James Shrosbree’s recent work is unexpected, un-designed, and “un-art-like.” His ceramic objects have low, lumbering, often ungainly shapes, at times buoyant and swelling, more frequently drooping as if pulled down by gravity. Some works appear clumsy and awkward, their monochrome glazes of unlovely yellows or greens slightly off; others are startlingly erotic in strangely bold
Caviar and Excrement: A Conversation with Wilfredo Prieto
A beautiful but wilting flower hangs in a noose, an egg sits next to an eight ball, and caviar enfolds excrement. Wilfredo Prieto’s works use simple, precise juxtapositions to tease out intriguing, open-ended metaphors. He often employs basic materials, projecting a certain poetry that at times recalls Minimalism and Arte Povera.
The Happy Effect: A Conversation with Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir
Hair is an extension of our identity, persona, and character. It can be added to, colored, and formed. It draws us in to look, to feel. Hair can also be a mechanism for attraction or disgust.
Sarah Meyers Brent: Natural Disasters
Sarah Meyers Brent’s friends tend to donate their used clothes to her, as if she were a branch of Goodwill. Not that she needs these garments to wear; instead, she uses them to construct complex sculptures in which their colors (faded to bright) and textures (smooth or fuzzy) add essential qualities to finished forms that
Provocation and Insistence: A Conversation with Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen is a provocateur, a risk–taker in deceptively gentle guise. At the heart of her work is a compulsion to peel away received, overt notions of the self and probe beneath them. She typically turns the tables on viewers.
Deep Wisdom and Collective Fortitude: A Conversation with Sonya Clark
Unraveling, 2015-ongoing. Detail of interactive performance. Photo: Taylor Dabney. Sonya Clark uses everyday materials to address “identity politics, collective fortitude, and social justice.” Returning repeatedly to the same basic materials, including copper pennies, hair, combs, and sugar, she brings value to quotidian objects through her investigations while asking viewers to consider the embedded histories surrounding
Françoise Grossen: Total Exposure
In Françoise Grossen’s work, intense physicality and presence are wedded to conceptual underpinnings–what an object is composed of is entirely consequential, meaning and purpose lying in material choices. Her objects, made between 1966 and 1999, are deeply and totally abstract yet also metaphorical.
Unity and Variety: A Conversation with Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga makes forms with layered contexts and material processes that are very much rooted in her experiences growing up in rural Kenya and the Rift Valley. Her works partly pay tribute to local craft tradition, demonstrating how the local can indeed teach the national and international.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Rooting Dislocation
When I met María Magdalena Campos-Pons in her Boston studio, she was gestating ideas for Documenta 14, thinking about installations in both Athens and Kassel. Her thoughts, figuratively and literally, germinated in a corner, where a branch of spindly potato plant—an invasive species that takes over everything—drew an awkward but tenacious line up the wall.
Xu Zhen: Information Age
Shanghai-based Xu Zhen reconstitutes time to create “information objects.” His sculptures appropriate historical elements from different civilizations but siphon them through an insurgence of new technologies, underscoring relationships between tradition and contemporary social experience–all in an attempt to sidestep culture as a “known experience” and breathe new life into what might otherwise be considered dead
