Breaking Up

THROUGH 2023 KATZ WING FOR MODERN ART DON’T TAKE YOUR LOVE AWAY FROM ME DON’T YOU LEAVE MY HEART IN MISERY IF YOU GO, THEN I’LL BE BLUE ‘CAUSE BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO.

/// NEIL SEDAKA ///

SPLIT SPLIT / / END END

We’ve all felt it—the crushing heartache from romantic love coming to a close, the desperation and disorientation that follow a deep emotional severance. With a title like Breaking Up, visitors may assume that a new installation at Phoenix Art Museum will examine this type of love and loss, connection and disconnection—emotions similar to those vocalized in Neil Sedaka’s chart-topping (and oddly upbeat?) 1962 hit “Breakin’ Up is Hard to Do.” But really, the selection of paintings, photographs, installations, and digital media works, drawn from the Museum’s collection, the collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and various private collections of Arizona-based artists, are less about love lost and more about the other ways we break up with—or break free from— unhealthy parts of our inner selves, fictions that have been considered facts, and systems that no longer (or never did) serve us. On view now, Breaking Up is organized into sections based on the types of fragmentation, or “breaking up,” that featured artists explore. Works by Deborah Butterfield, Nancy Rubins, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Lia Chaia, for example, illuminate the process of deconstructing everyday objects or materials like wood, paper, metal, and incense to create alternative structures and spaces that hold new meaning despite their repurposed media. One particular favorite of PhxArt visitors— Cornelia Parker’s Mass (Colder Darker Matter) (1997)—makes its return to the galleries, in this context asking viewers to consider how gathering bits of charcoal from an incinerated church and assembling them with translucent wire to create a suspended mass yields an experience whose parts tell us something unexpected about the whole. In contrast, a second section of the installation explores how artists take apart and reconfigure one of the most familiar forms: the human body. Featured works include those by Angela Ellsworth, Janet Toro, and Frida Orupabo. For her work Untitled (2018), Orupabo used her Instagram account (@nemiepeba) to crowdsource thousands of photos and videos of the Black experience, which she then collaged together to explore the ways the Black body, Black femininity, and sexuality converge, transcend, and are continually met with violence. The film—a combination of Orupabo’s selections with Cindy Sherman’s 1979 work Untitled Film Still #50—toggles between still and moving images, revealing famous poems and verse, a scene of a young woman styling her natural hair, a clip of Nina Simone singing “Feelings,” and more. The compilation causes the eye to wander and the mind to contemplate—the commonalities across images, the progression of time, the emotions that arise as we are drawn into the piece. Finally, viewers are encouraged to consider the many ways the heartbreak of trauma affect the human mind—how, for example, our memories, languages, and visual perceptions become fractured when we experience moments of loss and abandonment. Featured here are works by Michal Rovner, Uta Barth, Renée Green, and Tacita Dean. This section of Breaking Up also showcases works by a number of Arizona-based artists, such as Marie Navarre and Beth Ames Swartz. Additionally included are Ronna Nemitz’s video of a dog swimming in open water that leaves us breathless with panic, Jessica Palomo’s abstract black-and-white drawings that explore the shattered emotional state following the loss of a loved one, and Kristin Bauer’s restructured words and images drawn from historical propaganda and advertising that elicit reflection on the ways mass communication and powerful institutions shape our world views. All in all, it’s safe to say the installation, curated by assistant curator Rachel Sadvary Zebro, plunges deeper into the complex notions of detachment and separation than even the catchiest of top-40 hits. Featured artists and artworks pull apart expectations and biases. They tear down commonly held truths and arbitrary borders, all in the name of exposing something—or someone—more real, more true, than we ever believed possible. There’s an anxiety, a discomfort, a twinge of self-doubt that creeps up when considering all of the unlearning and relearning that can take place when experiencing artworks of this nature. But to his credit, Neil Sedaka did warn us, it wouldn’t be easy.

image credits: (page 14): Frida Orupabo, Untitled, 2018. Single-channel HD video. © Frida Orupabo from the artist’s Instagram (@nemiepeba). Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. (above, left to right) Ronna Nemitz, Endless Numbered Days, 2021. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist; Kristin Bauer, Working Title 04, 2020. Synthetic polymer pigment on canvas. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Grey Shed Studio.

Breaking Up is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members.