Miguel Rio Branco
Between the Eyes, the Desert

October 13 - November 10, 2001
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 13, 2001, 6-8 pm

D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present its third exhibition by Brazilian artist Miguel Rio Branco.

Between the Eyes, the Desert is an installation first conceived in 1997 comprised of over five hundred slide-projected images combined with a musical score and sculptural elements. The sequence and rhythm of the audio-visual structure allows Rio Branco to take his images beyond his well-known use of color-saturated photography toward a three dimensional sensory environment which resonates with a poetic narrative. As with previous multi-image works, Between the Eyes, the Desert is both a journey through the melancholy of a decaying culture and a reminder of the raw beauty present in the physical world.

In the catalogue of his 1999 exhibition at la Fondation “La Caixa” in Barcelona, Spain, Rio Branco remarks: “...The suffering of a man lying out on the streets of Rio de Janeiro is the same as a man in New York or Bombay. There is suffering, pain and loneliness everywhere. This is something you can see in the installation Between the Eyes, the Desert, a gaze without communication. The gaze is nothing, it is a desert where there is often no room for feelings. Loneliness is becoming more and more apparent in the big cities. We are flooded with visual information, with images which find no point of connection in the desert of our minds.”

Miguel Rio Branco lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Concurrent with the exhibition at D’Amelio Terras, his work will be included in Brazil: Body and Soul at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and O Fio da Trama/The Thread Unraveled at El Museo del Barrio in New York; and in Virgin Territory at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. A new artist’s book Entre os olhos, o deserto will be available at the gallery.