Overview
Internationally renowned artist Pipilotti Rist presents her major installation 4th Floor to Mildness in a West Coast premiere and only second exhibition in the U.S.
Pipilotti Rist dissolves exhibition spaces through luminous color, moving imagery, and melodic sound. 4th Floor to Mildness immerses us in a soft, aquatically inspired environment, where a film shot underwater plays across two biomorphic-shaped screens hanging from the ceiling. A soundtrack by experimental musician Soap&Skin/Anja Plaschg adds to the ambience with lyrics about dreams, love, and memories as the camera catches glimpses of floating bodies. Two projected light circles move across the room, enlightening it with visceral hues. For Rist, this light represents a “desire to turn yourself inside out.”
Rist creates conditions for visitors to come together in unconventional ways so that we might better understand our relationships to one another, our own bodies, and nature. In the gallery, raft-like beds provide a place for us to rest and share social space as we watch the projection overhead. She asks: “What happens to our perceptions when we don’t have to stand or fight gravity?” The sensation of floating may evoke a sense of returning to an elemental state. For the artist, the work “describes the fantasy of [ourselves] being an organic plant . . . and simulates our dissolution into water, mud, slime, molecules and atoms.”
Originally created for the fourth floor of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, PAM adapted the work to the Crumpacker Center with the assistance of the artist’s team at Atelier Rist; production partner Portland Garment Factory, a woman-owned B-corp and zero-waste creative factory, created the curtains, beds, and bed coverings, and Figure Plant engineered and fabricated the hanging screens.
Pipilotti Rist: 4th Floor to Mildness is curated by Sara Krajewski, Eichholz Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is supported by the Exhibition Series Sponsors, Pro Helvetia, Ronni LaCroute, Contemporary Art Council of the Portland Art Museum.
Acknowledgements
- Ronni LaCroute
- Pro Helvetia
- Contemporary Art Council of the Portland Art Museum
- Angela Summers