Pyrotechnic installation to be ignited at dusk,
Sunday, February 9, 2003

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is delighted to present MATRIX 201c: Cerith Wyn Evans Take your desires for reality, a new sculpture by London-based artist Cerith Wyn Evans. Wyn Evans has worked in a wide variety of media including mirrors, neon lights, and even orchids fertilized with his own urine. For this exhibition, Wyn Evans will craft a short quotation from fireworks mounted on wooden scaffolding and installed outside the UC Berkeley Art Museum. This piece will be ignited at dusk on Sunday, February 9.

Take your desires for reality is the third in the miniMATRIX series of small-scale, single work exhibitions by contemporary artists. Other artists featured in this series are Dean Smith, Tony Feher, and Catherine Sullivan.

New York art critic Jerry Saltz has described Wyn Evans as "a philosopher-artist who mixes traditions, materials, and techniques into elegant works full of intellectual anxiety."

Wyn Evans began his career making short experimental films after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, during which time he also worked as an assistant to film director Derek Jarman. Wyn Evans created his first firework piece in 1996; since then he has completed six pyrotechnic works, only three of which have been ignited. The remaining three have been exhibited, unlit, in galleries and museums. Wyn Evans selects texts from literature, film history, and politics specific to the location in which the works are installed. He sees his pieces as captions or subtitles to a larger, unseen narrative, and uses them as a means to explore the role viewers play in the representation, perception, and translation of visual language. A large indoor piece exhibited, unignited, at the ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, quoted Karl Marx: BETTER THAT THE WHOLE WORLD SHOULD BE DESTROYED AND PERISH THEN THAT A FREE MAN SHOULD REFREAIN FROM ONE ACT TO WHICH HIS NATURE MOVES HIM. The text for Wyn Evans's miniMATRIX firework piece will read "TAKE YOUR DREAMS AS REALITY," a quotation by Situationist Guy Debord.

Public programs
Artist's Talk
Sunday, February 9, 3 p.m.