herman de vries (who deliberately renders his name in lowercase) lives in Eschenau, Germany, close to the Steigerwald. This forest-and nature in general- is his studio. According to de vries, nature is our primary reality. Not only is it the place where he creates his works, it is also his subject, because he addresses the
Archive
Behind the Scenes: A Conversation with Mark Dion
Mark Dion creates sculptures and installations that explore and critique the history of science and institutional representations of nature. For decades, he has attempted to “understand the ideas that have shaped our social history of nature and have led us to our current suicidal relationship to the global environment.”
Heroic Inventions: A Conversation with Lewis Colburn
Philadelphia artist Lewis Colburn creates whimsical objects and installations that embrace a histrionic sensibility of character- with materials playing the starring role. From elaborately staged photographs and performances to meticulously sculpted objects and museum simulations of Americana, his work exudes fabricated stories and generalized dictations of history.
Zipporah Camille Thompson
ATLANTA Whitespec Project Space Started a few years ago by a documentary about the moon’s gradual drift away from the earth’s gravitational pull, Zipporah Camille Thompson began to reflect on the moon’s significance and its scientific and archetypal role in human life. The deflection of the moon, however slight, she realized, is a crisis meriting much more attention. Inspired by moonscapes and the satellite’s effects on myriad aspects of the earth’s diurnal patterns—from tides and weather to births and suicides—Thompson’s recent work delves into personal experiences, as well as the oneiric realms of myth and alchemy, to probe the mysteries of life, death, and renewal as symbolized by the moon, particularly its darksome phases.
Harriet Bart & Yu-Wen Wu
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA Minnesota Museum of American Art Project Space “Random Walks and Chance Encounters” (“RWCE”) asked visitors to take stock of their surroundings, acknowledge daily encounters, and ultimately, to simply see. Annexing almost all of the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s Project Space, the peripatetic installation was created over two weeks, by Harriet Bart of Minneapolis and Yu-Wen Wu of Boston. The artists first met in 2010 while in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, where they discovered a like-minded penchant for walking, a proclivity for connections between art and science, and an appetite for the limitless possibility of chance encounters—all of which were elements of their respective artistic practices and prompted the collaborative approach to “RWCE.”
Carlos Bunga
BARCELONA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) Commissioning contemporary art for a historical space always risks a vacuous result. This thought lingered in the back of my mind when I went to see Carlos Bunga’s three-part installation in the Convent dels Àngels at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), but it quickly evaporated. His discerning interventions could not have been less glib. In fact, they functioned as a lever to promote reflection on issues ranging from the complex’s evolving visual, material, spatial, and functional characteristics to the idiosyncrasies of the built environment and the continuing evolution of the urban fabric.
DÜSSELDORF
DUSSELDORF Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Standehaus Tiny figures teeter and bounce amid looming, massive spheres. Easy to miss from the floor of the Ständehaus’s vast atrium, the incongruous drama flits against a faceted glass roof more than 75 feet overhead. Triangular roof panes recall a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, as well as his musings on livable environments. But as critic Ronald Jones points out, Tomás Saraceno can be distinguished from earlier futurists because he aligns divergent realms of expertise and industrial materials with a scalable vision to create physically accessible environments.
Alain Kirili
NEW YORK AND GHENT, NEW YORK Hionas Gallery and Art Omi The lyricism of postwar Matisse and the muscularity of postwar American art are often viewed as opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Alain Kirili’s recent work, shown at two different venues, implicitly addresses this polarity. He first explored this path in 1978, when he began incorporating wire into abstractly modeled terra-cotta volumes. A few years ago, twisted wire and rubber works revealed a fertile re-engagement with gestural abstraction, as Kirili moved away from the totemic and volumetric creations that had defined his work for the past two decades.
Donna Dennis
NEW YORK Mixed Greens Once Donna Dennis decided to close the doors she had made, they opened for her. When she landed in New York City in the early ’70s and found herself smack within the barbed crosshairs of feminism and male-driven Minimalism, she confronted both. Her series of “door works”—including Egyptian Hotel (1972), a slim mastaba- like door—resembled geometrically shaped canvases that physically led nowhere. Instead, they functioned as psychological passageways through which Dennis discovered her voice.
John Crawford
NEW YORK Lori Bookstein Fine Art John Crawford, a Brooklyn-based artist whose output consists of welded steel sculptures, spent 10 years (1976–86) in Tuscany working at a blacksmith’s shop after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1995, he has been interested in the smithing works of various West African cultures. As a result of these models, his work is highly tactile, abstract, and often totemic. Abstract steel sculpture has a long, illustrious history in the U.S., but Crawford’s vision is quite different. He borrows from the forms of other places to create work that openly relates to its making, as well as to the history of American creativity.
