TAMPA< FL.- Executive Director Todd D. Smith announces the Tampa Museum of Art schedule for Summer 2010. Among the highlights, two exhibitions will explore the exciting genre of new media, which incorporates technology with video, sound, light and computation.

"Taken together," Smith says, "the two exhibitions on view in the museum's major changing-exhibition galleries demonstrate the complex role that media and technology play in the working practice of contemporary artists. They give the museum an opportunity to spark a conversation about art that expands the field of traditional forms."

Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions, May 8 – September 5, 2010.
MacKechnie Gallery
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions presents four films by this critically acclaimed Danish artist. Just’s films explore the complexities and contradictions of human emotion. Using overlapping cinematic, musical and literary references, his films adapt popular songs to communicate the vulnerability and insecurity in personal relationships. Since 2002, Just has explored the nature of affection and emotional release, often through role reversals and the shifting of power between two male leads. In many of his films, his two protagonists express a yearning and restrained passion for each other that unfold into an emotional performance of song and dance. These short films present polished Hollywood production values that use narrative storylines, as well as create a film noir-like atmosphere without a conventional plotline.

Just’s recent work continues to develop his moody and intimate environments, but with a new focus on female protagonists. His films comment on gender politics and the possibility of relationships that cross a generational divide — but more importantly, they present a broader, existential search for identity.

Just was born in Copenhagen in 1974 and is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. He currently resides in New York and Copenhagen. His work has been shown extensively worldwide, in galleries and museums, from the Hammer in Los Angeles to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work is in the collections of institutions such as the Tate in London, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Leo Villareal: Recent Works, May 8 - January 3, 2011.
MacKechnie Gallery
The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to present an exhibition of interior works by light sculptor Leo Villareal. In 2009, the museum commissioned Villareal to create the inaugural work utilizing the LED lights that are situated between the layers of perforated metal on the front of the museum’s South Façade. This 12,000 square foot work, Sky (Tampa) was unveiled at the museum’s opening in February and has remained on view each night since.

Villareal is also known for his gallery-sized works and this exhibition, Leo Villareal: Recent Works, will feature three of these works. According to Todd D. Smith, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art, we wanted to offer our visitors a chance to get up close to Villareal’s works and understand how the smaller, interior works work in concert with his larger, exterior works.” In addition, the museum will include a video loop of the exterior of the building to provide further context for the understanding and appreciation of his artistic outlook.

Sky (Tampa), 2009
The exterior of the new museum features programmable LED lights, 45 feet high and 300 feet long, embedded within two-layers of perforated aluminum panels. In daylight, the museum’s façade creates a moiré-like pattern, and in darkness the LED light installation glows with Villarreal’s signature light-coded and hypnotic dance.

Sky (Tampa) showcases movement and light; a sequencing of patterns created by Villareal’s custom coded software that emerge as a whole and result in random templates of flash, fade, trail and color. The matrix of 144 four-foot light emitting diode illuminators and 28 Inablers display a visual language of non-repeating patterns.

Sky (Tampa) is on view every evening beginning at dusk and is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Villareal resides in New York, has been included in solo and group exhibitions, and made numerous site-specific commissions throughout the world, at major cultural institutions. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C recently purchased his work Multiverse, which is on view in the corridor that connects the museum’s East and West Wings. Other installations include: P.S.1 MoMA, Queens, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS. Born in Albuquerque, NM, in 1967, Villareal began experimenting with light, sound, and video while studying set design and sculpture at Yale University, where he received his BA. He earned his MPS in the design of new media, computational media, and embedded computing from New York University's pioneering Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.