Past Exhibitions

At the core of Richard Mosse’s solo show at Art Vault is a never-before-seen presentation of the Thoma Foundation’s recent acquisition from Mosse, Broken Spectre: a captivating, 66-minute film documenting the intensive deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon. The work highlights, on intersecting scales from the microscopic to the monumental, the agents and victims of the unfolding ecological catastrophe in the Amazon basin. In just the last fifty years, mass deforestation has wiped out about 20 percent of the original Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world. In 1975, only one percent of the original forest had been lost to human resource extraction. Today, ongoing deforestation is leading to species extinction, unpredictable and extreme weather patterns worldwide, and global warming.

A comprehensive selection of large-scale photographs by Mosse complement Broken Spectre, along with a special presentation of Grid (Palimi-ú), a work from 2023 comprising two interacting elements: footage shot on 35mm infrared film that documents protest speeches by Yanomami leaders who had fled for safety to aldeia Palimi-ú, a village in Northern Brazil, and multispectral photogrammetry captured by drone over extractivist fault lines and sites of environmental crimes. This film offers a heart-breaking glimpse into ground-level community-led resistance and solidarity, rallying against the industrial gaze of multinational and corporate profit.

Throughout history, artists have consistently provoked viewers to look at the world through a different lens. They have inspired a consideration of the difference between how things appear to be and how they could exist in an alternate, future, or augmented version of reality. Drawn from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection, Lucid Dreaming presents works by artists who provoke us to think about the world we live in, the ground we stand on, and to take another look at the physical and psychological world we previously thought of as fixed as something more flexible and capable of change.

Artists include Refik Anadol, Jim Campbell, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Olafur Eliasson, Miles Greenberg, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gary Hill, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lee Nam Lee, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Tatsuo Miyajima, Jamie Nares, Iván Navarro, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Quayola, Hiraki Sawa, UVA (United Visual Artists), and Yuge Zhou.

Filtered through hue, tone, and spatial perception, our visual experience of the world is shaped by the technologies of our time. A plethora of options are available on our ever-present mini cameras, which can instantly intensify and shift the mood of any scene. Gaming spaces, where so much time is spent in recreation, limit, expand, and warp spatial understanding. These altered perspectives affect how we move through virtual realms, ultimately influencing how we conceive, build, and occupy actual spaces. Technologies expand, change, grow obsolete, and innovate in a heartbeat as they blossom into bursts of chromatic color and move us with the simplest of achromatic shadows. Filtered offers a light-infused journey through a selection of works from the Thoma Foundation.

Artists include Angela Bulloch, Herbert Bayer, Daniel Canogar, Max Cole, Petra Cortright, John Gerrard, Huntrezz Janos, Olafur Eliasson, Ivan Navarro, Matthew Kluber, LoVid, Sohei Nishino, Alan Rath, Omar Rodriguez-Graham, David Benjamin Sherry, Jennifer Steinkamp, Leo Villareal, Kumi Yamashita, and Marina Zurkow.

Lust Severs explores functional and experiential aspects of technology. Guest curated by pioneering film artist Jennifer West, this exhibition interrogates how the digital tools and physical materiality of technology mediate both bodily sensations and mental conceptions of the world around us. Playing to the often-discomfiting collision of the human body, culture, and technology, the title of the exhibition is taken from an auto-correct mistake that changed “list servers” to “lust severs” in an email chain. Spanning from the 1960s to the present, artworks displayed in the exhibition employ digital and analog video, LED sculpture, flatscreens, sculpture, computer-generated imagery, projection, and mixed media.

Artists include LaTurbo Avedon, Dara Birnbaum, Jim Campbell, Sarah Frost, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Desmond Paul Henry, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Cara Romero, Elias Sime, Cauleen Smith, Anne Spalter, Stan VanDerBeek, Carrie Mae Weems, Jennifer West, and Saya Woolfalk.

The first floor of Art Vault is dedicated to Networked Nature, an exhibition of Digital & Media artworks from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation that connect with nature’s creative energy.

Artworks on this floor feature artists’ pioneering approaches to artificial intelligence, machine learning, real-time software, custom algorithms, and virtual environments.

Artists include Nancy Burson, Jim Campbell, Daniel Canogar, Guillermo Galindo, Ja’Tovia Gary, John Gerrard, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Gary Hill, Madeline Hollander, Christian Marclay, Bruce Nauman, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Martin Reinhart & Virgil Widrich, Miguel Ángel Rios, Peter Sarkisian, Hiraki Sawa, Elias Sime, Sommerer & Migonneau, Jennifer Steinkamp, Siebren Versteeg.

The second floor of Art Vault is dedicated to Saint Somebody: Technologies of the Divine, bringing together artworks from across the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation’s diverse collections of Digital & Media Art, Contemporary Southwestern, and Art of the Spanish Americas that are rarely exhibited in parallel.

Saint Somebody asks: What does a saint look like? How do their miracles appear? Artists have helped to answer these questions for centuries. The litany of saints is also a history of art.

Artists include José Armijo, Dara Birnbaum, R. Luke DuBois, Carla Gannis, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Desmond Paul Henry, Jason Salavon, Cauleen Smith, Anne Spalter, Bill Viola, Saya Woolfalk, Nancy Burson, and an unidentified artist from 18th-century Cuzco, Peru.