The context of an artwork is critical to its experience. In the case of Mona Hatoum’s recent exhibition at the Rennie Collection, the context was two-fold. First, the works, representing 15 years of the artist’s oeuvre, were installed so that they resonated with the gallery spaces.
Drew Daly: Visual Friction
For Drew Daly, life has been a series of repetitive gestures: first, at age 14, as a baker’s assistant lining up loaves of bread, later as a scholarship swimmer perfecting his stroke, then as a production potter producing cup after identical cup, bowl after bowl.
Ted Victoria: Only the Object is Real
Last Halloween, new tenants—multi-limbed, vermin-like aliens with transparent bodies—moved into the 1783 Old Façade Building of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The three-story administration building, its windows aglow with swarming creatures, provided the setting for Infestation, an installation by New York artist Ted Victoria.
The Work is Space and Energy: A Conversation with Marco Gastini
Marco Gastini’s work induces an emotional state comparable to what you feel in front of the sea—engrossed by a mysterious, silent, slow dynamism, overwhelmed by its energy. This concept comes from Rudi Fuchs, and it is so precise that I want to borrow it to introduce Gastini’s work.
Objects, But Only Just: A Conversation with Karla Black
Naomi Wolf tells us in The Beauty Myth that “women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.”
Ilan Averbuch: Between the Intimate and the Monumental
Every art form conveys a specific sense of human nature, and there is a bond between sculpture and the surging sensation of monumentality, of our belief in our own grandeur. But the monumental does not merely, perhaps not even primarily, demarcate human pride, the feeling of our importance to a universe that needs to be
Greg Johns: Acknowledging the Land
For many artists, their most recent work is the most important; past production fades in significance. Not so with Greg Johns. In spite of basic changes in style over the course of his career, he is quite prepared to return to and develop earlier concepts.
Disappearing into Your Work: A Conversation with Mai-Thu Perret
For nearly a decade, Mai-Thu Perret has created a variety of works that stem from The Crystal Frontier, a fictional narrative revolving around the members of a feminist commune in the New Mexico desert. Although she splits her time between Geneva and New York, the desert provides the perfect blank slate for her utopian ideal.
Art as a Disappearing Act: A Conversation with Dustin Yellin
Dustin Yellin’s sense of wonder seems to come from another age. In his view, there is nothing quite as extraordinary as the rhythms, forms, and patterns found in nature. He surrounds himself with objects drawn from the worlds of fauna, flora, and minerals, as well as manmade things, ranging from the commonplace to the sublime,
Henrique Oliveira’s Tridimensionals: Brushstroke, Form, and Space
What was once radical is now accepted within the context of high art, from urinals to coyotes to canned feces. How do we recognize innovation in contemporary sculpture after we have seen so much over the past century?
