Reflections on the work of contemporary artists
The Nashville based artist and curator, Nicole Kutz, meditates in her paintings on life’s transience through handmade pigments and dyes. She frequently draws on the Japanese Wabi-sabi aesthetics, as well as the artforms of shibori and kintsugi, to create ethereal abstracted worlds, where you can find beauty in imperfections.
Continue reading “Nicole Kutz: When the conditions all fall in place”
Clive Knights practices architecture and art, in particular mixed media and monotype printmaking. He holds professional architectural design undergraduate and graduate degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy in Architectural History and Theory from Cambridge University. Clive has taught architecture since 1984 and was a full-time lecturer at Sheffield University for six years before moving to Portland State University in 1995 where he currently resides as a professor and director of the PSU School of Architecture. His primary areas of interest include the cultural meanings of architectural representation understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the revelatory capacity of metaphor in poetic work; and speculations in architectural design studio pedagogy. Publications include many journal articles and book chapters on the theory, history and pedagogy of architecture.
Continue reading “Clive Knights: Fragmentary Intimations of Shared Meaning”
For New York based artist Scherezade Garcia drawing gives rise to visual codes, which lead her to spontaneous compositions and meanings at the same time. Scherezade Garcia loves stories. The books she grew up with still provoke her imagination, words inspire a continuous production of images – “from The Arabian Nights to Greek Mythology, to Hans Christian Andersen to Crusade tragedies, to El Cid, Don Quijote, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, to Alejo Carpentier, Allan Poe, Garcia Marquez to so many others, I cannot imagine life without it,” she says. Through a variety of media, Scherezade Garcia evokes in her artworks the physicality of art making while alluding to layered narratives of history.
Continue reading “Scherezade Garcia: Navigating Histories”
Tomo Mori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based fiber artist who has been focusing on two main bodies of work: wall based collage series and sculptural
installations . In both she is working with used materials like old clothes and linens, fabrics she keeps reusing and transforming into new forms. During this 2021 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Tomo Mori shares what brought her to art making, what role her cultural background plays in her work, and what are some of her recurrent themes and processes.
Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s richly layered drawings, prints, paintings and installations draw on her daily life as a mother, daughter, homemaker and artist living in New York. She grew up in Jaipur, India and came to the USA to complete her undergraduate art education at Cornell University. Here, she found herself working with many of the elements she had encountered in her daily life growing up in India — homes she lived in, her relationships, events, color, block prints, miniature and folk paintings.
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A new art collective was born out of the need to find purpose and connection during the shut down period caused by the Covid 19 pandemic. Now the collective members launch a webzine that invites everyone to peer into their minds, get inspired and think of the various ways creativity has a potential to help cope with a global disaster.
Continue reading “Ararat: Artists Coming Together in a Time of Crisis”
Loren Eiferman sees her work as the “ultimate recycling”. She collects sticks and branches that have fallen to the ground and typically forms her sculptures by joining together hundreds of small pieces of wood into a cohesive whole through a unique technique she has developed for over 25 years.
Continue reading “Loren Eiferman: Drawing in Wood”
Brandon Graving aims to transfer and translate a sense of wonder in her artworks. She describes her process of making as exploring the connectedness of all things with ongoing “delight, immediacy and a sense of virginal untamed discovery with a nod towards Humbolt.” Some of her sculptural works are kinetic and turn, revealing elaborate intricacy and shadow play, while other works, including monoprints with handmade inks and semiprecious stones, alter dramatically in different light. She does not intend to depict nature but rather hone ideas and objects into simplified essential forms, some with elaborate treatment. Through her extensive attention to detail, she reflects on how the micro and macro within the work suggest a system that is both diverse and similar, how these dualities interrelate or even duplicate in nature.
Continue reading “Brandon Graving: Honing Viscosity and Air Currents”
Sue McNally lives and works in Rhode Island and when life permits, as she puts it, in rural southeast Utah. Her landscape paintings and her self portraits encompass everything in between — the views of nature she has encountered, and her shifting states of being. Sue McNally reflects on her art making and shares ideas on her new body of work.
Continue reading “Sue McNally: Learning how to Find”
In his stop-motion animation and mixed media installations the Brooklyn based artist Brian Zegeer creates fantastic landscapes which draw on his domestic family life, dissecting what is the meaning of identity – body as an organism, cultural heritage of childhood in Appalachia with Lebanese roots –altogether fuse into a mysterious and complex system where the viewer is prompted to get immersed.
Continue reading “Brian Zegeer: Porous Identities”