Phoebe Cummings uses unfired clay to make poetic and performative sculptures and installations that emphasize material, fragility, time, creation, and decay. Working across art, design, and ceramics, she has had a number of residencies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Greenland, including three months as a Kohler Arts/Industry Resident (2008) and six months
55th Venice Biennale
Venice The 55th Venice Biennale was less about art world trends and more about real world issues. There was Cuban art about escape, Angolan art about the remnants of an impoverished society, Chinese art about the invasion of privacy at airports, and Hungarian art about bombs that, in both world wars, were fired but didn’t
Imagination in Hyper-Drive: A Conversation with Brendan Jamison
It’s rare for Irish sculptors, particularly those from Northern Ireland, to have a high profile by the time they are in their early 30s, but Brendan Jamison, seemingly without effort, has propelled himself into the limelight and is unlikely to be dislodged in the near future.
From Babylon to Third and Broadway: A Conversation with Kristi Lippire
Kristi Lippire is an artist and curator who first emerged on the Los Angeles art scene in 1997 with a solo show at California State University, Long Beach. After more than 10 years of creating photographs and paintings, she recently turned to sculpture.
John Monti: Beyond Irony
Brooklyn-based John Monti is a mid-career sculptor who has moved from a Minimalist background toward a Pop stance that catches the eye through travesty. Once a maker of cool, lozenge-like wall reliefs, he now deliberately oversteps the line of good taste with works such as Cluster Study I (2012), a table-top work of urethane resin
Maria Cristina Carlini: The Aesthetics of Authenticity
Last year, Milan’s Fondazione Mudima and Fondazione Stelline co-hosted a retrospective of Maria Cristina Carlini’s sculptures, including large-scale works, maquettes, and preparatory drawings. It was a good opportunity to study the work of an important Italian artist (born and raised in Varese), who is not so well known—despite her track record of exhibitions in public
Absalon
Tel Aviv Tel Aviv Museum of Art Twenty years have passed since the death of the Israeli-French artist Absalon at the age of 29. This show, a revised version of a comprehensive exhibition mounted two years ago at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art, featured installations, sculptures, models, preparatory sketches, and video works loaned from
Dan Webb and Edward Wicklander
Seattle Greg Kucera Gallery Recent solo exhibitions bolstered the standing of two of Seattle’s most accomplished sculptors, Dan Webb and Edward Wicklander. Long-term residents of the city, both have shown extensively outside the Pacific Northwest for the past two decades.
Thomas Morrissey
Providence AS220 Project Space An in-your-face, freedom-of-speech quality informed Thomas Morrissey’s recent installation about the summary worth of creative endeavor. His life’s work was arranged, boxed, labeled with limited descriptions, and given a by-the-pound valuation. Heavy-duty, locked chain-link gates made the collection inaccessible, and an overhead security camera remained trained on his intellectual and artistic
Rona Pondick
New York Sonnabend Gallery When Rona Pondick’s sculptural installations first appeared in the mid-1980s, their raw expression of abjection, feminist rage, infantile greed, and intimations of mortality was startling. Roughly made, her unsettling works were ambivalent, psychological, and completely uncanny: elongated lead beds, beds protruding baby bottles like teats, weird agglomerations of children’s shoes and
