Courtesy of The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas.Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 26 from 6pm to 8pm
The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas proudly presents this exhibition of the series Liquid City by Canadian photographer Frank Rodick, and 41 Estações by Brazilian photographer Luciano Siqueira. Based in Montreal, Frank Rodick produced the 40 images of Liquid City between 1991-1999 in Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, New York, Hamburg, and Berlin. In these works, the city becomes a condition as opposed to a specific place — a theatre of transience where he destabilizes the image by breaking down the boundaries between foreground, background, and subject. The series exists complementarily with Luciano Siqueira’s 41 Estações. The Brazilian sound designer and musician produced this series in 2018, using his daily comings and goings throughout the Rio de Janeiro subway system to highlight the routines, promises, and uncertainties of human displacement amid an urban landscape. This exhibition is curated by Fabian Goncalves Borrega and Sinara Sandri.
Frank Rodick studied photography and film while completing undergraduate studies in politics and economics as well as a graduate degree in psychology. Growing up in a universe populated by books, literary metaphors are a constant in his thinking. Combined with his interest in philosophy and history, moving between disciplines has provided him with tools for exploring the subjective world, an overarching theme in his photographic practice. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions across the world, consolidating an important international career with visual experiments that engage the (dis)organization of memory, space, and the human figure.
Produced between 1991 and 1999, Liquid City was the first Frank Rodick photographic project. A series of 40 images, it was originally produced as analog photography on 35 mm film. Though set in Montréal, Toronto, Tokyo, New York, Hamburg, and Berlin, the images do not delineate a particular location. In Rodick’s work, the city becomes a condition as opposed to a specific place — a theatre of transience where he destabilizes the image by breaking down the boundaries between foreground, background, and subject.
Sound designer and musician Luciano Siqueira was born in Rio de Janeiro. He began to incorporate photography into his artistic repertoire in 2017. He studied at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, and works actively with artists and curators of Rio de Janeiro, focusing on the use of multimedia language in video installations.
Luciano Siqueira used his daily routes to photograph the displacement of bodies in the 41 stations of the Rio de Janeiro subway system. From the repetition of the human figure, the work reflects on the condition in big cities, the routine, the promises and uncertainties of a path marked by long periods in displacement.
Initially conceived as a refuge and a place for meeting, the city presents the need of mobility and the challenge of the unknown. At the same time desired and feared, the unexpected is a condition that causes discomfort, giving rise to control measures that, in many cases, involve spatial planning as a strategy to stabilize the conditions for the development of human life.
Landscape instability is an urban feature, but the circulation of information and the action of locative media cause an unprecedented imbalance between informational and physical flows. Being mobile and connected is a requirement of the contemporary city, while the spaces for local living are reduced. We live a new experience where we handle the various layers of spaces – simultaneous, immediate and combined events – gathered on our smartphones. A vertigo of shared geographical coordinates and time zones that disembarks in the fragmented time of a city that seems intoxicated by the excess of its own energy.
It is precisely at this moment that AMA brings together two artists of different longitudes and generations who photograph the city in a very particular way. While Canadian Frank Rodick breaks the location reference to scour his subjective world, Brazilian Luciano Siqueira makes a taxonomy of beings emerging from the Rio de Janeiro subway underground.
The AMA serves as the principal instrument of cultural diplomacy of the OAS. AMA’s mission is founded on the notion that the arts are transformative for individuals and communities. This guiding principle promotes the core values of the OAS by providing a space for cultural expression, creativity, innovation, dialog, and learning, while highlighting themes such as democracy, development, human rights, justice, freedom of expression, and innovation. AMA’s work draws on contemporary art to showcase a constructive vision of the future of the Americas via local and hemispheric cultural exchange.
Accessibility: The OAS AMA F Street Gallery is wheelchair accessible. For more information, please call 202 370 0147 or email gsvitil@oas.org.
The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas is located at 201 18th Street NW. For more information on accessibility, or to make an appointment to visit, please contact 202 370 0147 or artmus@oas.org.
