Denise Markonish – författare

Published to accompany MASS MoCA’s landmark installation of LeWitt’s innovative wall drawings, this book celebrates the artist and his illustrious 50-year career.Published in association with Mass MoCAExhibition Schedule:Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (opens November 16, 2008)

Known for installations exploring science, natural phenomena, and contemporary mythologies, French artist Laurent Grasso presents a visual journey of his avant-garde, conceptual work.Drawing on the visual possibilities of electromagnetic energy, radio waves, and natural phenomena, French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso explores their effect on our perception via immersive videos, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that resort to images or techniques borrowed from cinema or art history. At the crossroads of heterogeneous temporalities, geographies, and realities, his installations play with shifting viewpoints, boundaries between fiction and reality, and unusual perspectives.This tome explores the artist’s manipulations of what we perceive to be time’s consistency, showcasing artworks merging a wide range of interests, including scientific speculations and fictions; natural catastrophes; and representations of power and authority. This questioning of time appears in Grasso’s Studies into the Past paintings, created using historically accurate techniques, which reconstruct our perception of the reality of another era to create a “false historical memory.” Vibrant photographs display his unique pieces, while astute observations from some of the world’s foremost art critics offer insight into Grasso’s approach.

Art in the space between magic and activism: an introduction to the participatory, multimedia creations of Glenn KainoPublished with MASS MoCA.Published for the Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist Glenn Kaino’s (born 1972) largest exhibition to date, In the Light of a Shadow, this book showcases his work and how art can chronicle parallel trajectories of disparate political and geographical contexts, utilizing history to speak about our present, and art to facilitate political action and hope. Kaino has built his career in the space between these two; creating projects that are based on the magic of trust, fair promises and righting the lapses in memory and omissions of history, all while creating beautifully hopeful and immersive installations.This Book Is a Promise is organized in a galaxy-like structure, with different aspects of Kaino’s production over the years represented as intertwined constellations. Additionally, the book reads in two directions, Memory and Promise, each with their own cover. The Memory side presents a retrospective survey, while the Promise surveys the MASS MoCA exhibition. Themes explored include equity, visibility, belief, regeneration and space-making. This publication gives context to Kaino’s diverse practice, provides promises for people to follow to live in a better, more humane world and serves as a field guide to being human.

Contemporary artists examine the human condition from all sides in this riveting collection of American art that questions how we represent ourselves in the 21st century.