Cranbrook Art Museum - Exhibitions


Shoot the Family Contemporary Photography and Video Exploring the Undercurrents of Domestic Life Cranbrook Art Museum February 4 – April 2, 2006 Exploring the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, Shoot the Family, an exhibition of contemporary photography and video exploring the undercurrents of domestic life, focuses on artists’ portrayals of their own families. Opening at Cranbrook Art Museum on February 4, 2006, the artists represented in this exhibition have created photographs and video works of relatives and partners that can be harrowingly intimate, questioning any pretense of objectivity between image-maker and subject. Made during the last ten years by artists active in North America, Europe, and Asia, the works on view show the influences of traditional family snapshots and documentary and staged photography, as well as conceptual and performance art.
SELECTED EXHIBITION IMAGES (Note: Credit information on each image. Click to view larger.)

RELATED PROGRAMS >>
ARTISTS TALKS: LEADERS OF THE CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD SPEAK! Talks take place in deSalle Auditorium, on the lower level of Cranbrook Art Museum and are included with Museum admission. ARI MARCOPOULOS Sunday, February 12, 4 pm The California-based Dutch-born photographer and video artist Ari Marcopoulos, whose work is presented in the exhibition “Shoot the Family,” has made a career of capturing life on the cultural edge. Some of his more famous subjects include: Richard Serra, the Beastie Boys and JeanMichel Basquiat. Following the lecture, join us for an afterglow in the New Studios Building and Forum Gallery for a new exhibition by students of the Photography Department. Friday, Fourth Friday Night: February 24, 7 pm [FLAK]detroit presents "Detroit@00:55: This Time It's Personal." Screening of 55-second long films made by creative individuals and groups that explore Detroit and beyond. Sunday, "Brother, Fish, Mud:" March 26, 4:30 pm Recent Works by Peter Markus. Free admission Using the images from the exhibition Shoot the Family as a backdrop, Detroit-based fiction writer Peter Markus ("Good, Brother," "What The River Told Us To Do," "The Singing Fish") will read from his recent works, which address the nature of family relations. Book signing. Afterglow. IDEAS & PROCESS: GALLERY TALKS AND STUDIO TOURS LED BY CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART ARTISTS Sunday, February 5; Saturday, February 11; Sunday, February 19; Saturday, February 25; Sunday March 5; and Saturday March 11 at 3 pm This new education program is designed to explore both ideas and process in the making of art. This month graduate students from the Academy’s Department of Photography will off er gallery talks on the exhibition Shoot the Family. The talks will be followed by visits to the Academy’s Photography Studio. FILM MARATHON Special Screening of the Films Produced by the Artists Represented in Shoot the Family. Saturday, April 1, & Sunday, April 2, 2 - 4:30 pm, de Salle Auditorium April 1 2 pm Transitions and exits, 15 minutes, by Ari Marcopoulos 2:20 pm Fishtank, 1998, 47 minutes, by Richard Billingham 3:15 pm At Rest, 2003, 12 minutes, by Malerie Marder 3:35 pm Dad, 2003, 25 minutes, by Mitch Epstein 4:05 pm TBA - Zhang Huan April 2 2 pm Trick or Treat, 2002, 30 minutes, by Anne Olofsson 2:35 pm Believe Me, I Am An Artist, 2000, 10 minutes, by Adrian Paci 2:55 pm Vintage - Families of Value, 1995, 72 minutes, Director Thomas Allen Harris, with participation of Lyle Ashton Harris 4:15 pm Inverted Star, 1999, 4 minutes; Moses Superstar, 2003, 5 minutes; Middle Age Rampage, 2003, 6 minutes, by Miguel Calderon FILM DESCRIPTIONS Fishtank, by Richard Billingham The 'video verit' of Fishtank was contained with the compressed space of the flat. Ray sits alone in the kitchen, feeding the fish. Liz plays computer games. Jason swats a fly on the wall. Sometime they talk, sometimes they argue. Dispassionately yet compassionately, Billingham's film registered the emotional territory of the flat and his family who lived there. He charted a pattern of pathos, despair and hope. Fishtank crafted a terrible beauty from the landscape of family life. Inverted Star, by Miguel Calderon In 1999, Calderon placed a classified ad in a Mexico City newspaper seeking people who believed they were