Vik Muniz

The humor of Vik Muniz’s photographs often plays on the viewer’s perception and the familiarity of iconic images and commonplace materials. He typically fashions images from everyday substances such as dust, string, or sugar, then photographs the constructions to confound perception of scale and composition. In this sequence, he draws the divers from Aaron Siskind’s dynamic series, Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (examples of which are on view at right) in chocolate sauce. Muniz attends to Siskind’s nearly abstract compositions with gestural marks that only appear similar to the graphic tone of the originals due to the sheen of the sauce before it dries.