HOUSTON, TX.- The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Pipilotti Rist, the first comprehensive U.S. survey of the seminal work of the Swiss video artist. Organized by curator Paola Morsiani, the project brings together Rist�s most significant work from the mid-1980s to the present. Pipilotti Rist will be on view through January 14, 2007.

�Pipilotti Rist and Demetrius Oliver are two innovative and distinctly personal voices in contemporary art. As master manipulators of their media, both artists provoke viewers into contemplating broad issues through individual actions,� said Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Director Marti Mayo. �While Rist�s videos use the artist�s self to convey a wider sense of the female body and psyche, Oliver�s self-portraits use his persona to highlight historical and social themes. We are proud to premiere these two exhibitions for our diverse regional, national and international audiences, and to continue the museum�s tradition of presenting the best and most exciting art of our time.�

Pipilotti Rist includes eight of Rist�s early single-channel videos, six large wall projections, one video installation with a monitor, and a video installation created for a public space. The exhibition will feature a selection of significant works spanning her career, such as I�m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Sip My Ocean (1996), in which pleasurable images and music quickly become metaphors for hysteria and suffocation, and Ever is Overall (1997), in which the camera follows a female walking through city streets, smashing car windows with an iron flower as she meanders. Through multiple video projections, unconventional viewpoints and close-ups, and large-scale installations that envelop the viewer, Rist�s work dissolves the conventional boundaries between artist and audience.

For more than twenty years, Rist has focused on the idea of the female self. By contextualizing the female body in all its sensory and biological functions, and by layering references to woman, body and landscape in her work, her installations merge feelings of desire, sensuality and fantasy with feminist politics of identity and empowerment to create an intense emotional experience.

This unprecedented examination of the development and significance of Rist�s oeuvre sheds new light on her influential and intensely personal fusion of art and visual culture, not only in her ubiquitous female characters, but also in her pioneering installations with image and sound media.

�Through her use of video, Rist combines the worlds of art history and mass culture to create her own visual language,� said exhibition curator Paola Morsiani. �She uses this convergence to intelligently explore the power of our mind and its connection to the body as well as the pervasiveness of our sexual experience and its link to our mortality; and she expresses her profound empathy and hope for the times in which we live.�

Pipilotti Rist was born in 1962 in Switzerland, and studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (2005 and 1997); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004); the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2000); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1998); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996). She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Accompanying the exhibition, which is organized by Morsiani for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a subsequent national tour, will be a 150-page catalogue with essays by Morsiani and Rachel Teagle, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (where the exhibition will travel), an interview with the artist by novelist and art critic Linda Yablonsky, extensive color reproductions of exhibited work, and a comprehensive illustrated biography, bibliography and videography.

Morsiani was recently honored by the President of the Italian Republic with the title of �Cavaliere dell�Ordine della Stella della solidariet� italiana� for her significant contributions to the appreciation of Italian language and culture world-wide. As a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Morsiani has organized internationally-acclaimed exhibitions furthering awareness of contemporary Italian and international art, including Perspectives 147: Adrian Paci (2005) and When 1 is 2: The Art of Alghiero e Boetti (2002). She has also contributed critical essays to numerous exhibition catalogues and journals on artists such as Inka Essenhigh, Nader Ahriman, and Dario Robleto, and on contemporary video and film. Morsiani received her MA in art history, summa cum laude, from the University of Padua in Italy and received an MA in Arts Administration from New York University. She has been with the Museum since 1999.