possessed by the devil. It did not take long for Calderon to find the "stars" of his project. He went to their homes and documented the strange behavior of the self-professed possessed. However, beneath the film's prankish humor and sensationalism is a clear-eyed commentary on society's rampant commercialism and sensationalist media. **Moses Superstar and Middle Age Rampage*: no description is available. Dad, by Mitch Epstein On a windy August night in 1999, two 12-year-old boys broke into a boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and set it ablaze. The fire destroyed an entire city block, including a 19th century Catholic church. The church brought a $15 million lawsuit against the senior Mr. Epstein who owned the building. The film is a part of Epstein's epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty and the parallel fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital. Vintage* - Families of Value, by Thomas Allen Harris Awards: Best Documentary Video, 20th Annual Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1996; Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1996 VINTAGE - Families of Value is a fantasy documentary film, which intimately explores three African-American families through the eyes of lesbian and gay male siblings -- two or more in the same family. This lyrical and impressionistic film blends intimate and sometimes painful conversations between family members, with dramatic re-creations, verit footage, performance, audio visual collage and archival photos and films to sketch a provocative tableau of three modern black families negotiating sexuality and identity. Transitions and exits, by Ari Marcopoulos Marcopoulos covers the life and times of the world's top young snowboarders with contemplative portraits, mountainous landscapes, and daredevil action shots. However, there is more to the fascinating world of modern Peter Pans than video games, black eyes, cheap beer and cigarettes. In the words of the artist, "They are political in the way they shape their existence. Their lifestyle is financed by corporations and yet they live by their own rules outside of social norms." At Rest, by Malerie Marder For two years Malerie filmed her friends young and old in fitful sleep. The video reminds us that our best moments nowadays lie in the Land of Nod, but the tense soundtrack of breathing (really Malerie and Matthew Barney soundman Jonathan Bepler exhaling ominously through tubes for two hours) says that even sleep is no escape. One never avoids a frisson of fear. Trick or Treat, by Anne Olofsson Olofsson takes the viewer on a surreal drive with her father. Father and daughter attempt to connect as their drive seemingly goes on forever-- long enough for the viewer to reflect on many things: the couples and silences in Ingmar Bergman's films; the institutionalized support in Sweden for beautiful, melancholic art; the distillation of one of the mysteries of life (father-daughter relationships) into visual bites and one-liners suitable for quick consumption. Believe Me, I Am An Artist, by Adrian Paci Paci took photos of his daughters wearing a stamp on their backs, which was analogous to the stamp that is entered in the passport of Albanian citizens when they leave the country. The photos aroused suspicions on the part of the Italian police and Paci had to explain that he was not involved in child abuse. The video is about the drama of the story and at the same time it is a self-ironic reflection on the status of the artist today.
PRESS COVERAGE >>
The Detroiter - The Cranbrook Art Museum serves as the first stop for the traveling exhibition Shoot the Family, featuring artists whose subject matter is their own family members. The double entendre nature of the title is certainly meant to provoke and pique curiosity, but the show itself is far more exploratory and investigative of familial bonds than anything remotely touching on violence within the family unit... MetroTimes: All in the family Artists take on loved ones by Glen Mannisto 3/22/2006 Shoot the Family manages to both construct and deconstruct contemporary notions and conditions of the family while exposing the bare-bones style of the current state of video and photography. Curated by the highly touted Ralph Rugoff for Independent Curators International (ICI), the exhibition has the feel of a global survey...
