E.V. Day's Violetta at Houston Grand Opera !

Salomon Contemporary is pleased to announce E.V. Day's suspended sculptural work, Violetta, on exhibit at Houston Grand Opera from January 27 through February 12, 2012, coinciding with the return of La Traviata to HGO.

La Traviata tells the story of a beautiful, high-society courtesan, Violetta Valéry, who falls in love with one of her clients. Her transformation to self-sacrificing heroine constitutes one of opera's greatest portraits and has been the inspiration for countless works of literature, art, and film. In Day's Violetta, the gown has been transformed-broken in half, its lining torn out-but the prim, lacy dress and bones of the cage crinoline remain as a floating, spectral tribute to Violetta's strength of character and her desire to live a true life.

Violetta is from Divas Ascending, a series of 14 suspended sculptures made with costumes from the New York City Opera's archives, a collection comprised of wardrobes from prominent international opera houses. Violetta's dress was originally donated from the Austrian production at the Vienna State Opera.

Divas Ascending was first exhibited in the Promenade of the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center for the 2010 season of the New York City Opera. Presented by Salomon Contemporary and Art Without Walls, the series traveled to the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, Louisville in April 2011. In May 2011, Salomon Contemporary, New York exhibited Butterfly, a work constructed from Cio-Cio San's kimono and Pinkerton's epaulettes.

E.V. Day received her MFA in sculpture from Yale in 1995. The first sculpture in her Exploding Couture series, Bombshell, was included in the 2000 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and is now in the museum's permanent collection. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including the 2001 installation G-Force at the Whitney Museum at Altria, in which she suspended hundreds of thongs from the ceiling in fighter- jet formations, and a ten-year survey exhibition in 2004 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Bride Fight, Day's spectacular high-tension string- up of two dueling bridal gowns was exhibited at the Lever House in 2006. Day's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the New York Public Library, the Saatchi Collection, NASA, the Lever House, and numerous private collections.

For further information please contact:

James Salomon: (212) 727-0607 / james@salomoncontemporary.com Claire Vince at Houston Grand Opera: (713) 546-0278 / (832) 738-2611