Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art and is currently Professor of Fine Art and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Slade. Her work incorporates an enormous range of mass produced materials including cardboard, fabric, paper, glue, paint, plastic, wood, rubber, hardboard, and adhesive tape. Barlow's work questions the nature and role of the sculptural object in contemporary culture, utilising an extensive, fluid vocabulary and immense enthusiasm for engaging with the physical 'stuff' of the world. She creates new relationships, experimenting with unexpected combinations of materials creating objects and environments, which encourage us to see the everyday world with fresh eyes. 

She has undertaken a number of residencies including the McDermott Visiting Artist at the University of Texas, Dallas, 2003. Recent solo and group shows include, Peninsula, a nine sculpture installation commissioned for BALTIC, Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2004-2005 and SKIT, a seven sculpture installation commissioned for Bloomberg Space, 2005; SCAPE, a ten sculpture installation commissioned for Spacex, Exeter, 2005; British Art Show 5, 2000-2001, Beacon Project, 'a site of place, a place of site', (a commissioned seven sculpture installation work titled 'after'), The Maltings , Sleeford, Lincoln, 2005 and Works on Paper, Leeds City Art Gallery, new acquisitions by the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, 2005-2006. Barlow has recently exhibited at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway and with Nairy Baghramian at The Serpentine.
In addition to her regular teaching commitments at the Slade she has lectured extensively, for example Hearsay, Rumours, Bed-sit Dreamers and Art Begins Today, The Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Modern, 2002-2003; Lost for Words, Eva Hesse Symposium, Tate Modern, 2003.

http://www.sculpture.uk.com/artists/phyllida_barlow/


Hive by Phyllida Barlow

Balcony by Phyllida Barlow

Untitled Column by Phyllida Barlow

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer was born in Naperville, Illinois in 1974 and grew up in the Chicago area, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

Dettmer’s work has been exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. He has had solo shows in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and Barcelona and has had projects exhibited in Mexico City, Berlin and London. He has been represented at several international art fairs including Pulse (Miami), MACO (Mexico City), ARCO (Madrid), Scope (London, Miami), Art Chicago (Chicago) and many others. His work can be found in several private and public collections throughout the U.S, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Dettmer’s work has gained International acclaim through internet bloggers, and traditional media.

Dettmer thoroughly explains his work and his goal in artwork in one of his artist's statements and in an explanation of his work process.

He says, "The age of information in physical form is waning. As intangible routes thrive with quicker fluidity, material and history are being lost, slipping and eroding into the ether. Newer media swiftly flips forms, unrestricted by the weight of material and the responsibility of history. In the tangible world we are left with a frozen material but in the intangible world we may be left with nothing. History is lost as formats change from physical stability to digital distress.The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge. This is the area I currently operate in. Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I edit or dissect communicative objects or systems such as books, maps, tapes and other media. The medium’s role transforms. Its content is re-contextualized and new meanings or interpretations emerge. In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each layer while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose alternate histories and memories. My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception."

(http://briandettmer.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dettmer)


New Books of Knowledge, 2009

Altered Set of Encyclopedias



Core 6, 2007

Altered Book


Guide to Useful Information, 2007

Altered Book



Photos/Information: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/briandettmer/3301507760/in/photostream/

and http://briandettmer.com/)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Denise Pepper



    

Denise Pepper


My interests have always centred on the visual stimuli that we encounter in our daily lives. Currently I am experimenting with the use of glass outside of its traditional craft context, expanding its possibilities in contemporary art. A recent series of my work 'Control Briefs' is a series of sculptured women's underwear made in glass; each piece unique, with the mould taken directly from original garments. Glass is a challenging material and each of these sculptures has been created using a glass technique known as pate de verre or paste of glass in which powdered glass is applied as paint to moulds and fired in the kiln.
The sculptures are sometimes sexy, sometimes unattractive, bringing their secrets into a public space, touching on notions of voyeurism and alluding to a vestige of femininity that was more restrictive than today's. The work contests ideas behind the beauty myth in which we see both men and women endlessly pursuing the unattainable dream of physical perfection. By creating underwear in the seemingly inappropriate medium of glass, I intend to capture the restrictive and often uncomfortable positions we place ourselves in for fashion.
The sculptures are cast directly from original undergarments that I find intriguing, and perhaps once worn for a special occasion, which when reproduced in glass retain the delicate lace patterns and shape of the wearer. The processes used in order to create such technically challenging, visually rich and delicate works are intensive.
http://www.emerge-art.com.au/artist_name8


