Hammer Museum

Daria Martin

10 Apr - 03 Jul 2010

© Daria Martin
Minotaur, 2008
16mm film, color, sound. 10 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley, London
DARIA MARTIN
Minotaur
10 April - 3 July 2010

London-based American artist Daria Martin's elusive and enigmatic films combine intense ritualistic performativity with rigorous yet detached photographic approach. Her 16mm film, Minotaur Pays tribute to the work of dance pioneer Anna Halprin, whose life and work has had a profound influence on Martin. This film is centered on a Halprin dance based on the sculpture Minotaur by Auguste Rodin from 1886 (also known as Faun and Nymph), a work possessing intensely erotic content (it depicts the part-man/part-bull figure from Greek mythology with a naked young female in its grasp.) Martin's Minotaur extends her interweaving of highly conceptualized and choreographed physical movement; complexly layered stagecraft provoking unconventional formal relationships; direct allusions to modernist art history; and editing and cinematographic techniques evoking a broad range of the histories of both mainstream and experimental filmmaking.

This project is curated by Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Curator Dominic Molon.

Daria Martin: Minotaur is part of the Three M Project—a series by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, to commission, organize, and co-present new works of art.
 

Tags: Anna Halprin, Daria Martin, Auguste Rodin