Melissa Vandenberg, Artist, American

Braided Rapunzel 
US flags, steel, flag pole base & mannequin head 
2016, variable dimensions

Snake Handler 
gloves, polyester, thread, buttons, bell, mirror & wood 
2016, 31 x 74 x 28 inches

Sink or Swim: Family Style 
US Flags, Kapok life vests, wood & hardware 
2012, 12 x 36 x 27 inches

melissavandenberg.com

Forget Me (k)Not 
handkerchiefs, sewing notions, sewing machine & hardware 
2014, variable dimensions, Lexington Art League (interior)

Forget Me (k)Not 
handkerchiefs, sewing notions, sewing machine & hardware 
2014, variable dimensions, Lexington Art League (exterior)

melissavandenberg.com

Nicole Gugliotti, Artist, United States

awe/agency

Porcelain, Stoneware, wood, paint, video projection, audio, monofilament. 

10 ft. x 25 ft. x 14 ft. area installed

Images of the gallery exhibition can be seen here.  You can also see and hear the video and audio that was included in the installation.

Despite being legal in the united states, portrayals of abortion in pop culture and politics would have us believe that the choice is only acceptable when the alternative is self-destruction or worse. Rarely is abortion portrayed as a smart, brave decision. People who have had abortions are cast as villains or, more benevolently, victims and rarely as heroes of their own story. AWE/AGENCY seeks to combine formal beauty and wonder with pointed, direct content with the intent of offering an alternative model to the dominant narrative surrounding abortion in the U.S. 

Nicole Gugliotti is an artist and abortion services worker.  

Organic shapes  made of clay serve as speakers that cradle the head when participants lean in to hear recorded personal stories. 

nicolegugliotti.com

Diana Bourgoyne and Robin Ripley, Kinetic and Sound Installation

In INTERFACE/INTERFACING, a suspended needle moves slowly along a thread stretched across the gallery wall. The needle strikes the thimbles creating subtle percussive sound and also triggering the pre-recorded sounds embedded in the electronics. Visitors are invited to intimately experience line and space not only visually but also through movement and sound. Life and art intersect through this drawing together of various art practices and sensory experiences. 

Accompanying the installation is NOTIONS, a series of mixed media works by Robin Ripley, that takes us further into this extra-ordinary experiencing of everyday objects. 

DIANA BURGOYNE’s work addresses the relationships between society, technology, and the human environment. Burgoyne assembles electronic components to create works that appear “hand-made” to humanize what is often perceived as a sterile material. The material, content, and aesthetic of her art practice are developed from the idea of constructing “Electronic Folk Art”. 

ROBIN RIPLEY works with the language of objects, highlighting the composite nature of perception. Her work re-examines familiar objects as well as explores their function as signifiers and repository for sensory information, knowledge and memory. Ripley creates objects that do not exist in the natural world and yet reflect or transmit information about our world and our place in it. 

Numen Gallery

Link here to see more photos and video. 

Matt Roberts, Artist, United States

mattroberts.info

12 Sound Artists Changing Your Perception of Art

Link here. 

Kara Walker, Artist, b. 1969, American

“The Sugar Sphinx,” by Hilton Als. Kara Walker’s bleached-sugar sphinx is triumphant, rising from a kind of half-world—the shadowy half-world of slavery and degradation.

Walker knows that ghosts can hurt you because history does not go away. Americans live, still, in an atmosphere of phantasmagorical genocide—we kill each other with looks, judgments, the fantasies that white is better than black and that blackness is bestial while being somehow more “humane”—read mentally inferior—than whiteness. But what do those colors even mean? In Walker’s view, they are signifiers about power—the power separating those who have the language to make the world and map it, and those who work that claimed land for them with no remuneration, no hope, and then degradation and death.

Located in Williamsburg, the Domino Sugar Factory was built in 1882; by the eighteen-nineties, it was producing half the sugar being consumed in the United States. As recently as 2000, it was the site of a long labor strike, in which two hundred and fifty workers protested wages and labor conditions for twenty months. (I saw the piece before the installation was complete and look forward to going back.) Now the factory is about to be torn down and its site developed, and its history will be eradicated by apartments and bodies that do not know the labor and history and death that came before its moneyed hope. The site is worth mentioning at length because Walker’s creation is not only redolent of its history, it’s of a piece with the sugar factory—and its imminent destruction.

Measuring approximately seventy-five and a half feet long and thirty-five and a half feet high, the sculpture is white—a mammy-as-sphinx made out of bleached sugar, which is a metaphor and reality. Remember, sugar is brown in its “raw” state. Walker, in a very informative interview with Kara Rooney, says that she read a book called “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.” There, she learned that sugar was such a commodity that, in the eleventh century, marzipan sculptures were created by the sultans in the East to give to the poor on feast days. This tradition made its way to Northern Europe, eventually, where royal chefs made sugar sculptures called subtleties. Walker was taken not only with those stories but with the history of the slave trade in America: Who cut the sugar cane? Who ground it down to syrup? Who bleached it? Who sacked it?