PRESS RELEASE >>
January 11, 2006 For Immediate Release Contact: Felicia E. Molnar, 248-645-3329 Shoot the Family An Exhibition of Contemporary Photography and Video Exploring the Undercurrents of Domestic Life Cranbrook Art Museum February 4 – April 2, 2006 Bloomfield Hills, MI – We have all, at one time or another, taken photographs of our family members. Photographs and home videos of our relatives are one of our more enduring social customs. The artists, whose work is presented in “Shoot the Family,” also take part in this familiar ritual, but their photographs bear little resemblance to the conventional genre of the family snapshot or portrait. Opening at Cranbrook Art Museum on February 4, 2006, Shoot the Family, explores the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, focusing on artists’ portrayals of their own families. The photographs and video works-- as shot by artists of relatives and partners -- are harrowingly intimate, questioning any pretense of objectivity between image-maker and subject, exploring the split seams between our public and private lives. Presenting scenarios of emotional closeness as well as failed connection, Shoot the Family, offers a multi-layered representation of the contemporary family as a dynamic social institution, revealing that family matters are never simply personal, but inevitably encompass broader historical, anthropological, and economic considerations. In fashioning images of their own relatives and partners, most of the artists confront ambivalent or double-edged attitudes that color their familial relationships. For example, in a psychologically loaded photograph by Miguel Calderon, his extended family gathers for a group shot—thoroughly conventional except that they are dressed only in underwear. In Adrian Paci’s My Princess, his daughter wears formal attire, posing as a princess in a seventeenth-century Italian palazzo. At the same time, many of the works presented in this exhibition link the family to a nexus of social issues, including class and financial status, the transmission of gender and ethnic stereotypes, shifting marital and generational roles, and the impact of war and immigration. “Emotionally incisive, conceptually diverse, and visually inventive, the photographs and videos in Shoot the Family transform that most familiar artifact—the family photograph—into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture,” says Gregory Wittkopp, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum. Shoot the Family is a traveling exhibition, organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (iCI), New York and curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco and the 2005 recipient of The Ordway prize for curatorial excellence. The exhibition, tour and publication are made possible, in part, by a grant from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the iCI Exhibition Partners. At Cranbrook Art Museum, Shoot the Family is presented, in part, through the support of LaSalle Bank, the Art Museum’s 2005-2006 Exhibition Season Sponsor. Shoot the Family also is presented with the support of the Museum Committee of Cranbrook Art Museum including Adele Acheson, Maggie Allesee, John Berry, Jonathan Boos, Deborah Bragman, Keenie Fieger, Maxine Frankel, Ralph Graham, Stanley Grandon, John Henke, Jonathan Holtzman, Diane Kirkpatrick, David Klein, Til Klem, Wendy MacGaw, Diane VanderBeke Mager, James Nichols, Michael Poris, Cathy Rosenthal, Jane Schulak, Gilbert Silverman, Ronald Swanson, and Gary Wasserman. A catalogue is available for this exhibition and includes an essay by guest curator Ralph Rugoff on the aesthetic and social dimensions of the works in the show, as well as a text on the history of familial depiction in photography and video.
CREDITS >>
Shoot the Family is a traveling exhibition, organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (iCI), New York and curated by Ralph Rugoff. The exhibition, tour and publication are made possible, in part, by a grant from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the iCI Exhibition Partners Cranbrook Art Museum's 2005-2006 Exhibition Season, including Shoot the Family, is generously sponsored by LaSalle Bank. Shoot the Family also is presented at Cranbrook with the support of the 2005-2006 Museum Committee of Cranbrook Art Museum including Adele Acheson, Maggie Allesee, John Berry, Jonathan Boos, Keenie Fieger, Maxine Frankel, Ralph Graham, Stanley Grandon, John Henke, Jonathan Holtzman, Diane Kirkpatrick, David Klein, Til Klem, Wendy MacGaw, Diane VanderBeke Mager, James Nichols, Michael Poris, Cathy Rosenthal, Jane Schulak, Gilbert Silverman, Ronald Swanson, and Gary Wasserman. Cranbrook Art Museum also is supported by the contributors to the Annual Fund of both Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cranbrook Art Museum, the fund-raising activites of ArtMembers@Cranbrook, including both Fanfare and Serious Moonlight, and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Cranbrook Art Museum is a non-profit contemporary art museum, and an integral part of Cranbrook Academy of Art, a community of artists-in-residence and graduate-level students of art, design and architecture. Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cranbrook Art Museum are a part of Cranbrook Educational Community, which also includes Cranbrook’s Institute of Science, Schools and other affiliated cultural and educational programs. Cranbrook Art Museum is accredited by the American Association of Museums. For information call toll free 1-877-GO-CRANBrook (1-877-462-7262). To become a member of ArtMembers@Cranbrook call 248-645-3032. Museum Hours Wednesday through Sunday, 11am – 5pm Fourth Fridays, 11am – 9pm Closed Mondays and Tuesdays and the following holidays during the exhibition: Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve and Day, New Year’s Eve and Day Cranbrook Art Museum Members: Free! Adults: $6 Full-Time Students with ID and Teens 13 and over: $4 Senior Citizens (65+): $4 Children 12 and under: Free! No credit cards accepted Personal checks welcomed U.S. currency only For more information, please call 1.877.GO.CRANBrook. (1.877.462.7262)