Project Atrium: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Opening Celebration @ MOCA

Join MOCA Jacksonville for the last celebration of its 100th anniversary year with the opening of Project Atrium: Rafael Lozano Hemmer Spectral Subjects on Dec. 12 at 7 p.m.! Enjoy an evening of art and community featuring live music, the MOCA Bar, and a new installation by world-renowned artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

This event is free and open to all. MOCA Members are invited to an exclusive early access preview of the exhibitions. Not a member? Join today!

is a new interactive installation designed to transform the Atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville. The piece is a thermal observatory, showing a constantly updating map of the room's temperature on three colossal wall-projections. Using state of the art Xenics Dione thermographic cameras, the project detects heat and cold in the environment, including the building’s air circulation and ventilation, visitors’ body heat, and inanimate objects. As temperature is detected, the artwork generates a particle system that is a visible manifestation of its dissipation in the museum, showing, for example, how body heat emanates outward and away from visitors and is exchanged with the cooler, air-conditioned atmosphere.

As with previous biometric art projects by Lozano-Hemmer, the piece is a call to think of the human body as a continuum with the environment around us. The skin is not the limit of our body but only its visible limit. Sound, smell, heat, air/breath, biological waste, and even chemical signals in the form of pheromones are constantly seeping in and out across our body's visible limits, our skin, which is incorrectly described as the boundary between the public and the private. Written and oral language, actions, movement, exteroception, are examples of other manifestations of our extension into our surroundings, as are the resulting buildings, songs, environmental decimation, artworks, and the Anthropocene in general.

Spectral Subjects emphasizes the active role of the spectator as an integral part of the artwork without whom the piece does not exist. The work is meant to perform the double duty of acting as a critical materialization of the reach of our society’s technological perception and providing a playful expression of inclusion and presence, albeit inside a society of the spectacle, selfies, and reality TV.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency."
Hemmer has exhibited his work around the globe, and he was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007.

EXHIBITION PRESENTING SPONSORS
Joan and Preston Haskell

EXHIBITION SUPPORTER
Wende Wilson

PROJECT ATRIUM SPONSOR
Driver, McAfee, Hawthorne & Diebenow, PLLC

All exhibitions and programs during MOCA Jacksonville's 100th anniversary year are made possible through the generous support of our .

Questions? Contact MOCA Membership Coordinator Le Milford at [email protected]

CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF CREATIVITY AND COMMUNITY

The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2024, as the oldest art museum in the region and one of the first contemporary art museums to be established in the United States. This celebration year is an opportunity for MOCA to give back to the community that has been its home for a century by presenting groundbreaking exhibitions and programs that will engage the community and elevate Jacksonville as a regional destination for arts and culture.

About MOCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (MOCA) is the only museum in Northeast Florida dedicated to contemporary art. MOCA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and a Cultural Institute of the University of North Florida. The museum serves the community and its visitors through exhibitions, collections, educational programs, and publications designed to enhance an understanding and appreciation of contemporary art with particular emphasis on works created from 1960 to the present.

Located in the heart of historic Downtown Jacksonville, MOCA is one of the city’s most significant cultural assets. Among the most prominent contemporary art museums in the Southeast, MOCA’s exhibitions and programs set the pace for arts and art-integrated programming on a regional and national stage. Renowned in this community, MOCA casts the spotlight on Jacksonville as a burgeoning, vital arts destination.

The museum is also a cornerstone of Jacksonville’s multibillion-dollar downtown revitalization plan with exhibitions and programs that bring new visitors to the civic core during the day, at night, and on weekends.

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