The methods employed by an artist in producing a body of work are often made up of intricate and personal associations that may confound the way a viewer assimilates knowledge. Pedro Reyes, architect, cultural agent, and artist, employs simple means: objects and casual scenarios that blend the realms of utopia, psychology, function, individual fantasies, and
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
Catherine Burgess: Eloquent Enigmas
“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,