Above text source from Culture Desk, by Hilton Als, The New Yorker. Link here to read full article. 

Auntie Walker’s Wall Sampler for Savages, cut paper on wall, and Burning African Village Play Set with Big House and Lynching, 2006, painted laser-cut steel, with Erin Shirreff, photographs and sculptures, installation at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

source lssartadvisory.com

Miroslaw Balka, Artist, b. 1958, Poland

Fire Place is an installation consisting of an overturned carpet on which rests a crude hearth-like structure made from bricks and concrete. Within the opening of the fireplace sits a single naked light bulb, which fills the void with heat and light from a tungsten filament. Pasted to the outer surface of the bricks are torn and layered newspaper clippings of recent obituaries that are collected by the artist at the time and place of the work’s exhibition. A hollow mound-like cement torso with round apertures at the neck and shoulders rests on the brick foundations, and a relatively naturalistic cement head sits unsupported and partially sunken into the neck-void. Plaster has been smoothed over the surface of some of the cement, lessening the coarse texture of the underlying material. The overturned carpet is stained with grease and dirt and on its left side are stock or inventory numbers stencilled in red ink, remnants of manufacture that would ordinarily be obscured. The carpet establishes a boundary to the installation, a domestic threshold that is reinforced by the carefully placed pair of cement shoes that sit at its edge.

This work was made in 1986 by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, when he was living and working in his studio and former childhood home in Otwock, Poland. The work is designed to be situated on the floor and without a barrier, yet due to the fragility of the constitutive elements it is generally exhibited on a low platform to allow people to circulate around the installation. A reproduction of Fire Place printed in the catalogue to a solo exhibition of Balka’s work held at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1993 shows a slightly different arrangement of the sculpture’s components: the fireplace is positioned off-centre on the carpet, and the left shoe is placed marginally further forward than the right, turning the edge of the carpet down on itself (reproduced in Van Abbemuseum 1993, p.64).

Much of Balka’s work is concerned with the environments that humans construct for themselves and the materials and objects to which we give meaning. He is best known for the austere formalism of his work in which he combines minimal and seemingly neutral forms with highly evocative raw materials, including found items. This can be seen in another of Balka’s works in Tate’s collection, Oasis (C.D.F.) 1989 (Tate T07499), in which the abstracted silhouette of a house is formed from wood that was found around Balka’s home and studio in Otwock. This is accompanied by wooden containers filled with leaves and pine needles that were also discovered in the area, and all of the installation’s elements retain the residue of their previous use, with traces of plaster, cement and paint visible on the surface of the wood.

Fire Place was made at a transitional point in Balka’s career in which the artist began to move away from figurative representation towards more symbolic practice. Since the early 1990s Balka’s sculptures have been non-figurative, comprised of unadorned materials and simple forms, although often incorporating personally significant items. In a 1993 interview the artist stated that his move to non-figurative installation was part of his attempt to achieve greater allusiveness in his work:

In my earlier works I employed the body in the very literal way … After some time I satisfied my hunger for the form of the human body. I took interest in the forms that accompany the body and in the traces the body leaves: a bed, a coffin, a funeral urn.
(Balka in Van Abbemuseum 1993, p.64.)

In this installation, the carpet and shoes suggest some personal, yet ambiguous, significance as traces of the physical body. Balka has said of such objects that ‘I choose them because they carry a history which I connect with when I touch them. It is like kissing the hand of history.’ (Quoted in Institute of Contemporary Arts and Serpentine Gallery 1990, p.16.)

Further reading
Possible Worlds: Sculpture from Europe, exhibition catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Serpentine Gallery, London 1990.
Miroslaw Balka, exhibition catalogue, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1993.
Helen Sainsbury (ed.), Miroslaw Balka: How It Is, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2009.

Thomas Scutt
August 2014

Supported by Christie’s.

tateorg.uk

Adriane Colburn, Aritst, based in San Francisco and New York

Forest for the Trees

2010
Inkjet prints, sumi ink, film
12'x7'

Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fines lines between use and exploitation.

adrianecolburn.com

Yank Shonibare, Artist, b. 1962, London

'Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina' 2017

ENLIGHTENED PRINCESSES: CAROLINE, AUGUSTA, CHARLOTTE, AND THE SHAPING OF THE MODERN WORLD

THURSDAY 2ND FEBRUARY - SUNDAY 30TH APRIL, 2017

Specially commissioned new artwork by Yinka Shonibare MBE: Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina, 2017

Exhibition: Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World at Yale Center for British Art

This exhibition will explore the story of three remarkable German princesses: Caroline of Ansbach, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, all of whom married into the British royal family in the eighteenth century. Caroline and Charlotte became queens consort to George II and George III respectively; Princess Augusta never achieved this distinction but held the titles of Princess of Wales and Princess Dowager, and was mother to King George III.

