Lara Favaretto

On view February 12 – April 28, 2019

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara is pleased to present Lara Favaretto, featuring works spanning Turin, Italy-based artist Lara Favaretto’s more than twenty-year career, and presented in collaboration with Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada. The exhibition marks Favaretto’s solo U.S. West Coast institutional debut. Lara Favaretto is curated by Abaseh Mirvali, Executive Director & Chief Curator.

Lara Favaretto (b.1973, Treviso, Italy) lives and works in Turin, Italy. Throughout her career, Favaretto has worked with a range of media, including performance, sculpture, installation, and video. Based on profound conceptual research, Favaretto’s complex artistic practice brings forth works that interact with space, activating the community and setting of a specific place. While Favaretto engages and allures audiences with gestures of the seemingly playful or festive, upon closer examination, her work paradoxically evokes the inevitability of failure and decay.

Acknowledgements
Support for Lara Favaretto provided by the Alexander Family, Elisabeth & Greg Fowler, John Green, Hayes Commercial Group, Montecito Bank & Trust, Paseo Nuevo Shops & Restaurants, Presqu’ile Winery, MCASB Board of Trustees, and MCASB Visionaries.

Special thanks to Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; UCSB Art Department and Glass Box Gallery, Isla Vista, USA; and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy. More »

James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America)

Opening reception:
Thursday, May 16, 2019, 6 – 8 pm

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara MCASB is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of independent American filmmaker James Benning, James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America). For more than 40 years exploring the medium, Benning has engaged with history, memory, and documentary traditions, often encompassing a rigorous treatment of the American landscape. Benning’s exhibition at MCASB will present some of the filmmaker’s most recent works, including the films Twenty Cigarettes, and READERS, put in dialogue with a selection of photographs and objects from his Portraits series.

James Benning (b.1942, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) lives and works in Val Verde, California, USA. Benning is a major figure of American cinema. In the late 1960s, he directed his first short films in the experimental-cinema tradition, retaining its formal rigor and taste for conceptual constraints while pioneering the notion of “figurative narrative.” His films rest on an experience of time and perception and its relationship to space. They also approach the notion of place from autobiographical, cultural, political, and historical viewpoints. In 2014, his film, 13 Lakes, was added to the National Film Registry. Benning has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.

Benning’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2015); Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria (2014); VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal, Canada (2014); and Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2014), among numerous others. Group exhibitions and screenings include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA (2017); Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2017); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2016); Centre d’art de L’Onde, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France (2016); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA (2015); De Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA (2014); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2014, 2006, 1981, 1979); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2013, 2003, 1979, 1978). More »