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.
Robert Kinmont
NAPA, CALIFORNIA di Rosa Robert Kinmont’s recent one-person show, “Trying to Understand Where I Grew Up,” was a mini-retrospective with works from his early years in the 1970s through pieces created as recently last year. Kinmont, one of the California Conceptualists, rose to prominence in the ’70s, then dropped out of the art world in the ’80s and, for about 20 years, studied Buddhism and made his living as a carpenter. Around 2000, he returned to making sculpture, and he still lives and works in Sonoma, California—an important factor for work that explores the peculiarities of place and the human relationship with nature.
John Outterbridge
LOS ANGELES Art + Practice The most salient aspect of John Outterbridge’s recent retrospective was its powerful originality. A prominent and influential Los Angeles artist and activist, Outterbridge creates works that embody erased, obscured, or neglected histories. Though he evokes the writings of Langston Hughes to convey an essentially African American cultural history and experience, Outterbridge converts these elements into forms that oscillate between encoded meaning and the opacity of pure abstraction.
