Flight Patterns

by Cornelia Butler, Francis Pound

Flight Patterns highlights contemporary artists primarily working in the Pacific Basin--Southern California, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia--whose work addresses the specific topographical conditions and experience of living in this geographically and geopolitically dynamic region. As its conceptual foundation, Flight Patterns rethinks topographical practices of photography since the 1970s, looking at current manifestations of the topographical impulse in landscape-oriented work. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue include new projects, recent work from the 1990s, and historically significant works of photography, film, video, and painting by 23 artists, including Doug Aitken, Rodney Graham, Anthony Hernandez, Tracey Moffatt, Paul Outerbridge, Allan Sekula, Miles Coolidge, Simon Leung. Flight Patterns introduces the work of West Coast American artists as well as those artists working in regions where there is a parallel history of landscapes and their representation, and where similar postcolonial issues are at stake. A landmark artistic, social, and geographical document, Flight Patterns highlights a diversity of artistic approaches--both formalist and conceptual--to one of the most fascinating and complex areas of the planet.

Genres: Art

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2000

About the author

Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. From 2006-2013, she served as the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York City). Prior to that, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from 1996-2005. Butler also held curatorial positions at the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), Artists Space (New York City), and the Des Moines Arts Center (Iowa). Her multimedia exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution dealt with international feminist art of the 1970s. Butler is a 1980 graduate of Marlborough School, and a 1984 graduate of Scripps College.

(from Wikipedia)