Phyllida Barlow, one of the U.K.’s most prolific sculptors, creates large-scale installations that involve a process of crushing, wrapping, stretching, stacking, and rolling. Her practice is one of production and deconstruction, and she uses readily available materials, often discarding or recycling them for new projects.
Anne Chu: Making Sense of Cultural Chaos
Anne Chu is a mid-career, New York-based sculptor and painter whose work reflects many years of familiarity with the city’s art museums. Her parents came from China—her father was a mathematics professor at Columbia University—yet she does not identify closely with Chinese culture.
Context as Material: A Conversation with Jon Rubin
Socially engaged art considers site, history, and the public as equals, the artist’s vision working in concert with the audience’s reality. Jon Rubin has been a defining force in this arena, creating and blurring boundaries within a very young practice that carries huge implications.
Weaving Time and Place: Roger Rigorth
Roger Rigorth’s sculptures integrate cultural variables with natural materials to create a sense of history and of place and time. There is a suggestion that these hybrid quasi-craft forms could have had a function. They might even have a symbolic purpose, but what, and for what culture?
All That Glitters Is Not What It Seems: A Conversation with Sokari Douglas
Born in the Niger Delta, Sokari Douglas Camp is well aware of the harmful effects of environmental pollution in the region. She has made this subject her primary focus, combining it with other challenging issues related to Nigeria and the broader world in works made with her preferred material—steel.
The Matter of Energy: A Conversation with Damián Ortega
Narratives about Damián Ortega highlight his early shift from political cartoonist to artist, thereby conjoining his wit and sense of playfulness to incisive critique and intellectual rigor. Even more interesting, however, are the variety of forms and wide range of materials that Ortega uses as a sculptor and installation artist and how these two aspects
Shaping Time: A Conversation with Carlos Irijalba
Inquiry into the role of space and time in artistic practice has been a constant regardless of medium. The same applies to the intent of capturing time in the work itself, a philosophical quest that has occupied more than a few artists.
Hitoshi Nomura: Stretching Mortal Time
Hitoshi Nomura, one of Japan’s most esteemed artists, though he is comparatively unknown in the West, finally received significant attention in the United States with two fall 2015 exhibitions: a one-person show at Fergus McCaffrey Gallery in Chelsea and inclusion in “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography 1968–1979,” curated
The Facsimile Is Good Enough: A Conversation with Walter McConnell
Walter McConnell’s two major bodies of work strike at the core of human ambition—the desire to possess. More acquisitive than magpies, more daring than Prometheus, we shape and reshape our world through ownership—either physically (collecting and hoarding) or, if that fails, intellectually (ordering and classifying).
Gianluca Bianchino: Dispersing Form and Energy
Gianluca Bianchino has quietly made a name for himself as a sculptor in New York area circles. He has done so despite the fact that his studio remains in New Jersey; although, as he points out, he has made a point of moving closer to New York City, holding a studio first in Montclair—he received
