Vik Muniz b. 1961, São Paulo From the moment of his New York debut in 1989, Vik Muniz has been known for his combination of technical virtuosity, wry humor, and complex conceptual underpinnings. Much of his work consists of art historical references realized with everyday materials like chocolate syrup, dirt, and string. Muniz often uses photography to document his elaborate and ephemeral constructions. Like the Dadaists, he employs multimedia to engage debates on high and low culture, but in his postmodern approach the results are less affronts to aesthetics than witty, sophisticated, and ultimately accessible jokes on the history of art and culture. Dürer's Praying Hands, 1993 Toned gelatin-silver print, edition 2/3, 34 x 30 inches (86.4 x 76.2 cm) In the late 1920s, Alfred Stieglitz photographed a number of clouds in a series titled Equivalents, which carved out a conceptual use for photography, atmospherically emblematizing man's essential freedom. Some sixty-five years later, Muniz undermined Stieglitz's metaphysical investment in clouds in a series of the same name. In this photograph, cotton balls mimic a cloud, which in turn mimics an image of praying hands drawn by Albrecht Dürer (which are themselves a mimetic representation of reality). Each layer fails to adequately copy the next, yet their very equivalence also undermines the system of representation itself. Meaning spirals into absurdity, glossed over by the apparent simplicity of the photograph and the sheer ordinariness of seeing shapes in clouds. —Nat Trotman