Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the work of women artists, many of whom have been in the art world for multiple decades. Last spring, “Works in Progress” in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, featured 11 women (in their 70s, 80s, and 90s) whose work “we should have known about
Corporeal Transitions: A Conversation with Doug Jeck
Seattle-based sculptor and University of Washington associate professor Doug Jeck has been bridging ceramics, photography, and performance for more than a decade. His work, influenced by static physicality and historicity, maintains the human object at its center.
Michael Esbin: Actions in Stone
Michael Esbin belongs to an outstanding, now mature generation of stone-carving artists, although it must be admitted that this kind of work is not supported as much as it used to be—especially in America. Esbin moved to Italy some 35 years ago in order to embrace the stone carving there.
Ideas Can Last Forever: A Conversation with Richard Long
Berlin Circle, 2011. River Avon mud, view of installation at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Richard Long’s practice involves walking great distances in the wilderness, then pausing to make works referencing natural and cosmic phenomena experienced along the way.
Dream Machines: A Conversation with Theo Jansen
Animaris Adulari, 2012. PVC, 3.2 × 5 × 2 meters. Photo: Courtesy Theo Jansen and Peabody Essex Museum. In 1990, Dutch artist Theo Jansen began creating Strandbeests, or “beach animals,” an interactive and dynamic, wind-driven life form that roams on the beach.
Doug & Mike Starn
PRINCETON, NJ Princeton University Art Museum Standing nearly 18 feet tall and weighing eight tons, Doug and Mike Starn’s luminous outdoor installation (Any) Body Oddly Propped continues their preoccupation with dendritic growth and sunlight, while adding a weightiness not previously seen in their work. Seven tremendous steel frames hold vividly colored glass panels etched with silhouettes of tree branches that form networks akin to veins or synapses. The massive rectangles, like deconstructed architecture, are propped diagonally against one another; two are held up (or rather seem to be) by spindly cast-bronze tree limbs.
Raul Keller
HELSINKI SIC Galleria Raul Keller’s artistic trajectory cuts through the realms of sound art, video, photography, live performance, and installation. For his gallery and museum exhibitions, he often brings in elements from several of these spheres to create site-specific installations that immerse the viewer in sonic environments. In recent years, his explorations have tended to use a specific range of sound devices—typically, membrane speakers, trampolines in various shapes and sizes, and parabolic dishes, which he presents in diverse arrangements. At times, colored light imparts an additional aura of drama, mystery, or wonder.
Joan Tanner
SEATTLE Suyama Space Huddled in impromptu groups, excluding passage in some directions and open to being traversed in others, Joan Tanner’s recent multi- part installation seemed to lumber, stride, and even careen through space. Continuing her distinctive arrays of curiously awkward and yet oddly familiar forms, The False Spectator could be characterized as off-the-cuff, extemporized, or makeshift. Yet Tanner’s installations exude an air of compositional determination even as they appear to head in several different directions simultaneously—a polysemantic strategy that makes seeing them in person a pleasurable experience and retelling them in text a daunting task.
“The Xerox Box”
NEW YORK Paula Cooper Gallery Conceptual art, which came into being during the mid-1960s in the cold-water flats and raw-space warehouses that spread through Lower Manhattan, was anything but an elitist movement. Instead, it was a phenomenon largely based on the notion than art could exist in pursuit of ideas rather than preconceived object-forms laden with academic entitlement (which it later became). The conceptual aspects of the work evolved at a time when casual materials—like Xerox pages—were either secondary or integral, often integrating time or temporality as part of the idea.
Soo Hong Lee
NEW YORK Art Mora Korean sculptor Soo Hong Lee, who teaches at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, makes work out of wood—seemingly simple pieces that we in America would relate to Minimalism, but which take on the ritual simplicity of spiritual expression. Though there is no overt reference to Buddhism in his work, his efforts feel infused with that philosophy. Wood is a simple material; and Lee’s pieces possess an honesty that relates them to the long tradition of wooden religious sculpture in Asia. Yet the work is relentlessly abstract, given to schematic imagery that repeats forms in negative and positive space.
