“I was always interested in fringe techniques. I did formed domes, I did big fiberglass sculptures, I went to autobody school—new form allows for new content. But nobody paid attention to my interest in fringe techniques as long as they were masculine. It was only when I crossed the gender gap into what was forgotten that it became notable.”
Giants Walking: A Conversation with Huma Bhabha
Huma Bhabha does not work with images culled from the Internet; she eschews appropriation and explanatory texts. Perhaps because of her devotion to old-fashioned creativity, Bhabha is rapidly becoming one of the most celebrated contemporary artists.
Patricia Piccinini: Imagining Empathy
Peering into the hotel rooms of the budget Patricia Hotel in Vancouver was an indelicate intrusion into the most private of intimacies: a naked mother nursed her infants on a double bed while, in another room, a young couple in post-coital languor embraced under disheveled sheets.
Serious Frills: A Conversation with Phyllis Green
For the past 40 years, Phyllis Green has questioned the nature of objects and their social context, using a wide range of materials—video, fiberglass, steel, concrete polymer, wood, textiles, polyurethane foam—and fabrication techniques such as hand construction, sewing, and digital milling.
Cathy Wilkes: Ugly Archetypes
Cathy Wilkes, a 2008 Turner Prize nominee, has raised eyebrows with her highly charged arrangements of commonplace items and personal artifacts. Formally precise and essentially diaristic, her work employs a difficult and coded visual language that succeeds in exerting a strong psychological pull, creating shared experience from isolation.
Irresponsible Objects: A Conversation with Matthew Ronay
Entering a Matthew Ronay exhibition is like walking through a deserted kindergarten, with ice-cream-colored sculptures strewn around a play area. Ronay, who approaches his creative configurations with genuine curiosity, attributes his childlike approach to color blindness and an insistence on scribbling things down.
Sterling Ruby: Monument Material
A precocious 12-year-old once rolled her eyes at me after I described an artist as a “Renaissance man.” When I asked her what was wrong, she said “I hate that phrase. It’s so vague, it’s meaningless.
I Am the Background: A Conversation with Dan Colen
Dan Colen, who applies himself to painting, placards, and sculpture with equal bravado, likens his approach to that of a child enthused first by one idea and then another. He explains his work as closer to a permanent condition than a series of disconnected objects.
Sabotage: A Conversation with Minerva Cuevas
Minerva Cuevas, who came to prominence in the 1990s as part of a group of socially engaged Mexican artists responding to political corruption, NAFTA, and the government’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies, works across sculpture, installation, photography, painting, video, and performance.
Minoru Ohira: Attractive to the Hand
Minoru Ohira uses wood in ways that make it seem like a newly discovered material. Surfaces flicker from light to dark—monochromatic or flecked with color, matte or gleaming, bristling with texture or smoothly uninflected, richly stained or overtly natural.
