Daphne Wright’s work maneuvers things into what her biographical statement calls “well-wrought but delicate doubt.” Shifting between “taughtness and mess,” it sets “imagery, materials, and language in constant metaphorical motion.” Using a wide range of materials and techniques—plaster, tin foil, video, printmaking, found objects, and performance—she creates beautiful and rather eerie worlds that feel like
Saya Woolfalk: The Harmonics of Dislocation
A kaleidoscopic transformation unfolds to the soft and soothing drone of a narrator as she guides the viewer through a marvelous land where humans, plants, and objects engage one another. Barriers break down. Identities cross-fertilize. Linear time loses all relevance.
We Are the Landscape: A Conversation with Steven Siegel
Using pre-consumer and recycled materials—discarded newspapers, crushed soda cans, empty milk containers, and shredded rubber—Steven Siegel creates public art and site-specific installations in natural and urban contexts that reinvent the role of sculpture for an eco-conscious planet.
Working By Any Means Necessary: A Conversation with Mel Chin
Mel Chin refuses to be pinned down, hemmed in, or otherwise restricted from pursuing whatever concept fires his imagination—in whatever medium seems appropriate. The Houston-born artist began his career making sculptures based on research into ancient cultures, social issues, and geopolitical subterfuges.
Being the Void: A Conversation with Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley understands the human body as a place of memory and transformation. Most of his early works are based on the process of casting his own body, which functions as subject, tool, and material. His more recent works deal with the body in abstracted or indirect ways and are concerned with the human condition.
The Beauty of Thinking: A Conversation with Giuseppe Panza
For Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, it’s all about pleasure—receiving and sharing spiritual pleasure, the kind that begins in the mind and takes its inspiration from the play of light and the passage of time. Over the last 50 years, the industrialist and real estate investor has amassed one of the world’s premier collections of
Sculpture that Declares the Space Around it: John Atkin
Sculpture as metaphor has recently been encroaching on the territory of the late Modernist anti-aesthetic of the literal, that of the Minimalist cube. Yet sculpture requires a context, and that context exceeds the presence of the work.
Orgy in the Sky: Rebecca Ripple
Los Angeles-based Rebecca Ripple first intrigued me with word works that seemed to hollow out a place for the human body in banal furnishings. thigh/blind (2001), for instance, spells out “thigh” by cutting the word, letter by letter, into aluminum blinds; in another piece, “elbo” is sewn into a Home Depot rug.
Acts of Finding: A Conversation with Ann Hamilton
Acts of reading have multiple dimensions yet leave no material trace: this is the subject of human carriage, Ann Hamilton’s recent installation circumnavigating the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, which was on view last year. Pulleys, guillotined books, a silk-sheathed bell that rang as it raced down the building’s iconic spiral, and a Reader who
Extreme Precision: A Conversation with Margaret Evangeline
Margaret Evangeline has long experimented with aesthetically resistant materials, making work that deepens the immediacy of a moment. She is perhaps best known for her use of gunshot and mirror-polished stainless steel. In recent videos, she experiments with sounds and actions collected while shooting the steel panels of a commissioned sculpture.
