Rachel Whiteread, who lives and works in London, has created a new politically charged piece titled Place (Village) on view now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In an interview, she explained “she has been making the same work since college, which involves working with objects and histories and time.” In this exhibit, she deviates from using her stock materials such as polyurethane, resins, plaster and rubber, but still creates the perception of something that is no longer vital but was once connected with human life.

Rachel Whiteread was born in London in 1963. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic (1982-85) and sculpture at the Slade School of Art, University College, London (1985-87). Whiteread’s first solo exhibition was held at the Carlyle Gallery, London, in 1988, the year after she graduated. The first monumental sculpture that brought her recognition was Ghost (1990), a plaster cast of the interior space of an ordinary room, shown at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. She was the first woman to win the Turner Prize and is widely known for her public monuments, including Water Tower (1998) in New York and Holocaust Memorial (1995/2000) in Vienna.

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“You could lie on the floor and be completely losing yourself, time-wise and space-wise,” says curator Klaus Biesenbach of Pipilotti Rist‘s new video installation in the Museum of Modern Art‘s atrium. The installation, called Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), was commissioned by MoMA and has been in the works for two years. Pour Your Body Out, which officially opened to the public on November 19th, turns the space into an engrossing environment of video, sound, and objects. As the title suggests, Rist intends to immerse viewers’ bodies in a spatially opulent experience. In the above behind-the-scenes video, the artist discusses working in MoMA’s imposing atrium.

Rist, who is based in Zurich, originally studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the School of Design in Basel. She has taught at UCLA and has exhibited at international galleries and museums, among them the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, the Centre Pompidou, Hauser & Wirth, and Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum. She participated in the 2005 Venice Biennale and MoMA already owns one of her best known video installations, Ever is Over All (1997). Rist has also worked extensively with the experimental music group Les Reines Prochaines. Pour Your Body Out remains on view through February 2, 2009.

Artist Holli Schorno creates collage works on paper using book clippings to construct hypothetical landscapes. The works are created out of biology and chemistry textbooks, old maps and encyclopedias, and other grade school note and work books. Despite the initial appearance of digital production, there isn’t anything digital about her work. The artist often selects her materials based on the content that appears on the strip of paper, defying the expectation that the building blocks of her collages are based on the formal concerns of color, texture and shape. This knowledge adds another layer when interpreting the work and further extends a possible dialogue.

During Pulse Miami this year, Schorno displayed a massive collage on rag paper titled Moving Houses, which stretches to fifteen feet in length. The artist’s work was shown in Miami with the New York based Pavel Zoubok Gallery. Schorno is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. She has completed solo exhibitions with Esso Gallery, LUXE Gallery and Pavel Zoubok, in New York City.

Last weekend in Miami, DailyServing.com had the opportunity to speak with artist Rashid Johnson about his work on display with the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in the Nada Art Fair. Johnson has received much critical acclaim for his poetically potent works, which directly confront ideas of race, identity and culturally coded artifacts through sculpture, photography and installation. Johnson was recently included in the Rubell Family Collection exhibition 30 Americans, for which one of his photographs was used for the cover of the exhibition catalog. The artist gained notoriety early in his career through his participation in the exhibition Freestyle, curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This year, the artist traveled his new exhibition Sharpening My Oyster Knife to Magdeburger Kunstmuseum in Magdeburg, Germany, 404 arte contemporanea in Naples Italy and Moniquemeloche Gallery in Chicago.

During Art Basel Miami Beach, Kevin Bruk Gallery presented new works along side countless well-known artists. Undeniably, the new paintings of the lesser-known Miami-based artist Craig Kucia stood out as a breath of fresh air among the others. Kucia’s large canvases radiate with color and life, offering a hyper-realist view of a fragmented narrative, one that seems to be undecipherable even to the artist. Formally, Kucia approaches the image though varying methods of paint application within a single painting, employing realistic, graphic and illusionistic handling of the paint. The works seem to act as a metaphor, with animals and objects acting as stand-ins for people and personality traits. The work may disregard academic art theory for a more intuitive and playful approach, however it doesn’t lack the potential for a greater dialogue. Kucia has simply moved towards story-telling as his main mode of communication, allowing himself to understand the greater narrative one painting at a time.

Craig Kucia received degrees in art from the Cleveland Institute of Art and Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. His has completed recent solo exhibitions at The Melvin Art Gallery of Southern College in Lakeland, Florida and the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, California.

During the week of the Art Basel, both day and night are filled with art in Miami Beach. On Friday evening, DailyServing.com attended Installation 5 at the Raleigh Hotel, a new exhibition highlighting the art of the self portrait put on by Scion and co-hosted by Beautiful/Decay Magazine. The exhibition, which featured over 30 artists, explored the idea of portraiture through the two dimensional mediums of painting, collage, photography and video. Some of the highlights from the evenings events included works by Andrew Schoultz, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Kelsey Brookes.

The Installation Five show will travel through New York, Portland, Minneapolis, San Jose, Los Angeles, Detroit, Phoenix and Washington D.C. Upon the completion of the tour, Scion will auction the works to the public, giving 100% of the proceeds to art-related charities and non-profits.

This year, PULSE Miami housed some of the most advantageous work of all the fairs. Most of the galleries in PULSE didn’t stick to the strict painting or photograph on the wall, but chose work full of experimentation and exploration of ideas. One of the most poetic of these works came from 2×2 Projects out of Amsterdam. The artist, William Speakman, created a site-specific installation of LED-lighted sculptures that challenged the dimensions of the space as well as the boundaries of color and light. Too many artists rely on color and light as a method to aggressively confront the viewer, but Speakman uses his sources to attract the viewer to subtlety and beauty in the details. The objects appear to be a part of more complicated system, linked by the cords that power them and designed so intricately that they seem to use architecture and design to address the elements of space, form and light. Deservingly, this won him the honorable second place in the PULSE Prize for 2008.

William Speakman was born in the UK and received his education from the Art Academy St. Joost in the Netherlands. He was featured in Scope Basel with 2×2 Projects, in Basel Switzerland, and shown with galleries in the Netherlands such as Arti et Amicitiae and the Carl Berg Gallery.