Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz, "After the Bath, after Edgar Degas," 2011 via Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

In his latest series Pictures of Magazines 2, Brooklyn-based Vik Muniz continues his practice of photographing his own found object mosaic works. Muniz is the subject of last year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Waste Land. The film chronicles the artist’s return to his native Brazil where he finds inspiration for his next project on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz befriends catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, and hires them as artist assistants to arrange garbage into giant portraits of fellow catadores.

At Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Muniz instead recreates iconic imagery out of torn magazine pages and the result is surprisingly painterly. Each tear replaces the gesture of a brushstroke as the topography mimics globs of paint. Thousands of decontextualized media scraps become a visual miscellany suggesting a constant stream of updates. When arranged into the likeness of a single work, once labored over by a single artist, Muniz seems to point out a discrepancy of focus and value over time.

Pictures of Magazines 2 is now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea until October 15^th.