Despite the Greek economic crisis, art is thriving in Athens thanks to a growing number of nonprofit and alternative exhibition venues. One such space, the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (iset), a nonprofit archive and gallery, recently featured the work of an unusual sculptor in the exhibition “Devalue/Value/Surplus Value: between ‘work’ and ‘art,’” curated by Charis
Unknown Extremes: A Conversation with Tania Kovats
Tania Kovats’s work encompasses sculpture, installation, and large-scale, time-based projects that investigate the layered aspects of landscape—that which lies beneath and beyond what is perceived with the naked eye. These unknown spaces— shifting tides, weathered rock faces, wood grain, and even the uncharted territories of outer space—are mysteries to be unraveled.
Gravity’s Pull: A Conversation with Mathilde Roussel
Sculpture is traditionally about the body. Mathilde Roussel alludes to the body indirectly, by way of sheets of paper or rubber hanging from the wall, which she refers to as skins, and amorphous columns built up of masses inspired by her study of overdeveloped musculature.
Ree Morton
NEW YORK Alexander and Bonin Although Ree Morton started her career late and was active as an artist for less than a decade, her influence continues some 40 years after her death. Today, many artists present their work in constructed environments, but in the ’70s, Mor – ton was among the first to disturb the white cube of the gallery, setting up installations that used walls, corners, and floors. At the same time, she moved away from making singular sculptural objects, using non-traditional and craft-based materials to explore the creative potential of process and the provisional.
Ernesto Neto
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Brazilian artist Ernest Neto has established himself as one of the leading sculptors of his generation. To create the works in “The Ser – pent’s Energy Gave Birth To Human – ity,” his remarkable recent exhibition, he collaborated with the Huni Kuin, an aboriginal community in the Brazilian Amazon. Neto works primarily with fabric installations, drawing from various traditions-Minimalism, Arte Povera, and Neoconcretism. In 2014, he began to work with the Huni Kuin, who are known for their spiritual insight, their desire to live in harmony with nature, and the centeredness they experience through a communal exchange with the earth.
Carol Ross
EAST HAMPTOM, NEW YORK Guild Hall Carol Ross has an impressive exhibition history, dating from the mid- 1960s through the present. Her recent exhibition, titled simply “Carol Ross,” featured works from the last 20 years or so, with 16 mid-size outdoor sculptures installed in the Guild Hall’s Furman Sculpture Garden—the tallest reaching almost 13 feet, but most between five and seven feet tall—and seven indoor, wall-hanging pieces and several colored-pencil works on paper.
deCordova New England Biennial 2016
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum deCordova’s 2016 New England Biennial left me struggling with the definition of “sculpture” as it’s currently understood. The work of Heather Leigh McPherson is a case in point: it hangs on the wall, looking like a painting. But it’s made of an acrylic puddle poured over chiffon dyed in sorbet colors, and encased in each acrylic sheet is a scribble pad crayoned with two-dimensional scrawls. One sheet of plastic even contains a cigarette lighter. Multi – media, video, wall-hung pieces, interactive readymades-this biennial had them all, but not much in the way of traditional sculpture.
“New Sole of the Old Machine: Steampunk Brockton— Reimagining the City of Shoes”
BROCKTON, MASSACHUSETTS Fuller Craft Museum Steampunk can be described as a fantasy world at the intersection of Victorian history, science fiction, and advanced steam-powered technology. Fuller Craft Museum curator Beth McLaughlin and “Steampunk Guru”/artist Bruce Rosenbaum recently invited artists to be part of a “retro-future exhibition”—”New Sole of the Old Machine,” which used the tenets of steampunk to reimagine the city of Brockton by fusing a modern sensibility with industrial antiques. Participating sculptors were interested in objects not only as artifacts, but also as signifiers of other realities, both past and future.
Christopher Saucedo
NEW ORLEANS Good Children Gallery “Out of my own great woe,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “I make my little songs.” Analogous to the German writer’s transformation of “woe” into poetry, Christopher Saucedo turns natural disasters into prankish sculpture. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded his home in New Orleans, leaving the living space covered with “exotic, colorful mold.” In 2011, soon after he moved to New York, Hurricane Sandy flooded his house and studio in Rockaway Beach, Queens. These catastrophes nonetheless are but grist for Sau – cedo’s comic mill.
Heather Theresa Clark
WASHINGTON, DC Hillyer Art Space Heather Theresa Clark comes to artmaking from the unusual background of urban planning, green development, and ecology. Every component of her installation, Maintenance, was carefully engineered to critique “exurban” life as she experiences it in Northern Virginia, being, in her words, “embedded in a landscape that feeds on cultural neurosis.” Clark posits that this neurosis derives from detaching labor from the basic survival needs of shelter, food, and clothing, instead basing exurban planning on consumer consumption.
