There’s a big video monitor on the South Mountain side of the Montclair Art Museum playing something that may look, from a distance, like “The Little Mermaid.” Actually, it’s part of the museum’s new solo exhibition by Brooklyn artist Marina Zurkow, who teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU. The show’s centerpiece, “Mesocosm,” from Zurkow’s “Friends and Enemies” series, is 146-hour-long video that was created in Flash, in which one minute of screen time equals one hour of real time. It is based on Lucian Freud’s painting of British fashion designer Leigh Bowery, and features the landcape and weather of Northumberland UK.
The Zurkow exhibit, which opened Saturday, also features the video “Slurb,” commissioned by the city of Tampa, and which imagines the city as an post-apocalyptic underworld, the video “Weights and Measures” and Heraldic Crests for Invasive Species.
The show kicks off a “New Directions” initiative to feature contemporary art in a museum best known for the work of 19th-century landscape artist (and Montclair resident) George Inness. Museum director Lora Urbanelli opened Saturday’s press preview of the show by saying, “All art starts out as contemporary art.”
To get a taste of the show, take a look at these videos.
Zurkow’s work is on display through January 8. The Montclair Art Museum, at 3 S. Mountain Ave., is open Wednesdays to Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.
