Rita McBride, Secession Tower, Secession 2000
 
 
The interest of the American artist Rita McBride centers around the question whether and how the relationship between an object and its materiality is determined by perceptual patterns. Her objects and installations avoid both formalism of design and the aesthetics of the ready-made. Rita McBride is developing a project for the Secession, in which the building will be transformed paradigmatically into an island: surrounded by palm trees and heightened to become a high-rise, the Secession will turn into a holiday paradise that contrasts ironically with the starkness of the white cube and the superficiality of the tourist attraction.
 
 

Rita McBride, Secession 2000
 
 
McBride's technique can best be compared to transformation and alienation. She assumes that the material of an object is in itself a carrier of meaning. Ignoring the seemingly obvious coupling of form, function and material, Rita McBride works with iconographic overlapping both on a formal level and on the level of the material. In 1990 she constructed a life-size scale model of a Toyota in rattan cane and merged the associations of the material, which is normally used in a handicrafts context to construct cozily squeaky furniture, with a form from high-tech mass production. Both automobile and piece of furniture - albeit transferred from everyday life into an art context - Toyota remains as a quotation and/or interpretation-cum-meaning in balanced inequilibrium, in which material and form each refer to what is missing.
 
The utopian content of such interacting reference structures is inherent in Rita McBride's project of the Secession, where she evokes visions of a paradisiacal existence on four conceptual levels and at the same time unmasks these as unrealistic pipe dreams: the cryptic intimation at the portal will be accompanied by a model and an edition of posters.


PUBLICATION  

RITA McBRIDE 24 pages, 17 colored illustrations, 11 b/w photos author: Jan Mendoza Secession 2000, ISBN 3-901926-27-5 ___________________ available in the shop

 
 
Rita McBride was born in 1960 and now lives and works in New York City. Her exhibitions include: Rita McBride and Piggybackback (in collaboration with Catherine Opie and Lawrence Weiner), Galerie Bela Jarzyk, Cologne (1996); Hyperinclusion, OSMOS, Berlin (1997); Travel and Leisure, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (1998); Construction in Process VI: The Bridge, Melbourne (1998); Rita McBride & To Be Announced, Kunstverein Munich (1999).
 
 

MARK WALLINGER   MIRJAM KUITENBROUWER

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000

 
 
 
For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at