SEATTLE, WA.- Vik Muniz: Reflex organized by the Miami Art Museum, surveys the work of internationally acclaimed, Brazilian-born, conceptual photographer Vik Muniz (American, b. 1961) in an exhibition of approximately one hundred photographs. It is on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum through January 15, 2007. Admission is $5 and free for SAM members.

Since the late 1980s Muniz has recorded the camera images he makes by hand. Whether constructed in two or three dimensions, his work uses non-traditional materials ranging from chocolate, thread, dust, toy soldiers and diamonds. He often references well known paintings, sculptures, or historical photographs. Like many artists of his generation, Muniz questions photography’s truth-telling capacity, and explores how our culture of images – reproductions made in print, on television and the computer – impact visual experience. His photographs blur the line separating abstraction from representation, and explore how visual information is constructed, presented and received. Fascinated by techniques of photography – its capacity for deception, optical illusion and visual puns – Muniz challenges perception, and calls into question what we see and how we see. In the process the artist continually shifts between roles as painter, sculptor, draftsman, photographer, writer, conceptualist, prankster, and critic. The fully illustrated color catalogue which accompanies the exhibition is an artistic biography written by Vik Muniz.

The Best of Life – For this series Muniz drew from memory a number of well-known images from the mass media—such as John Kennedy, Jr. saluting at his father’s funeral—then photographed and reprinted them using a dot-matrix process so that they resembled their printed sources. The series provokes viewers to consider the role of selective memory in identifying familiar images; Equivalents – Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’ famous cloud studies, Muniz used cotton to simulate the popular pastime of finding images in cloud formations; Pictures of Thread – In this series, Muniz used thousands of feet of thread to reproduce landscapes by Corot, Constable, Ruisdael and others; The Sugar Children – For this series, Muniz used sugar to draw the portraits of children of Caribbean sugar cane workers; Pictures of Chocolate – Muniz used chocolate syrup as a drawing tool in this series which he recreates well-known known photographs and works of art; Pictures of Earthworks - Muniz created both large-scale and tabletop-sized earthworks and photographed them in a manner that renders their scale indefinable. ,li>Pictures of Color – For this series, Muniz arranged paint color chips to create pointillist renderings of images from art history; Pictures of Magazines – Muniz used millions of circular pieces of paper punched from mass media publications to create portraits of acquaintances and famous artworks; Monads – Muniz reproduced well-known photographs, many of them relating to children, entirely from plastic toy figures of people and animals; Pictures of Diamonds – Muniz renders the images of glamorous Hollywood stars in glittering jewels; Pictures of Junk – Muniz organized caches of derelict materials to reproduce paintings by artists such as Caravaggio and Goya on an enormous scale.

Muniz was born in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil, and moved to the United States in 1983; he currently lives and works in New York.

Muniz has exhibited internationally since 1989. He has had one-person exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York (1998, traveled); the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sào Paulo and Museu de Art Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (2001); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001); the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2002); the Menil Collection in Houston (2002); the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2003); the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, in Rome (2003); the Fundación Telefonica in Madrid (2004) and the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art in Dublin (2004). He was the Brazilian representative at the 49th Venice Biennial (2001) and created a commissioned work for the exterior of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY (2003).

Vik Muniz: Reflex was organized by Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, with support from Miami Art Museum’s Annual Exhibition Fund. Additional support provided by Duggal Visual Solutions.