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http:// --> Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Obituaries Weather Archive Hot Topics Forum Photo Gallery Past Readers Polls Revels Etcetera Backpage O-Zone Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad Online Games Movie Preview October 23, 2006 Newspin By David Segal The Associated Press There is always a great story behind the photographs of Vik Muniz, and for his latest series, "Pictures of Junk," the story is about heavy lifting and gunfire. Let's start with the gunfire. The tons of junk in these massive photos were collected from a junkyard in one of Rio de Janeiro's worst neighborhoods, nicknamed the Gaza Strip. As Muniz and his assistants rummaged, members of two rival drug gangs tried to kill one another. "We'd hear the bullets over our heads," says Muniz, an elfin man of 45 who seems perpetually amused, even by this. "The gangs in Rio are insane." The heavy lifting came in hauling several truckloads of urban detritus: tons of wires, tires, tubing, sinks, pylons, trash cans, fans, shelves, barrels, rusted appliances and thousands of nuts, bolts and chains, all of it driven to a massive dockside hangar, part of which Muniz had turned into a makeshift studio. He and his team spent weeks arranging the junk on the floor, meticulously re-creating Old Master paintings of mythological figures, beginning with Goya's famous take on Saturn. What looks like the flesh of the characters in these tableaux is actually the hangar floor. After endless tweaking, Muniz would climb to a catwalk 40 feet up and photograph an assemblage, which was about the size of a basketball court, with a large-format camera. Then he'd clear the floor, head back to the junkyard and start all over again. "The first one we did took six months," says Muniz. "After that we got more efficient." The result is Caravaggio meets "Sanford and Son." The images on display at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in Chelsea are huge, about 9 feet by 6 feet, and whimsically gorgeous. There is some winking humor here: paying homage to treasure with trash; enshrining the permanent with the disposed-of. There are some eye-tickling shifts in perspective, too. From a distance the photos look as if they were snapped up close; up close, you realize they were shot from yards away. As your brain absorbs this optical flimflam, it's hard to suppress a giggle. This is vintage Muniz, right down to the anything-goes approach to raw materials. During his nearly 20-year career, this Brazilian turned New Yorker has made art with beans, dirt, sugar, pepper, and fake blood. He made horror-movie stars out of caviar and reproduced a series of iconic images — Leonardo's "Last Supper," publicity stills of Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando — with chocolate syrup. He has conjured Mona Lisas out of peanut butter and jelly and a Medusa from a plate of spaghetti. (Each work is essentially a drawing or sculpture that Muniz discards once it's photographed.) His canon would merely amuse if it weren't so dazzlingly executed. "He's a virtuoso," says Peter Boswell, curator of the Miami Art Museum. "And it's amazing how many levels his works succeeds at. You can call him a photographer, but he's also a superb draftsman, a conceptualist, an illusionist and an art historian." He's also on a roll. "Reflex" is on tour — Miami, Tampa, Seattle, San Diego and Montreal--and winning raves. The Museum of Modern Art, which is basically Cooperstown for working artists, owns several of his works and wants more, according to Peter Galassi, the museum's curator of photography. "There's this amazing wit and verve and variety, and this huge affection for images of all kinds," Galassi says. "In a way all of his work does the same thing, but he does it so many different ways and with so much different material that he makes it incredibly rich." Muniz has a cultishly devoted fan base among collectors; a photo from his chocolate series fetched $102,000 at auction last year. And he is popular enough to have achieved Highly Coveted Backlash Status: Critics consider him a maestro of special effects rather than an artist whose work will endure. Muniz appears to be the world's least tortured artist. He has edge but no cynicism. He speaks with a slight Brazilian accent — and pretty much nonstop. His favorite topics include theories of perception, the anatomy of the eye, the history of art and the advantages of Bosco over other chocolate syrups when used as paint. "I tried them all, and Bosco is the thickest," he says. "I swear they made it with art in mind." Muniz was struggling at the margins of the New York scene until a 1996 vacation in St. Kitts, where he and his wife, artist Janaina Tschape, befriended some local kids whose parents worked in a sugar factory. At home, Muniz bought some black paper, then re-created photos of the kids he'd snapped — in sugar. The mix of black from the paper and white from the sugar yielded depth and uncanny clarity. The series, "Sugar Children," earned Muniz a spot in the highly esteemed New Photography show at MoMA in 1997. "That was my big break," he says. Deciding that the images, rather than the originals, would be his art freed him to fine-tune his visual sleights of hand, and to think big. He once hired a skywriter to draw the shapes of clouds in the sky, then photographed the "clouds." Most often, he's riffing off an easily recognized image — a photo of Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, which he reproduced with thousands of tiny diamonds loaned by a jeweler. For another series, he reconstructed a landscape by Claude Lorrain with 12,000 yards of thread. "Vik has managed to make a form of conceptual art that makes people feel intelligent instead of stupid," says artist James Hyde, a friend. "That's quite an innovation. And he is able to do it because Vik really likes people." Leave a Comment: Advertisement: Advertisement: Paid Advertising Inkjet Printers Student Loans Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Advertisement: Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.