Madeline Hollander: Sunrise/Sunset

About

Madeline Hollander’s Sunrise/Sunset, a live installation featuring ninety-six recycled automobile headlights which operates a perpetual world clock, will inaugurate Jeffrey Deitch’s second Los Angeles gallery space. Hollander highlights the choreography of the invisible systems that shape human experience.

The headlights form a global time zone map that performs with the earth’s rotation. As the sun rises and sets across the globe, the headlights react, turning on when moving into the night and off when entering daylight, blinking and shifting in real-time according to their location in the world. The result is an image of global connectedness emerging from the interaction between individual actions, technological automation, and cosmic forces.

Hollander’s work is a unique fusion of choreography and sculpture. She explores how the human body in motion negotiates its limits within systems of technology and daily rituals. Her performances and installations present perpetually looping events that intervene within spatial, psychological and temporal landscapes. Sunrise/Sunset continues her recent research into traffic patterns and instances of automation that attempt to align the body with the cosmos.

Fascinated by the responsive nature of headlight technology which reacts to movement, light and weather conditions, the artist syncs each column of headlights to a different time zone. In addition to creating a live and ceaseless global clock, the artist has developed a networked map and a cascading electronic dance. The installation is accompanied by an original score by the composer Celia Hollander.

Sunrise/Sunset was developed with the support of BMW as part of the BMW Open Work by Frieze program.

Sunrise/Sunset is Madeline Hollander’s second project with Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. She created the choreography for Urs Fischer’s PLAY, presented at the gallery in 2019.

Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Madeline Hollander (b. 1986, Los Angeles) studied cultural anthropology and visual arts at Barnard College (BA) and Bard College (MFA), New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2021); the University of Texas at Austin, Visual Arts Center (2020); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2020); The Artist’s Institute, New York (2018). Her work has been exhibited at the Brandhorst Museum, Munich, Germany (2022); Performa Biennial, New York (2021); The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut (2020); the Whitney Biennial curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta (2019), Helsinki Contemporary, Finland (2019), the Work Marathon Festival at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2018), and Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019). As a choreographer, Hollander’s pieces have been performed at the Joyce, New York; The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Louvre Abu Dhabi with the Los Angeles Dance Project, and she has collaborated with Jordan Peele on his feature film Us (2019) and Urs Fisher’s immersive installation PLAY at Gagosian, New York (2019) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019).

Jeffrey Deitch is opening a second Los Angeles gallery space at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard at the corner of North Orange Drive, a block north from its large gallery at 925 North Orange Drive. 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard is a historic building, the long-time home of the legendary recording studio Radio Recorders. Many of the greatest musicians from the 1940s through the 1970s including Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix recorded there. The building was most recently occupied by LAX Art. In addition to its exhibition space, the new gallery will feature a branch of Des Pair books, recently celebrated by Los Angeles Magazine as the best independent bookstore in the city.

Image: Detail of Madeline Hollander, Sunrise/Sunset, 2021.