Through their wide-ranging intellectual, social, and political interests, Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte helped to shape court culture and the age in which they lived, and would leave a lasting legacy. They encouraged the greatest philosophers, scientists, artists, and architects of the day; and they brought art, music, dance, enlightened conversation, and experimentation into the palaces and royal gardens, and supported industry, trade, and imperial ambition. The exhibition will include many important works of art and manufacture, which belonged to these women and their families, or were commissioned by them. Works by Hans Holbein, William Kent, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, Johan Zoffany, and many more will be on display. Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World is a collaboration between Historic Royal Palaces and the Yale Center for British Art. It will be on view at the Center in spring 2017 and then at Kensington Palace from June 22 to November 12, 2017. The lead curator is Joanna Marschner, Senior Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, assisted by Samantha Howard, Curatorial Assistant. The organizing curator at the Center is Amy Meyers, Director, who is assisted by Lisa Ford, Assistant Director of Research; Glenn Adamson, Senior Research Associate; and Tyler Griffith, Postdoctoral Research Associate.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same title, a beautifully illustrated catalogue of works edited by Joanna Marschner, with the assistance of David Bindman and Lisa Ford. Co-published with Historic Royal Palaces in association with Yale University Press, the book will feature contributions by an international team of scholars.

 

 

 yinkashonibarembe.com

Bio

Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in 1962 in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art, first at Byam School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA.

Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is the brightly coloured ‘African’ batik fabric he buys in London. This type of fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.

Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004, and was also awarded the decoration of Member of the ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ or MBE, a title he has added to his professional name. Shonibare was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta 11, Kassel, in 2002 to create his most recognised work ‘Gallantry and Criminal Conversation’ that launched him on to an international stage. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and internationally at leading museums. In September 2008, his major mid-career survey commenced at the MCA Sydney and then toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He was elected as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy, London in 2013.

Shonibare’s work, ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ was the 2010 Fourth Plinth Commission, and was displayed in Trafalgar Square, London, until January 2012. It was the first commission by a black British artist and was part of a national fundraising campaign organized by the Art Fund and the National Maritime Museum, who have now successfully acquired the sculpture for permanent display outside the museum's new entrance in Greenwich Park, London.

In 2012, the Royal Opera House, London, commissioned ‘Globe Head Ballerina’ (2012) to be displayed on the exterior of the Royal Opera House, overlooking Russell Street in Covent Garden. The life-sized ballerina encased within a giant ‘snow globe’ spins slowly as if caught mid-dance, the piece appears to encapsulate a moment of performance as if stolen from the stage of the Royal Opera House.

In 2014, Doughty Hanson & Co Real Estate and Terrace Hill, commissioned ‘Wind Sculpture’ and it is installed in Wilcox Place, London. Measuring 6 metres by 3 metres, it explores the notion of harnessing movement through the idea of capturing and freezing a volume of wind in a moment in time.

Shonibare’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and VandenBroek Foundation, The Netherlands.

Liz Burris, Student Work

Dimensions & Materials : (5) 18"x12" Foam Blocks, Acrylic Paint

Site: Trump International Golf Club, West Palm Beach, Florida

Artist Statement:

As an artist I feel it is important to have a voice.

I was motivated by Donald Trump's 2018 Budget Plan and my personal stance against it. For this piece I created five tombstones, made from foam blocks and painted them with acrylic paint. The five tombstones represent the death of just a few of the important programs and organizations Trump plans to completely eliminate next year; The National Endowment for The Arts, The National Endowment of Humanities, The United States Institute of Peace, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The Global Climate Change Initiative.

The money, taken from decreased funding and the totally eliminated programs (approximately $54 billion) will, according to the budget, be put towards our massive military, bringing its total budget up to a whopping $654 billion. With this budget increase, the United States' military budget alone will equal the size of the next eight largest military budgets around the world combined. I felt it was important to bring these tombstones to one of the places Trump has frequently visited during his time as President, the Trump International Golf Club located in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Joseph Provenza, Student Work

Mom

Fabric, paint, lazer prints, frame, artificial light.

3.5' x 7' x 3'

Kimmy Schander, Student Work

"Reflecting on Man Draining Nature: Diffract, Refract, Reflection" 

48" X 48" X 108"

Found tree trunk with PVC pipe embedded, more PVC pipes, tree branches, wrapping paper, assorted glass jars, water, glycerin, glass rods, and red acrylic paint

Statement:

After I gathered all my materials, I sat in the space with my tree trunk and pipes, allowing the three walls to surround me. I wanted it to shape my emotions, somehow, and incorporate my thoughts on nature. I was still reflecting on how light bends objects through water, too....and then the pipes spoke out! I immediately thought about how we are draining nature, and began incorporating all my previous ideas, and this one, into a whole new one. My goal being,  that my viewers would grasp a similar experience because our Earth's natural resources are diminishing,  and man is to blame. Winifred Gallagher called it "The Science of experience" in "The Power of Place. Yes, we need to reflect on how man is draining nature. We need to diffract from our current ways refracting in the light of nature. . .bending with the waters of willpower, and change our wasteful ways, before we drain her dry.