Fujiflex print
508 x 628mm
Edition of 100
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A Logo for America was re-presented in Piccadilly Circus during the South London Gallery’s presentation of Under the Same Sun Art in Latin America Today in July 2016.
Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar creates installations, photographs, films, and community-based projects that explore issues around humanitarian crises and the relationship between the First and Third Worlds. Probing the contemporary over-saturation of media images and the limitations of art in representing atrocities, Jaar draws attention to global power and exploitation. Perhaps his best-known work, This Is Not America (A Logo for America) (1987) consisted of a sequence of projections overlooking a U.S. army recruitment station in Times Square, including the outlined map of the U.S. with the words This Is Not America written across, and the word America superimposed over all the Americas â€North, Central, and South. There’s this huge gap between reality and its possible representations. And that gap is impossible to close,” Jaar has said. So as artists, we must try different strategies for representation the neglected everyday environment can have such extraordinary complexity and beauty.
BIOGRAPHY
Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956. Jaar has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1989); Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1991); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (all 1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (both 2005); Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); and Art Institute of Chicago (2012); Fondazione Merz, Torino, Italy (2013) and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2014). A major retrospective of his work took place in 2012 in Berlin at Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst, and Alte Nationalgalerie. His work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009 and 2013, the last time as Chile’s representative); Sao Paulo Biennial (1985, 1987, and 2010); Istanbul Biennial (1995); and Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (1995 and 2000). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Jaar lives and works in New York.