Saturday, March 26, 2011

Peter Scaturro

A Process Note: Ceramic Sculpture

I generally construct each sculpture by intuitively joining dark and light clays. This is a visual metaphor for the joining of opposites and the union of diversity in life. Then I run the joined clay through a slab roller which intimately fuses the clay and gives me a uniform thickness. I begin construction of the work and it's execution is completed as I stated above and by using techniques such as scoring and slipping joints before I put two pieces together. All the work is allowed to slowly dry to become green ware. It is then bisque fired and either low fired or high fired to different temperatures. The sculpture's titled Ascent 1-4 were fired in a salt kiln. During the firing salt is introduced into the kiln and its reaction with the silica of the clay creates a beautiful dark color with a slight pebbled texture. It is my favorite way of firing clay.

My art work is about the excitement of exploring with your eyes, mind and spirit the unique and the mysterious. The work is created to have immediate impact and long lasting power. It is about seeing what you have never seen before. I hope the paintings and sculptures engage you by their power of color, motion and imagery and move you into a sense of wondering and curiosity. Right then and there you are beginning to be pulled in--to be involved in the process of discovering all the variety of shapes, the dark and light spaces in between them, how they're connected, float or seem to move fast accross the paper. I know you will often return to the painting and find new insights and associations with the imagery that will add to your overall sense of experiencing the original beauty of the creative process. These works would enliven and energize any room they are placed in.

(http://www.peterscaturro.com/home)

"TriUnity 2"
Ceramic Sculpture, 3 Clays,
30"H x 17"W


"TriUnity 7-Opposite Side"
Ceramic, 3 Clays, High Fired Reduction, 28 x 11 x 11, 2010
28"H x 11"W

"TriUnity 5"
Ceramic Sculpture, Porcelain and 2 clays, San Francisco,Napa Valley,Painting,Watercolor

26"H x 22"W

Friday, March 25, 2011

Gabriel Dawe

Gabriel Dawe was born in Mexico City where he grew up surrounded by the intensity and color of Mexican culture. After working as a graphic designer, he moved to Montreal, Canada in 2000 following a desire to explore foreign land. In search for creative freedom he started experimenting and creating artwork, which eventually led him to explore textiles and embroidery—activities traditionally associated with women and which were forbidden for a boy growing up in Mexico. Because of this, his work is subversive of notions of masculinity and machismo that are so ingrained in his culture. By working with thread and textiles, Dawe’s work has evolved into creating large-scale installations with thread, creating environments that deal with notions of social constructions and their relation to evolutionary theory and the self-organizing force of nature.
After seven years of living in Canada and gaining dual citizenship as a Mexican-Canadian, Gabriel moved to Texas to pursue graduate school at the University of Texas at Dallas where he is presently a candidate for an MFA in Arts and Technology. His work has been exhibited in Dallas, Houston, Montreal, Toronto and Barcelona.


http://www.gabrieldawe.com/

Don't Ask Don't Tell No. 1 2009
Air force boots and pins


Eye 2010
Thread, wood, nails, paper, and video production and sound
Piexus No. 3 2010
Gutermann thread, wood and nails


Nora Ligorano







Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have collaborated together as Ligorano/Reese since the early 80's. Nora Ligorano is a visual artist and graduated with a BFA in painting from Maryland Institute, College of Art. In 1982, she was a Fulbright fellow in design arts in Spain. Marshall Reese is a poet and video artist. In 1978, he received an NEA Creative Writers Fellowship for his poetry. He studied classical languages, classical art and architecture at Pomona College in California.

