Contemporary Art and Culture
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.
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.
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In early February, the bleakness of winter got to the New York City based artist Leslie Kerby. She decided to reach out to friends near and far, as she had done during lockdown, this time asking them to send photos of the places around their house where they were able to find some solitude. She contacted everyone individually which opened up possibilities for longed for exchange. To her delight she received many beautiful photos. It took her a couple of days to figure out how she would paint from them. Ultimately, she decided on watercolor, acrylic, and mixed media collage on vellum, which enabled painting on both sides, while letting the light in. “It was a gift to visit with everyone in their home. A testament to the value of human connection,” she says.
NEW LINK to whole project
Continue reading “Leslie Kerby: Happy Place Project”
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”
Jessica Lagunas is Interested in working with unconventional materials—makeup, hair, perfume, organic materials—through video-performance, installation, drawing, prints, artist books, embroidery, and recently, weaving. She is a New York City-based Latinx artist, whose group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio’s The (S) Files Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and Laxart, among others.
Continue reading “Jessica Lagunas: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center”In Dialogue with Holly Wong
Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:
“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
Continue reading “Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary”
Art is a refuge both for the viewer and the maker. Katerina Lanfranco’s recent exhibition at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Nature Poems, offers respite from these strange and unsettling times. The exhibition starts with an exquisite painting titled, Bouquet for You. Its deft placement in the gallery is significant as it presages the story of the entire show in microcosm. Three encapsulated womb-like flower forms grow amid a dense, swirling, chaotic background teeming with what look like sperm cells and luminous spinning orbs. Practically buzzing with a sparkler’s sizzle, this wellspring of life is shot through with skeins of golden paint tracing through and around the orbs. The golden trails recall the rays of golden light falling onto the Virgin in Renaissance Annunciation scenes. Here instead of symbolizing the conception of Christ, Lanfranco suggests the secular, “scientific” conception of the Universe.
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