Friday, April 26, 2024

DAVID WINTON BELL GALLERY – BROWN UNIVERSITY

Elisabeth Subrin: The Listening Takes

 

 

On view through Sunday, June 4

 

Filmmaker and artist Elisabeth Subrin’s The Listening Takes (2023) presents three portraits of the subversive French actress Maria Schneider (1952–2011) within an immersive sound, video, and sculptural installation.

 

Collaborating with the women who portray Maria (internationally acclaimed actress Manal Issa, and Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval, who are celebrated directors and actresses), The Listening Takes focuses on Schneider’s refusal within a 1983 interview to discuss her controversial lead role opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the non-consensual sex scene that she was subjected to on the set.

 

As she articulates her perspective as a woman within the film industry, Schneider reveals a devastating prescience about the ways women are defined within and beyond cinema. Filmed for both black box theater and multi-channel gallery presentations, Subrin’s project untethers Schneider from Tango and allows the nuances of Maria’s interview to be reimagined within three extraordinary performances, each generously listening, and holding space, for one another.

 

 

Superimposed

 

 

On view through Sunday, June 4

 

Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #436: Asymmetrical pyramid with color ink washes superimposed, currently installed on loan from the LeWitt Foundation at Brown University’s Health and Wellness Center as part of the Public Art program, features five asymmetrical triangles resembling the unfolded faces of a pentagonal pyramid.

 

LeWitt employed a minimalist style in his drawings, convinced that the value of art lies in the quality of the idea rather than its physical form.

 

Using a combination of colors, geometrical shapes, and textures, his work derives inspiration from various movements of mid-twentieth century American art that similarly depicted simplified and abstract figures.

 

Featuring a combination of prints, collage, and painting by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Charmion Von Wiegand drawn from the Bell Gallery Collection, the objects on display echo an amalgam of the styles and visual forms entwined in the work of LeWitt and his peers.