Carlos Amorlas’ installation Black Cloud is currently on view at Phoenix Art Museum in Greenbaum Lobby and John Morrell Promenade.
Inspired by the annual migration of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico, Black Cloud features a “swarm” of paper moths that take over museum spaces, rising to envelop the viewer.
Carlos Amorales has described Black Cloud as his way of saying goodbye to his grandmother, offering an intensely personal origin for an artwork that inspires a universal sense of wonder in each of us. Made up of 25,000 black paper moths and butterflies of 30 different species, the installation forms a surreal yet sublime gathering of insects delicately poised in sculptural formations.
Based in Mexico City, Carlos Amorales works in a wide variety of media, including video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. In his artistic research, he is interested mainly in language and the impossibility (and possibility) of communicating through means that are unrecognizable or not codified, like sounds, gestures, and symbols. Amorales’ works exist in an alternate world of their own making, parallel to ours, constantly evolving at the same rhythm that they are produced.
Black Cloud is on loan from the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection.
Courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum · Photo: Katie Jones-Weinert
