Vik Muniz: Reflex March 3, 2007

This MAM-organized traveling exhibition of approximately 100 works surveys the career of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz from the late 1980s to the present. Muniz has made an international impact with his photographs documenting images he has made in an astonishing variety of non-art, often ephemeral materials, including dirt, sugar, wire, string, chocolate syrup, peanut butter, fake blood, color chips, the circular paper remnants made by hole punches, and diamonds. Muniz' images are at once familiar and alien. They are often recognizable news images, works from art history, or portraits of well-known personages. After an initial moment of recognition, it quickly becomes clear that these images are not what they first seemed. Through his witty images, Muniz honors, questions and subverts the traditions of representational art, treading the line between reality and illusion, representation and abstraction, idea and image, means and ends.