After 20 years of collaboration, Ligorano/Reese's process of making work has become seamless and the boundaries between their conceptual contributions have all but disappeared. Their installations, limited edition multiples and artists books have been exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum fur Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Frankfurt, Germany, MIT MediaLab, Museum of Arts & Design, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Rotunda Gallery, Schroder Romero Gallery, The Kitchen, the Sculpture Center, and Lincoln Center. They have received fellowships and funding from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA, the NEA and Art Matters.

Free Speech Zone is from a series of works concerning the library as a cultural site. The installation takes its title from the growing restriction of the exercise of First Amendment rights by quarantining protest to designated areas.

The artists' first site-specific library installation Acid Migration of Culture (Donnell Library Center, Manhattan, 1994) focused on the library as a site of conflict - an institutional lightening rod where significant cultural issues about censorship and access to information are being waged.

Today, the significance of these issues, a short decade later, has not only intensified but grown more polemic and urgent. The overreaching powers of the Patriot Act, coupled with the explosion of the internet and monopolization of private media threaten the very fabric and foundations of our country and way of life. These are the concerns, which led the artists to create the installation on view at the Donnell Library.
http://rogallery.com/Ligorano_Reese/ligorano-reese-biography.html

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Damián Ortega




A 20-foot-tall, narrow, tapering object with a pyramidal top, Damián Ortega's Obelisco Transportable stands on a grassy platform on wheels, as though it has been uprooted from a previous location and made portable. Since ancient times, when the form first emerged in Egypt, obelisks have served as visible centerpieces of cities. Ortega characterizes Obelisco Transportable as "a mobile landmark" that one could potentially move anywhere to commemorate anything. It offers a pragmatic yet wryly playful approach to a global society in which the balance of power is constantly in flux, and in which populations shift and drift from one place to another.

Obelisco Transportable is also a nod to the ways in which public sculptures and monuments have historically been moved from one city to another. Ortega describes this as the "Napoleonic gesture," in which the wartime victor plunders the monuments of captured cities and brings them back home to be installed in public there as a symbol of victory. Such transfers were meant to signal the rise of a new power and the demise of an older one, as well as an exchange of central and peripheral positions. Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, for example, was originally created in Heliopolis, the ancient Egyptian city, more than 3,000 years ago. During the time of the Roman Empire, it was moved to Alexandria, where it remained for almost two millennia before being offered to the United States as a gift in the 19th century.

Ortega, who until just a few years ago was active as a political cartoonist in his native Mexico, creates sculptures, photographs, collages, and other works that tap into the poetic and symbolic resonance of everyday forms. Using wordplay, visual metaphors, and physical interventions, Ortega investigates the way in which objects serve as markers of cultural and political history. Among his best known works are the three pieces that make up "The Beetle Trilogy" - Cosmic Thing (2002), Moby Dick (2004-5), and Escarabajo (2005) - an epic series that revolves around the Volkswagen Bug as a ubiquitous icon of modernity.

Born in 1967 in Mexico City, Damián Ortega now lives and works Berlin. In 2003, his work was featured in the 50th Venice Biennale. His recent major solo shows include "The Beetle Trilogy and Other Works," Gallery at REDCAT (The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theatre) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); "The Uncertainty Principle," at Tate Modern, London (2005); "Damián Ortega," at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2004); "Spirit and Matter," White Cube, London (2004); "Damián Ortega," Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; "Moby Dick," kurimanzutto, Mexico City; and "Damián Ortega: Cosmic Thing," ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia (2002).

http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/projects/07/ortega/ortega-07.html

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Chris Burden

The images of Burden that continue to resonate in public mind is of a young man who had himself shot (Shoot, 1971 At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet away from me.) electrocuted, (Doorway to Heaven, 1973), impaled, cut (Back to You, 1974;Through the Night, 1973) , drowned (Velvet Water, 1974), kidnapped, locked up ( Five Day Locker Piece, 1971)…Over the past thirty years Burden has produced a multitude of assemblages, installations, kinetic and static sculptures and scientific models.

