Pipilotti Rist
PAST
31 OCT 1998 / 24 JAN 1999Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss artist and musician who scripts and produces her own videos, sometimes appearing in them herself. Her work frequently employs the seductive visual techniques of cinema and television to create emblems of feminine experience. She draws an analogy between her medium of video and a woman’s handbag as compact container of both artifice and personal expression. Following this comparison, the art of Pipilotti Rist investigates the “handbag” of the psyche, and in the process reveals its contents.
Artist Bios
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist was born on June 21, 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland. She likes red beets a lot. Her focus is video/audio installations because there is room in them for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex and friendliness) – like in a compact handbag. Her opinion is: Art’s task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities, and to destroy clichés and prejudices. Rist’s work has been exhibited widely at international museums and festivals including the biennials in São Paulo, Venice, Istanbul, the Caribbean, Santa Fe, and Sydney. Her multimedia video works such as, “I‘m Not The Girl Who Misses Much” (1986)‚ “Sip My Ocean” (1996), “Remake of the Weekend” (1998), and her Public Art Fund, NY commissioned “Open My Glade” (2000) blur the boundaries between visual art and popular culture, exploring the unfamiliar in the everyday. Her lush, seductive imagery employs the idiom of commercial advertising and music videos to create a highly individual artistic language which is informed by her past experiences in a music band and as a set designer.VIEW ARTIST