Mark Moore Fine Art and the artist are pleased to announce the acquisition of a major video work by artist collective OKAY MOUNTAIN by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the Permanent Collection.
Okay Mountain is a nine member artist collective based in Austin, Texas. Formed in 2006 as an artist-run alternative gallery space, the group has exhibited their drawing, video, sound, and performance projects throughout the United States and in Mexico City, and has been widely recognized for its “inventive construction, loving attention to detail and keen-eyed connoisseurship.” Okay Mountain repackages, reconstitutes, and rekindles our consumerist desires with a sardonic edge. Their installations and multi-media assemblage works mimic the stock vernacular of our communal materialism, yet tweak them just enough to reveal our superficial insecurities and convictions. While most artists are alumni of the University of Texas at Austin (TX), others are graduates of University of California Los Angeles (CA), Rhode Island School of Design (RI), and the University of Kansas (KS). Institutional exhibitions have included those at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (TX), Austin Museum of Art (TX), McNay Art Museum (TX), Arthouse (TX), University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (TN), and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (MA). Their work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Art Houston (TX), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), Santa Barabara Museum of Art (CA), and Vanderbilt University (TN).
Water, Water, Everywhere So Let’s All Have a Drink takes the visual language of late-night television as its basic formal premise. The video, a quick succession of clips meant to invoke the activity of channel surfing, recreates the aesthetic and embodied experience of mindlessly scanning TV. First exhibited at the Austin Museum of Art, the work was projected onto a larger-than-life sculpture of a television set. Since then it has been screened at Prospect 1.5 in New Orleans, the Heuser Art Center, and the Dallas Biennale. Some of the tropes that Water, Water lampoons and celebrates, include, low-budget infomercials, how-to programs, home-shopping networks, sitcoms, and local news programming. The resulting visual assemblage attempts to make sense out of the overwhelming disconnection brought about by contemporary media’s image factory.
WATCH THIS VIDEO HERE
With its encyclopedic collection and an exciting schedule of international loan exhibitions and award-winning programs, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is one of the premier destinations in the United States for art lovers. Established in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s collection numbers nearly 70,000 works and embraces the art of antiquity to the present.
The collecting department of modern and contemporary art has grown to more than 1,400 objects spanning six continents. Major figures in the evolution Modern and Contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on the progress of abstraction, are represented across the 20th century and into the 21st and include works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. The Surrealist era is introduced with works by Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy. Postwar European artists in the collection range from Pierre Alechinsky, Anthony Caro, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and Jean Tinguely to Rebecca Horn, Anselm Kiefer, Giuseppe Penone, and Gerhard Richter. Collecting in the new millennium has opened up new avenues of exploration, from the light-based works of James Turrell, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Bill Viola to artists who challenge accepted art-historical narratives, including Nan Goldin, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Do Ho Suh, and Fred Wilson. |
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