Artcenter/South Florida Presents Quantum Shift By London Tsai And Judith Berk King Opening Reception
Saturday, May 12 at 7:00 p.m.
ArtCenter/South Florida’s main gallery
800 Lincoln Road at Meridian Avenue
Miami Beach

ArtCenter/South Florida presents Quantum Shift, an exhibition that explores metamorphosis in hybridized biological forms and the fantastic in literary and mathematically inspired objects. This exhibition features the graphite drawings of Judith Berk King and the wood and metal sculpture of Lun-Yi (London) Tsai. On view May 11 – June 17, 2012

A concurrent sounding event, GLADE(S)CAPE by Gustavo Matamoros, and audio reactive video by Rodrigo Arcaya will be held at the Audiothèque at 924 Lincoln road, studio 201. Quantum Shift will be on view through June 17, 2012. For more information, please call 305.674.8278 or visit the website at www.artcentersf.org.

“We are very excited about bringing together Lun-Yi Tsai and Judith Berk King: two talented artists who deal with the natural and the extraordinary in very different ways, both in their materials and in the spatial dimensions that their work inhabits,” said ACSF’s Interim Exhibitions Director, Kristen Thiele. “Quantum Shift features unique components aimed to interact with our visitors, further advancing ArtCenter’s goals of bringing contemporary art to a broad and ever-expanding audience. The text that accompanies Judith’s work provides insightful commentary about her reinvented forms, imagining a future where these creatures might exist; and London offers a sculptural work that contains a video about his process and poetry. Additionally, his installation ‘Cloud’ invites viewers to write a note and attach it to the piece, thereby integrating their words into his art.”

Tsai describes his work as “a collection of fantastic objects that are both of my internal life and of the collective unconscious.” A full time professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Miami, he primarily used math to inform his earlier two-dimensional work and set out strict mathematical parameters to project higher mathematical structures onto canvas and paper. Ultimately, the flatness of these surfaces were limiting, so London acquired and mastered the rare techniques of aircraft aluminum gas welding and traditional sheet metal shaping to expand his concepts to sculpture. This has enabled him to explore the earlier mathematical conceptions and his interests in literature and the world around him.

King has an affinity for botanical and zoological specimens, which stems from early childhood and her exploration of these ideas through drawing and painting. “As an artist, I focus on the hidden and secret aspects of botanical and zoological forms to reinterpret and beautify a potentially disturbing subject,” said the artist. In her compositions, King often imagines a world transformed by environmental changes and man’s interference with plants and animals. Through magnification and distortion, she forces the viewer to examine and confront the ambiguous, disquieting shapes that may lie in the future.

The exhibition Quantum Shift offers two extreme yet parallel views of the internal and external world. While their motives may be different, Tsai and King’s work concentrate on isolated forms that allude to much broader and expansive realms.

Captions
Judith Berk King | Untethered | Graphite on paper | 2012
Lun-Yi (London) Tsai | Untitled (Megalomaniacal Object) | Welded aluminum with solid rivets | 30 x 30 x 43.5 inches | 2011