Chris Burden works and lives in California and has been represented by Gagosian Gallery since 1991. He has had major retrospectives at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California (1988) and MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1996). In 1999 Burden exhibited at the 48th Venice Biennale and the Tate Gallery in London. And for the summer of 2008 a 65 foot tall skyscraper made of Erecter set parts, titled What My Dad Gave Me, stood in front of Rockefeller Center, New York City.
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/chris-burden/

Three Ghost Ships, 1991
Sailboats, one with solar panel and electronic components
3 boats: 6-1/2 x 6-1/2 x 15-1/2 feet each sailboat hull
Installation at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

Indo-China Bridge, 2002
Stainless steel reproduction Mysto Type I Erector parts,
15-1/4 x 45 x 8-1/2 inches (38.7 x 114.3 x 21.6 cm)
Ed. of 12

Medusa's Head, 1989-1992
Plywood, steel, rock & cement
14 feet diameter (4.3 m

Tom Bogaert

Before dedicating his life to art, Belgian artist Tom Bogaert documented genocide and human rights abuses in Africa, Europe and Asia. He worked as a lawyer for Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency. The artist does not see his artwork as an extension of his refugee work, although it does directly confront the intersection of human rights, entertainment and propaganda.
Tom Bogaert stopped practicing law in 2004 and participated in the Elizabeth Foundation Studio Center in New York City. He had his first solo exhibition in NYC in 2008 with the legendary Jack the Pelican Presents gallery and he has widely exhibited in Europe, the Middle East and the US. Bogaert’s work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times, Al-Akhbar, JO-magazine, NY Arts Magazine, Baladna, Artist for Artist and The Miami Herald.
Tom Bogaert lives and works in Amman, Jordan.

http://www.tombogaert.org
Water Tank E2 2010
Welded galvanized steel water tanks mounted on metal stand
Canary Space Ship (studio view) 2007

Space-specific sculpture: a complex of used birdcages, connected together with metal wire, glue, tape and knitting yarn.
Inside the complex were three live canaries with personalized bird bands that featured the artist's studio address, in case the space ship was intercepted by extraterrestrial beings.


Bird Ring 2007
Aluminum alloy

Monday, March 21, 2011

Michael Lineares

The Puerto Rican artist lives and works in San Juan. His work however, reaches much further, with numerous international exhibitions including The Lawrimore Project, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art of Pennsylvania (ICA); CANADA Gallery, New York; The Peace Tower, a project by Mark di Suvero & Rirkrit Tiravanija for the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York (2006), among others. Recently Linares has been included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus/Artists Directory, a publication that will accompany the triennial of the same name in the New Museum, New York. Found and Lost is the first solo show for Linares in Puerto Rico and is presented as part of the New Tendencies program. 

For the majority of his career Linares has blended the concerns and methods of Transgressive, Conceptual, and appropria­tive art with popular culture in order to create his own unique iconography, some times controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with everything from sex and desire, to race and gender, to media, and com­merce. In Found and Lost, as the viewer passes through the exhibition space they are led through a collection of works that originate from existing works of art, which have been modified in order to reactivate and redirect their latent meanings—underlining the constant process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of this meaning present in each act of reading. In the case of both You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me? and What does it say to you? these actions test not only the valid ity of the works being referenced, but also that of his own work, and suggests the revision of the position of the author as much as that of the spectator.


http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=574844:michael-lineares&catid=166:international&Itemid=723
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425937483/423908876/michael-linares-afterlife.html
http://jameswagner.com/2006/04/michael_linares.html


Wait till grows, Swing 2007
Tree, pot, swing

Afterlife 2008
Plant, skull, soil
Oasis 2006
Wood, screws, enamel, plastic, assorted beers

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Henry Van Wolf



Mr. Van Wolf was the President of the San Fernando Valley Professional 
Artist's Guild in 1953. He resided in North Hollywood for a number of years 
where he created the following sculptures: "Happy Family", Olivia De 
Havilland". "Fighting Mountain Lions", and "Will Rogers." He worked out of a 
large home which he used as his studio and lived in a small house next to the 
large home studio. His sculpting ranged from small to over.
1898 (Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany)
Death1982 (Los Angeles, California)
Lived/Active California
Mediums

* Bronze
* Oil Paint


Subjects

* Figure, Figurative
* Indian, Native American Figure, Genre
* Portrait


Associations

* American Artists Professional League
* California Art Club-
* National Sculpture Society
* WPA, Federal Arts Project