A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
John Bisbee: Nail Sculptures
John Bisbee is an American sculptor living and working in Maine. He is an art professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Bisbee received his B.F.A. from Alfred University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Bisbee’s work is included in the collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, The Albright-Knox Gallery, the Portland Museum of Art, at Microsoft, and in private collections.
Anselm Kiefer, “Seven Heavenly Palaces”
Kiefer, born 1945 in Donaueschingen and long considered to be one of the most important German artists alive, gave each of the towers its own name: “Falling Stars,” “Sternenlager,” “Die Sefiroth,” “Tzim-Tzum,” “Shevirat Ha-Kelim,” “Tiqqun,” and “The Seven Heavenly Palaces.” For Kiefer, an important point of reference was the myth of creation in ancient Jewish mystical literature describing man’s part in God’s word.
Yet the artist has taken other points of reference into consideration in his work, as well, some of which are decidedly contemporary by comparison: in his usage of the material cement and his orientation along the customary dimensions of a shipping container, Kiefer establishes connections to present life marked more than ever before by globalization and possibility.
Kiefer, who has been living and working in Barjac, France since 1993, understands the universalism expressed in these works as an apt image of our time at the beginning of the 21st century. The cross-references and symbolism in “The Seven Heavenly Palaces,” which operates on several levels simultaneously, are numerous.
With the Sefiroth tower, for instance, the painter, sculptor, and installation artist takes recourse to the three mythological paths open to mankind for lending life order and meaning, according to ancient Jewish tradition: love, sympathy, and strength.
David DiMichele,” Pseudo Documentation”, Installation/ Photography Series
David DiMichele’s current body of work, Pseudo Documentation, is a series of large-scale photographs depicting grandiose installations in fantasy exhibition spaces. DiMichele creates this work by first building scale models of exhibition spaces, and producing original artworks in drawing, painting and sculpture mediums, which are sited in the spaces and then photographed to create the final works.
The Pseudo Documentation photographs are inspired by DiMichele’s background as an installation artist, love of abstract forms and passion for monumental museum and gallery architecture.
Images from Top to Bottom: Hose Drawing, 2008; Salt and Asphalt, 2007; Pendulum Drawing, 2005; Broken Glass, 2006: Melting Ice, 2007; Light Rods, 2008; Apollonian and Dionysian, 2009; Holes, 2009.
Top image reblogged with thanks to http://contemporary-art-blog.com
The Art work of Yayoi Kusama: Photo Set Two
Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism. Her art is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, the Tate Modern in 2012, and the Hirshhorn in 2017.
Paris-based Collective Claire Fontaine, “Carelessness Causes Fire”, Audain Gallery, Vancouver, 2012
A Paris-based collective founded in 2004, Claire Fontaine is named after a brand of French notebooks and stationery. In an attempt to identify the transformed position of “the artist”, Claire Fontaine has conceived of the “readymade artist,” which considers the contemporary artist as equivalent to Marcel Duchamps’s urinal or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. The collective has developed a practice in which existing forms and materials—such as ephemeral-object sculpture, installation, video, painting, infographics, and neon—are crafted into works that critique political and aesthetic norms of the art world.
Reblogged with thanks to http://contemporary-art-blog.com
Douglas Gordon and Morgane Tschiember, “As Close as You Can for as Long as it Lasts”, 2016
Ryan McGinness, “Signs”, 2014, Fifty Vinyl on Aluminum Signs/ Dispalyed in Manhattan from July 28- August 30, 2014
Signs, a public art project by artist and designer Ryan McGinness, featured funky street signs fabricated and installed by the New York City Department of Transportation all around downtown NYC.
The project included fifty signs installed and displayed around the Manhattan area until the end of August in 2014. The signs were installed on traffic light posts and lamp posts along the route of the city’s Summer Streets program, a weekly event where about seven miles of NYC’s streets were closed off to allow people to freely and safely run, walk, bike and play.
The fifty signs were made of vinyl on aluminum and were manufactured and published by the DOT itself. The signs featured various contemporary designs in black, red, and white. The artist identified each sign as a number and he also included whimsical descriptions for each of the design on his website.
Wolfgang Stiller, “Matchstickmen”, Wood Installation
German artist Wolfgang Stiller created the “Matchstickmen’” using head molds that he had laying around his studio. The giant matchsticks created of thick pieces of lumber are standing or lying in the room. The faces are all different and meant to look as if they simply emerged in the wood after burning each flammable tip.
Ryoichi Kurokawa, “Octfalls”, One of Eight Displays in the Installation
“Octfalls” was an eight hour audiovisual installation by Ryoichi Kurokawa involving eight HD displays of waterfalls with eight channel multi sound. It was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.
Ryoichi Kurokawa is a Japanese artist, born in 1978, who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Kurokawa’s works take on multiple forms such as installation works, recordings, and concert pieces. He composes the time sculpture with the field recordings and the digital generated structures, and reconstructs architecturally the audiovisual phenomenon.
In recent years, his works are shown at international festivals and museums including Tate Modern[UK], Venice Biennale[IT], Transmediale[DE], EMPAC[US], YCAM[JP] and Sonar[ES]. In 2010, he was awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category.
