Month: October 2015

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz

Following her education at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, Magdalena Abakanowicz began to produce her first artistic works. Due to the fact that she spent most of her academic life moving from place to place, much of her earlier artwork was lost or damaged, with only a few, delicate plant drawings surviving. Between 1956 to 1959, she produced some of her earliest known works; a series of large gouaches and watercolors on paper and sewn-together linen sheets. These works, described as being ‘biomorphic” in composition, depicted imaginary plants, birds, exotic fish, and seashells, among other biomorphic shapes and forms.

During the 1970s, and into the 1980s, Abakanowicz changed medium and scale; she began a series of figurative and non-figurative sculptures made out of pieces of coarse sackcloth which she sewed and pieced together and bonded with synthetic resins. These works became more representation than previous sculptures but still retain a degree of abstraction and ambiguity. In 1974-1975 she produced sculptures called Alterations, which were twelve hollowed-out headless human figures sitting in a row. From 1973–1975 she produced a series of enormous, solid forms reminiscent of human heads without faces called Heads. From 1976-1980 she produced a piece call Backs, which was a series of eighty slightly differing sculptures of the human trunk.

Floyd Elzinga

Steel Sculptures by Floyd Elzinga

Rotten stumps, broken branches, invasive species, ravaged trees as well as polar opposites and dysfunctional objects; these are the things that excite Floyd Elzinga. He has made a career out of highlighting and glorifying these through three dimensional sculpture, relief work and environmental installations for over 15 years. Current themes in his work focus on broken landscapes, portraits of trees and the aggressive nature of seeds.

Floyd received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, NS. He was initially drawn to steel, due to its malleable, plastic and forgiving nature, and he continues to utilize its range of colours as well as the way light plays off the surface. He has been exploring traditional metal working techniques to create textures and depth the same way a painter would use a paintbrush.

Elzinga’s Pine Cone Colony installation was featured at The Campbell House Museum during Toronto’s 2010 Nuit Blanche ( Bottom two images of steel pine cone in a fire).  Public commissions of his work can be seen in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Toronto, as well as Rockcliffe Park Village Green, Ottawa, and the Canadian side of the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge.

Nunzio Paci

Anatomical Paintings by Nunzio Paci

Taking the analogy comparing blood vessels and tree branches literally, Nunzio Paci creates oil and graphite paintings that connect humans back to nature. Paci’s works look almost straight from a medical textbook except for one flaw—the trees and animals that sprout from his subjects’ mouths, chests, and necks. Paci ultimately takes a painterly approach to his works, paint dripping down the canvas to add balance to his extreme detail.

Paci’s practice centers on the relationship between man and nature, especially focusing on the visual overlap of our intrinsic and extrinsic systems. The beautiful and minimally colored works could be interpreted as extremely morbid as Paci shows us our ultimate fate when nature takes over.

Nunzio was born in Bologna in 1977 and now lives and works in Italy. Nunzio Paci currently has a solo show including several of the pieces you see here at the Palazzo del Podestà in Bologna through October 12. Nunzio explains the work by saying, “My whole work deals with the relationship between man and Nature, in particular with animals and plants. The focus of my observation is body with its mutations. My intention is to explore the infinite possibilities of life, in search of a balance between reality and imagination.”

Laurence Galian: “Attributes and Qualities”

Photographer Unknown, (Tapestry and Totem Tattoo)

“Within our very cells we carry genetic memories of ancestral incarnations. If we awaken these atavisms to conscious life, we can take on their attributes and qualities. These atavistic powers have been known for millennia as: animal totems, helping spirits, maybe even the Gods and Goddesses themselves!”

― Laurence Galian, Beyond Duality: The Art of Transcendence 

The Blue Hammock

Photographer Unknown, (The Blue Hammock)

“Every summer we strung the old hammock between two hearty apple trees that tempered summer’s humidity with the thick shade that they poured on those that lingered beneath them. And I would swing for hours, listlesslly adrift in the quiet refuge that the afforded me. And yet, while I slept wrapped in the solace of their sanctuary, they were busy fashioning sweeping canopies full of apples of the sweetest sort.”

-Craig D Lounsbrough

Huang Yong Ping

Huang Yong Ping, “Wu Zei”, Oceanographic Museum, Monaco, 2012

A founding member of the Xiamen Dada group in China during the mid-1980s, Huang Yong Ping has garnered an international reputation as an avant-garde provocateur. His diverse practice explores ideas related to society, its destiny, cultures, and the impact of globalization on identity. The artist combines Oriental and Western philosophies and adapts mythologies, giving them modern day references, to draw attention to the troubling and alarming events of our time.

His large scale installation for the Oceanographic Museum is inspired by the sea and refers to maritime disasters caused by man. “Wu Zei” is a gigantic hybrid animal – an octopus and a cuttlefish. The 25 metre monster invades and takes possession of the entire ceiling of the Museum’s prestigious Salon d’Honneur and encircles the pillars with its eight tentacles. The monster sits in position and waits to entrap the smaller aquatic animals, representatives of the life of the Sea.

By calling his installation “Wu Zei”, Huang Yong Ping creates ambiguity. The title “Wu Zei” is the Chinese name for a cuttlefish yet Huang Yong Ping’s work is a hybrid beast. “Wu” is also the character for the colour black and “Zei” the symbol for spoiling, corrupting or betraying. Huang Yong Ping plays with language and semiology juxtaposing cuttlefish ink to oil spill and corruption to regeneration.