For over 30 years, Pipilotti Rist has been exploring the relationship between videos and the body, spatial environments and psychological landscapes through ethereal art installations. As her first West Coast exhibition, the Swiss visual artist has unveiled “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Rist burst onto the scene back in 1986 with I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, a single-channel video that featured a brunette hysterically singing lyrics to the Beatles‘ Happiness Is a Warm Gun. The footage interestingly (and somewhat disturbingly) meditates on how advancements in technology reflect the creative unconscious of the brain. Rist would go on to create a number of introspective videos alongside installations that have been featured around the globe.
The exhibition at MOCA surveys the past three decades of work, alongside a new hypnotic audio-visual installation that is specially made for the Geffen. For much of her past oeuvre, pain and innocence serve as a platform for Rist to capture the anxieties thrust upon us from modern society. In a past interview, she described “pictures, films and sounds” as “spaces into which we can escape…The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’
“Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is on view until June 6, 2022.
Also on view, the first major Tupac Shakur exhibition has been sanctioned by His Estate to take place in Los Angeles.
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
