Allyson Vieira: The Plural Present

This first-ever in-depth look at New York artist Allyson Vieira (born 1979) investigates the contextual variations that occurred when her exhibition The Plural Present moved from Kunsthalle Basel to Swiss Institute in New York. Focusing on material, process and structure, Vieira surveys the continuity between the art of antiquity and the art of today--evoking Polykleitos and Robert Smithson in equal measure--and possesses a conscious understanding of the importance of time as it relates to place. In this eponymous publication, artist Joe Fyfe maps Vieira’s relationship to antiquity; William Hanley uses the language of materials as he parses through the works; Amelia Groom, drawing on George Kubler’s radical approach to history in The Shape of Time (1962), considers Vieira’s "four-dimensional" approach to sculpture; and the curators of both exhibitions discuss the site specificity of their iterations with the artist. Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.