Paola Pivi has created her own surreal world for her exhibition Art with a view, opening October 13 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami. Showcasing both new and familiar works across multiple genres, from sculpture and photography to installation and performance art, Pivi’s work combines the ordinary and the extraordinary, juxtaposing the expected with the unexpected.
A 65-foot, rainbow-striped inflatable ladder welcomes visitors to the Bass, leaning against a wall at the museum’s entrance. Brightly colored, feathered polar bears lounge around the gallery space, while a musk ox emerges from a conical hill the same color as its fur. Pivi’s large photographs of real animals in fantastical situations adorn the gallery walls. A group of strangely diverse white animals, from kittens and pigs to ducks and llamas, converge in an alpine meadow, evoking an Edenic paradise, where species’ instinctive distrust is void, and lions lay down with lambs. A pensive donkey stands alone in a blue motorboat on the Mediterranean Sea. The dreamlike unreality is only increased by a video of 24 goldfish, their bowls belted into passenger seats on a flight to New Zealand. Pivi expertly creates a stunning new dimension, where reality is open to interpretation.
