Introduction

São Paulo-based artist Jac Leirner creates sophisticated abstract compositions out of what most of us consider throwaways and trash. She collects cigarette packs, airline tickets, envelopes, brochures, and museum store shopping bags and makes them into art.

Leirner's most colorful, varied material is that ubiquitous vessel of contemporary mass culture, the sticker. The work that Leirner has created for Miami Art Museum, Adhesive 44, is her forty-fourth sticker-based work and her largest to date. This work consists of two parallel thirty-four-foot-long rows of window panes covered with stickers. The windows are mass produced and available to the general public, while the stickers were selected by the artist from her vast personal collection.

Adhesive 44 is as intense and lively as a crowd at a party. Leirner has brought together hundreds of stickers which normally have discrete, often nearly anonymous uses, and put them center stage. The interpretation of her work depends on what viewers bring to it. One person may recognize a logo from an art fair they attended. Another viewer might be pleased by a particular design or the way it fits into the overall composition.

This ambiguity sums up the many paradoxes that characterizeAdhesive 44. The work is a harmonious whole made up of enormously varied parts. Its meanings are as numerous as its stickers.

Jac Leirner - Adhesive 44 is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by MAM Associate Curator Cheryl Hartup as part of New Work, a series of projects by leading contemporary artists.