Exhibitions: Raw/Cooked: Lan Tuazon

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  RAW/COOKED
  Host to more artists than any other place in the country, Brooklyn has become one of the creative capitals of the world. Thousands of artists, from the established to those early in their careers, are making art in Brooklyn every day. While Williamsburg emerged in the late 1980s as the frontier for artists in search of affordable studio space, the years since then have witnessed an efflorescence of artistic activity in many other areas throughout the borough—from Bushwick to Red Hook, from Dumbo to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Hardly any corner of Brooklyn lacks a vibrant creative community.
  
  To celebrate and affirm the primacy of Brooklyn as a center of artistic productivity, the Brooklyn Museum is proud to present Raw/Cooked, a series of five projects by under-the-radar practitioners who work in the borough. The artists were invited to select sites within the Museum in which to present their projects and to consider their work in the context of the Museum's distinctive architecture and historical collections.
  
  The title Raw/Cooked suggests several aspects of the artistic process: the transformation of raw materials that occurs in the act of art-making; the elusive sense of when a work-in-progress is "done" and ready to show; and the recognition of distinctly different aesthetic tastes.
  
  The participants were selected by Eugenie Tsai, the John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, from a roster of candidates proposed by an advisory committee made up of five distinguished Brooklyn artists: Ron Gorchov, Michael Joo, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Amy Sillman, and Mickalene Thomas. Each committee member was asked to suggest artists who have not yet had a major museum exhibition and do not have gallery representation.
  
  The artists participating in the series are Kristof Wickman, Lan Tuazon, Shura Chernozatonskaya, Heather Hart, and Ulrike Müller.

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  Raw/Cooked: Lan Tuazon
  Lan Tuazon’s three-part exhibition, On the Wrong Side of History, challenges the reasoning behind museum classification and display. Dispensing with chronology and origin as the primary frames of organization, Tuazon returns to a premodern system in which objects are grouped together by thematic relationships and similarities of function, investigating the possibility of finding new meanings in the Museum’s collection.
  
  The first part of the exhibition is an architectural piece constructed from wood platforms and Plexiglas vitrines. These objects originally served to display and protect works of art, but here they come together as a new work.
  
  The second part includes three ink drawings; each depicts a reordered selection of objects from the Museum’s collection, exploring an alternative approach to museum organization. A printed floor plan showing the location of some of these pieces is available for visitors.
  
  Part three comprises seven “sculptural combines” created to be displayed alongside artifacts in the third-floor Egyptian galleries. The sculptures interpret each artifact’s conceptual content, according to one of seven types of relationships, or “resemblances,” and are accompanied by short explanatory texts.
  
  Born in the Philippines in 1976, Tuazon received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union and her M.F.A. from Yale University (2002).