Va-Va-VOOM

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More About

• Princess Caroline of Monaco
• Johnny Depp
• Bass Museum of Art
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Movie Stars

Avant theater icon Roger Wilson has raised the curtain on the future of portraiture in his skull-staving series of works at the Bass Museum of Art. “VOOM Portraits” features 25 high-def images of people and animals presented on large-scale HD plasma flat-screens. His subjects range from Johnny Depp to Princess Caroline of Monaco to Brad Pitt. In Wilson’s clever vignettes, celebrities channel characters from a play or a historical figure, upending the viewer’s notions of vanity and fame.

Depp appears in drag as Duchamp’s alter ego Rose Selavy. Robert Downey Jr. gets the treatment, appearing as a corpse in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp. Princess Caroline pulls double duty as her mum, Grace Kelly, in Rear Window and John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. Wilson increases each work’s dramatic impact via individual soundtracks from musicians including Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Bernard Hermann, Michael Galasso, and Big Black. Through August 3.
May 23-Aug. 3, 2008