Los Angeles artist (and one of ArtReview‘s 2016 Future Greats) Max Hooper Schneider has been announced as the winner of the fifth BMW Art Journey prize, for his proposed project Planetary Vitrine: The Reef as Event. Hooper Schneider was selected from a shortlist of three artists, including Maggie Lee and Beto Shwafaty, whose work were presented in the Positions sector for emerging artists at last year’s Art Basel Miami.
For his project, Hooper Schneider will go on a maritime exploration of coral reefs around the globe, including the Indo-West Pacific, where the majority of the planet’s corals are found, as well as Lake Baikal in Russia and the coast of Madagascar. Other stops will include pilgrimages to seminal sites ‘in the development of the coral imaginary in science and art’: Cocos Keeling Islands, where Charles Darwin conducted fieldwork for his 1842 treatise ‘The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs’; and the Bahamas, to where André Breton took an imaginary trip via readymade photographic representations of Bahamian coral.
The outcome will include dimensions of research and documentation as well as sculptural events, including some of the artist’s signature ecosystems contained in glass-and-acrylic vitrines. For this project, the artist plans on burying empty vitrines at sea near one or more of the visited sites for the coral and reef, and other natural and human participants to ‘create’ or inhabit them, with the aim of exhuming and displaying them in the future.
21 February 2017
