Video-and-sound installation at MOLAA compares two Ford Motor Company towns

The Museum of Latin-American Art (MOLAA) will open its exhibit Streamlined: Belterra, Amazónia/Alberta, Michigan on Saturday, Jan. 17. The show, which is curated by Edward Hayes Jr., showcases the work of the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, who investigates the promises, legacies and failures of modernity, globalism and utopian idealism. As in this exhibition, much of her work deals with an examination of cultural and economic exchanges between the United States and Brazil.

In Streamlined, a video-and-sound installation compares two Ford Motor Company towns: Belterra, a rubber plantation village in the Amazon forest, and Alberta, a sawmill town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Built concurrently in 1935, each town provided, respectively, rubber and wood for the manufacturing of the Model T in the United States. The installation establishes a sense of place, showing how specific cultural characteristics invaded and changed these formerly equivalent, pre-planned towns.
“Tossin’s installation seeks to excavate evidence of a form of work and life that remained from a past that was once modern, and that currently belongs only to the time of now,” said Moacir dos Anjos from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, a Brazilian cultural preservation organization, and a chief curator of the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010. “The artist acts as an ‘interpreter’ of what remained of the two cities invented by Henry Ford— slowly transformed ever since their creation, discarding or incorporating things and meanings— to offer her own interpretation of those changes, through images, for public debate.”
Clarissa Tossin received her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts (2009) and B.F.A. from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (2000). Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including, most recently, Site Santa Fe 2014: Unsettled Landscapes, Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Bringing the World into the World at The Queens Museum in New York.

Earlier last year, her work could be seen at Fundação Iberê Camargo, in Brazil, as a part of the exhibition Liberdade em Movimento. In 2013 she was part of the CCA Wattis Institute’s traveling exhibition, When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, and she was commissioned a Window into Houston site-specific project by the Blaffer Art Museum. Tossin has had solo exhibitions at Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo and Sicardi Gallery in Houston.
She was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from 2010 to 2012 and participated in the Artpace International Artitst-in-Residency curated by Hou Hanru in 2013. Recent awards include a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2014), an Artistic Innovation Grant (2012) from the Center for Cultural Innovation and a Videoarte Project Grant (2012) from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco.
MOLAA is located at 628 Alamitos Ave. Hours are Sundays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 11am to 5pm, and Fridays from 11am to 9pm. Cost is $9 general admission and $6 for students with ID and seniors 65 and older.
Members and children under 12 are admitted free of charge. Admission is free every Sunday, as sponsored by Target. For more information, call (562) 437-1689 or visit molaa.org .

Source: MOLAA