Mia Feuer: Suspended Landscapes

March 05, 2010 - April 17, 2010

Overview

Mia Feuer engaged Transformer’s project space from floor to ceiling in the creation of a large-scale, site-specific installation that acted as a continuation of her on-going sculptural exploration of metaphorical terrain.

Fabricated from foam and aircraft cable, Mia's brightly colored, intersecting construction cranes and pulley systems formed a “landscape” of impressions that the Winnipeg-born artist encountered during frequent travels up and down the US East Coast.

The artist’s perception of construction cranes as macabre tools that deface seemingly pristine environments constituted the underlying foundation ofSuspended Landscape. This conceit compelled her to create the entangled, three-dimensional “landscape painting” that traversed Transformer’s project space, its elements appearing to collide and come to rest at violent intersections. Despite their grand scale, these enormous architectural tools are easily overlooked symbols of destruction, and then – of rebuilding. Suspended Landscape projected a sense of dislocation and chaos by featuring these ubiquitous cranes, now crippled and debilitated. A tangled mass masquerading as metal and threaded with cables and pulleys, Suspended Landscape revealed the fragility of forces that once seemed indestructible.

Mia Feuer was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2004 and her MFA in 2009, from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Mia has received numerous travel/research, production and creation grants from the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Jewish Foundation of Manitoba and The Lila Acheson Readers Digest Foundation. In 2007, supported by The Winnipeg Arts Council, she traveled to Palestine to facilitate sculptural workshops in the West Bank with Palestinian children. She has received a full two-month fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, a two month fellowship at Seven Below Arts Initiative in Burlington, VT and has been invited to participate in a Millay Colony for the Arts residency in 2010 and a residency with Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in 2011.

Solo Exhibitions include Outworks Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada in 2006, FLUXspace, in Philadelphia, PA, Dorfman Projects, NY, NY in 2009; and Transformer, Washington, DC; Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA and The Firehouse Gallery in Burlington VT and The Contemporary Arts Center of Atlanta, Atlanta GA in 2010. Mia currently lives and works in Washington, DC and teaches sculpture at George Mason University and American University. The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for offering additional support for Suspended Landscape.