Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum A Video Installation by Shimon Attie

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Shimon Attie’s Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum is a multiple-channel, high-definition video installation that explores the relationship between works of art and museum visitors and staff. Attie’s particular interest is giving visual form to the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object. The exhibition is part of the museum’s Collection Connections series, which invites artists to create new work that reinterprets traditional objects from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collections.

Shimon Attie is best known for his installations that incorporate projected photography and other media into and onto architectural sites. Attie’s past works have given visual form to memory and the human imagination by animating public sites with images of their lost histories, and in more recent years by creating multiple-channel video installations for museum and gallery exhibitions. He often explores questions of memory, place, and identity and the themes of layered and buried histories. Through his work, which has been mostly video of late, Attie reveals the rich complexity of the past and the dark secrets of our environment.

Sponsors

Collection Connections is generously funded by the Annenberg Foundation. Collection Connections is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Cultural Encounters initiative designed to attract new and diverse audiences to the Museums. The Cultural Encounters imitative is generously funded by The James Irvine Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, the Institute of Museums and Library Services, the Columbia Foundation, and the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation.

Currently on view