“Austere, elegant. Uncompromising, ambiguous. Stern, seductive. Lucid, mysterious. Lean, sumptuous.” This stream of adjectives comes from notes that I took on my most recent visit to Catherine Burgess’s studio in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The inherent contradictions in this list are not indications of indecisiveness on my part or that of the artist.
Suspending Frictions: A Conversation with Cornelia Parker
When Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) erupted onto the art scene, it defined Cornelia Parker as an artist remarkable for her uncompromising ideas. Using British Army personnel to blow up a garden shed, she then suspended the scorched remains to create an explosion held in mid-air, immortalized in all its fractured drama.
Euphoric Sculpture: A Conversation with Franz West
A delightful court jester in an art world that often takes itself too seriously, Franz West straddles the line between the solemn and the absurd. His poignant forms—maladroit groupings of furniture; eccentric, misshapen, polychrome lumps of papier-mâché and plaster in bright outlandish colors; ambiguous organic shapes; and complex collages with sexual undertones—are permeated by a
Excavating Destiny: A Conversation with Shawn Skabelund
Since his first installation, A Line, Issued Out of the Ground (1994), which traced the ties connecting dam construction and Chinook salmon deaths in the Columbia River Basin, Flagstaff-based Shawn Skabelund has been creating large-scale, site-specific, socio-political works that explore what Wendell Berry calls the “unsettling of America,” namely, the effects, marks, and changes that humans make
Reality Check: When Appropriation Becomes Copyright Infringement
In this day and age, what does an artist really need to know about copyright? What exactly can legally and ethically be claimed as one’s copyright—and as copyright infringement? And how to make sense of news reports in December 2008 of a demand sent to a 16-year-old collage artist in London for appropriating a photo
Darrell Petit: Mass and Matter
In Darrell Petit’s environmental sculptures, stone achieves a dialogue between order and chaos, a balance between mass and space. By preserving the ties between sculptural forms and their source in the earth, Petit acknowledges our place within the context of nature.
On the Track of BMW’s Art Cars: A Conversation with Thomas Girst
Marriages of brand-name artistic talent and luxury consumer goods don’t get much better than the partnership showcased on a recent summer day in southern Germany. At the Formula 1 Grand Prix racetrack, racing enthusiast Frank Stella was co-driving a 1975 BMW M1 ProCar hand-painted by Andy Warhol.
Can Sculpture Save New Orleans? Three Audacious Plans Make an Attempt at Recovery
In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, it was hard to imagine that the Crescent City art world would ever re-emerge as remembered. But the New Orleans art community has proved to be unexpectedly tenacious. Less than two months after Katrina, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art resurrected its series of Thursday night roots music concerts,
Ice in the Whirlwind: Chris Drury’s Desert Journey from Antarctica to Nevada
In early 2006, the British Antarctic Survey publicized its Artists and Writers residency. Chris Drury, who had been looking for a way to visit one of the Earth’s most remote and extreme places, applied and was selected as one of two artists sent south that year.
Justin Randolph Thompson: Shrines and Found History
Justin Randolph Thompson’s large-scale sculptures and installations are rooted in cultural history. Using an idiosyncratic vocabulary, his work unfolds complex stories by means of carefully crafted organic and geometric metaphors. Juxtapositions of old materials and new techniques create a synthesis of multi-faceted meanings inspired by pain and destruction in times past, cultural rituals, and sacred
