Math Bass: Crowd Rehearsal: The Jewish Museum, New York

New York, NY, October 25, 2017 - The Jewish Museum presents Math Bass: Crowd Rehearsal, on view in the Museum’s Skirball Lobby from November 2, 2017 through April 22, 2018.

Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass (b. 1981) works across video and performance as well as painting and sculpture, which she executes in a distinctly graphic style. In her installation Crowd Rehearsal, a svelte, ladderlike sculpture draped with a coatlike painting is set against two canvases with nearly identical imagery. The title and forms suggest but do not show human bodies and actions.

Bass grew up in a Jewish home, regularly attending synagogue, where ceremonies, rituals, and text influenced her predilection for the shrouding, pictographs, and repetition that infuse Crowd Rehearsal. Cloaked forms and empty spaces punctuate these works, imbuing them with a sense of contingency or incompleteness. This resistance to fixity is in tension with her hard-edged, graphic style.

The paintings included in the installation are part of a series titled Newz!, which the artist began in 2012. Each painting shares a title whose letters—N, E, W, and Z—can be rotated to form Z, W, M, and N. These small shifts turn a comprehensible word into a collection of random letters and highlight the instability and mutability of meaning.