BELLEVUE, WA.- Bellevue Arts Museum is presenting the first solo museum exhibition in the Pacific Northwest for Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon. Oscar Tuazon: Collaborator explores the playful, shapeshifting nature of Tuazon’s collaborations and how such efforts continually challenge and revitalize his larger sculptural practice.
The exhibition features more than thirty new and existing works from the past fifteen years including new sculptures and a site-specific intervention that responds, in part, to the light-filled nature of architect Steven Holl’s design for Bellevue Arts Museum’s third floor galleries. A commissioned work, also titled Collaborator, infiltrates the gallery and adjacent Court of Light with a series of shed-like structures, in various stages of completion and prototyping. Shifting the inside and outside nature of exhibition space, Collaborator temporarily incorporates artworks by Tuazon and other artists he has worked with into its display. As with previous installations at Kunsthalle Bern and ICA London, the raw sequencing of these structures draws attention away from the overall architecture and toward the precarious, tactile, and immediate—providing a central dynamic within Tuazon’s work and the backdrop for considering a wide range of past collaborations.
The exhibition also features a survey of collaborative works from throughout Tuazon’s career, including past works with his brother and fellow artist Elias Hansen, a sound work made with performance art pioneer and conceptual architect Vito Acconci, and recent assemblage works made in concert with poet Ariana Reines. Regularly embracing the impulse to think with and through the agency of others, Tuazon punctuates his solo work with a sustained choreography of deliberate exchange, widening his own aesthetic reach along the way. This extends to ongoing dialogs with architect Steven Holl, artists Gardar Eide Einarsson and Nicholas Galanin, and artist and Native American activist Leonard Peltier, also present within the exhibition.
Tuazon lives and works in Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Indianola on the rural Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State. In 2018, his work was included in a show at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich and as part of a three-person exhibition at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, CT. Recent solo exhibitions include Oscar Tuazon: Water School, currently on view at the MSU Broad in Lansing, Michigan; Oscar Tuazon: Hammer Projects, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2016; Studio at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, in 2015; as well as solo exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2014; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, 2013; and the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, 2013. Having lived and worked in Paris, Tuazon is the co-founder of the artist collective-run gallery castillo/corrales (operative 2007-15) and currently organizes LAWS (Los Angeles Water School) in proximity to his downtown Los Angeles studio.
Tuazon’s work has been featured in several important international group exhibitions, including the 2012 Whitney Biennial, ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, and Skulptur Project Münster, among others. Tuazon studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
