In June 2014, Latvia’s Pedvale Open-Air Art Museum hosted its 7th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art (ICCCIA), organized by Ojars Feldbergs, Kārlis Alainis, a teacher at the Latvian Academy of Art, and Tamsie Ringler, a sculpture professor at St.
Geny Dignac: Playing With Fire
Geny Dignac says that she has “a love affair with fire.” The Argentina-born, Arizona-based sculptor began incorporating living flames into her work during the late 1960s. As she explains the relationship: “I respect fire; I’m bewitched and obsessed by it, but I’m not intimidated by it, and I always feel in control.”
Vincent Barré: Forms of Humanism
May 27, 2014 saw the official inauguration of La Journée de la Résistance—Resistance Day—in France. The newly established holiday honors the heroism of those individuals, celebrated and anonymous, who, in the words of a speaker at the dedication ceremony, “chose liberty over barbarism,” during the World War II Nazi occupation of France.
John Greer: Staging Civilization
For John Greer, civilizations are like distant islands immersed in a sea of time. He developed an early interest in how memory and the human tendency to shape forms into symbolic ideotypes (regardless of culture) result in the repeated creation of certain typologies.
Luisa Rabbia: A Sense of Kinship
Luisa Rabbia employs the human form to express existential themes, ranging from physical and spiritual transformation to the interconnectivity of all beings. Despite its figurative aspects, her eclectic body of work, consisting of sculptures, installations, drawings, and animated videos, tends toward abstraction.
Aljoscha: Germinating New Art
Dateline: Tuesday, March 17, 2009. At Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, a young man moves toward Portable War Memorial (1968), a large installation or, more precisely, an environment created by Edward Kienholz in obvious reference to the Vietnam War.
Daniel Wiener: Trojan Horses
When a natural environment is confronted with contaminants, it responds with instability and disorder. One of the byproducts of contamination is “outcrossing,” a process that allows recessive traits to migrate across a population, adding diversity and strengthening certain characteristics.
Identity in Dialogue: A Conversation with Emilie Brzezinski
Family Trees, a Hide and Seek Story, 2010. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, of Czech parents, Emilie Benes Brzezinski has lived in the United States since her childhood. Though her artistic career goes back to the early ’70s, a period in which she experimented with a variety of media, including plastic, latex, and wood fiber, she
When Words Fail: A Conversation with Peter Randall-Page
Nature provides a multifarious range of forms, held in suspended animation between the polarities of stasis and transformation. Peter Randall-Page offers a Neoplatonic view of the world through his work, linking these forms in order to explore analogies between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Michael Jones McKean and the Set of All Things
In 2011, Michael Jones McKean began a series of segmented low-relief sculptures whose titles suggest an unnerving, impossible, but seductive universality. Each work is designated by a categorical term preceded by “the”—The Republic, The Religion, The Folklore, The Comedy, The Garden—singly and collectively referencing the human effort to interpret, theorize, associate, narrate, classify, and collate.