Anish Kapoor, “Dismemberment: Site 1″, Mild Steel Tube and Tensioned Fabric, 2009, gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand
This work is an installation for “The Farm”, a private outdoor art gallery in Kaipara Bay, north of Auckland. Kapoor often creates outdoor sculptures as with the case with his first outdoor fabric sculpture. Anish Kapoor states “it is designed to withstand the high winds that blow inland from the Tasman Sea off the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island”.
It is 85 metres long and consists of two elliptical steel rings (one vertical, one horizontal), 27 metres across with 32 cables providing displacement and deflection resistance to the wind loads. It is covered in a custom deep red PVC-coated polyester fabric by Ferrari Textiles that weighs 7,200kg alone. It was created with the idea of enhancing views of the harbour to the west and mountains to the east channelling the forces of water, air and rock. It reminds one of red blood cells and veins with a membrane like quality to it that Kapoor describes as being “rather like flayed skin”.
Willow Sculptures by Laura Bacon
British Sculptor, Laura Ellen Bacon (born 1976) works raw materials into large-scale or ‘human-scale’ artworks, in both interior and landscape settings. Working with predominately natural materials and her bare hands, her works embrace, surround or engulf architectural and natural structures.
Her work has been described as ‘startling but beckoning’; ‘monumental yet intimate’; ‘frenzied yet calm’. Laura’s particular use of materials emerges from a compulsive desire to work them into a formed space of some kind, using a language of materials that seems strangely familiar to the natural world.
“I began making my early works upon dry stone walls and evolved to work within trees, riverbanks and hedges, allowing the chosen structure (be it organic or man-made) to become host. I am still powerfully driven to create spaces of some kind and over a decade into my work, my passions continue to merge creatively with architecture.
The forms that I make have a closeness with their host structure or the fabric of a building; their oozing energy spills from gutters, their ‘muscular’ forms nuzzle up to the glass and their gripping weave locks onto the strength of the walls. Whilst the scale and impact varies from striking to subtle (sometimes only visible upon a quizzical double take), I relish the opportunity to let a building ‘feed’ the form, as if some part of the building is exhaling into the work.”
Jason Hackenwerth, “Crown of Thorns”, Latex Balloons
New York artist Jason Hackenwerth created the above in 2006 as part of “Honeysuckle Labyrinth” exhibit for the New Museum Gala in New York City. The artwork on display consisted of insect-like forms that rotated slowly on air currents, seemingly interacting with each other.
Hackenwerth chooses balloons as his medium because he feels they add an instantly recognizable characteristic to his creations—which he describes as microorganisms that communicate about connectivity.
Sculptures by Kendall Buster
Kendall Buster is a full-time faculty member in the sculpture and extended media department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her large-scale “biological architecture” projects have been exhibited in numerous national and international venues. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as part of a series on art and science and was the recipient of a 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Arts.
“Sculpture can expand beyond the idea of the making of a distinct, autonomous object and into site-responsive installation,” Buster said. “The way I work tends to engage architectural spaces, often using a variety of materials that may not be permanent, and so there is this wonderful opportunity to do all kinds of things with scale, play and volume.”
A native of rural Alabama, Buster began her education in the sciences, particularly biology and microbiology, which inform her work today.
“A lot of these pieces have accessible interiors and operate like models that transform a given architectural space,” she said. “And there are certain kinds of references to what we think of as the language of biology in that many of the materials I use really do resemble a membrane.”
Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty”, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty, considered by many to be his most significant work, was constructed in April 1970 on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. The sculpture is built of mud, precipitated salt crystals, and basalt rocks. The sculpture forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. The sculpture is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged, depending upon the water level of the Great Salt Lake.
Smithson reportedly chose the Rozel Point site based on the blood-red color of the water and its connection with the primordial sea. The red hue of the water is due to the presence of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme 27 percent salinity of the lake’s north arm, which was isolated from freshwater sources by the building of a causeway by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959.
Smithson was reportedly attracted to the Rozel Point site because of the stark anti-pastoral beauty and industrial remnants from nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, as well as an old pier and a few unused oil rigs. While observing the construction of the piece from a helicopter, Smithson reportedly remarked “Et in Utah Ego” as a counterpoint to the pastoral Baroque painting “Et in Arcadia Ego” by Nicolas Poussin.
Note: for those who are deeply into Smithson and Rothko, I recommend a treatise by Timothy D Martin with the Tate Museum entitled: “Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Rothko and Smithson”. An intense read but very interesting. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/timothy-d-martin-psychosis-and-the-sublime-in-american-art-rothko-and-smithson-r1136831
Wolfgang Buttress, “Lucent”, Fibre Optics, Mirror
Commissioned by Hearn for the John Hancock Center in Chicago, Lucent will be the focal point of the towers entrance.
Working with eminent astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Bayliss, from the Australian National University, Wolfgang has created a semi-spherical sculpture made up of thousands of nodes which accurately map the stars which can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere from the Earth with the naked eye.
Fibre optic lighting subtly pulsates over the day and throughout the seasons. Lucent is attached to a mirrored ceiling creating the illusion of a whole sphere. Beneath the artwork sits a polished black granite pool of water; this reflects the sculpture and suggests a sense of infinity
Lucent expresses and emanates light; the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are implied in it’s reflection. They are there but cannot be seen.