew of New York) with the sonically powerful music of the legendary, eclectic, uncompromisingly funky Bang On A Can. Carbon Copy Building delves into the strange and hilarious place where parallel worlds overlap as two identical buildings lead very separate lives.

Lava Love - August 19
Sarah East Johnson's troupe, LAVA, creates an explosive performance in which the seven dancers dive through hoops, balance in human ziggurats, and cantilever aloft on trapezes. Film clips of primal movement, from volcanic eruptions to scuttling crabs, serve as entr'actes.

Reno Does Science - October 21
From HBO's Reno In Rehab specials and NPR's The Infinite Mind, critically acclaimed iconoclast Reno turns her hilarious microscope to the human genome project, waxing poetic on the slippery slope of the ethics of modern science.

BIPED performed by Merce Cunningham Dance Company - October 27 and 28
The New England premiere of BIPED, a collaboration between the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, features real and virtual dancers in remarkable interaction.

Film Series - throughout the summer
MASS MoCA will present films throughout the summer on its large outdoor screen. Many will be accompanied by live music including: The Golem, Metropolis, When the Clouds Roll By, Microcosmos and Plan Nine from Outer Space.

General support of the 2000 season is provided in part by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency; the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Dept. of Economic Development/Office of Travel and Tourism; the Fund for Adams of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation; Ellis L. Phillips Family Foundation; The Robert Lehman Foundation; the LEF Foundation; The Peter Norton Family Foundation; the Brownrigg Trust in memory of Lynn Laitman; Jack and Jane Fitzpatrick; Nancy Fitzpatrick and Lincoln Russell; Allan and Judy Fulkerson; Jane and Taylor Briggs; Carmela and Paul Hakisch; the High Meadow Foundation; the Bari Lipp Initiative for Dance; and Philip Scaturro.

MASS MoCA serves as a testing ground for works that explore new territory, employ new media, technologies, and materials, and expand the practice of contemporary art. The institution is a laboratory for artists and visitors, revealing the behind-the-scenes process of creation and blurring the conventional distinctions between artistic disciplines and between art and technology. MASS MoCA's exhibitions and programs capitalize on its dynamic galleries and performance spaces, which are housed on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings. The size, versatility, and vitality of these spaces enable MASS MoCA to present and commission works that can be exhibited nowhere else in the world.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katherine Myers
(413) 664-4481 x8113
katherine@massmoca.org