Bronwyn Taylor

Christchurch based sculptor Bronwyn Taylor is best-known for her bronze casting work. From Kaituna to Kaitorete will instead feature recent drawings and sculptural objects in an experimental investigation into drawing both as a tool and as a practice in its own right. Charcoal is an important substance for Taylor, who makes her own charcoal on her property in the Kaituna Valley outside of Christchurch and it features heavily here. Inspiration for the exhibition is Taylor’s interest and passion for the natural landscape and geology of her home and surrounds on the Banks Peninsula.

Drawing has long played an important role in Taylor’s work as a sculptor and this exhibition will feature drawing in two and three dimensions: charcoal drawings on paper and sculptural objects made of charcoal and wax on the gallery floor. The result is an exhibition that poses a question to the viewer: how does drawing sit in relation to sculptural objects?

According to art historian Barbara Garrie, in From Kaituna to Kaitorete “there remains a constant tension between the work as object and as image. Taylor’s works on paper can also be approached in terms of this tension. As a kind of drawing installation, this exhibition foregrounds the very ‘objectness’ of the artist’s charcoal drawings in their physical relation to other works in the show. Yet, these drawings are of course also inevitably read in terms of their rendering as two-dimensional images. Within the frame of each image, Taylor plays with pictorial strategies of depth and perspective, creating abstract invocations of the landscape that might best be described as ‘spatial constructions’. Often making use of compositional systems involving lines and grids, these works relate to the processes of mapping out and demarcating the land, as well as the practice of image-making itself.”

Quote Of the Day

"Truth is not found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself." ~Osho

Sands of Time: The Work of Micha Ullma, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

taken from http://telavivartdesign.com/2012/11/micha-ullman-retrospective-sands-of-time/

Spanning four decades of creative activity, Sands of Time is a retrospective exhibition of the work of Micha Ullman, one of today’s most esteemed and internationally acclaimed Israeli artists and 2009 Israel Prize laureate. On exhibition are drawings from four decades including Wedding, a sand installation created especially for this exhibition, iron-and-sand sculptures, and documentary films screened presenting Ullman’s oeuvre and focusing on his environmental works and public space installations in Israel and abroad. Ullman’s art avoids superfluous means of description and expression, relying instead on distillation, reduction, and abstraction. The idea that different, even contradictory views should coexist in a single work reflects the artist’s profound commitment to dialogue, which runs like a thread through his work and his life. This balancing act between conflicting forces, which stresses mutual influence rather than coercion, is the source of the power of his art. In his works, hard meets with soft, permanent with ephemeral, lofty with earthly, life with death. “I look for good in evil,” says Ullman, “for the sky in a pit.” His characteristic material is red sand from the Sharon area north of Tel Aviv, where he lives; it represents the notions of roots and belonging, alluding to the trenches which protect us and the graves in which we bury our dead. Yet in Ullman’s works it is elusive and fluid, a nomadic element infused with a sense of doubt. Though deeply anchored in the Zionist yearning for roots, it also exposes the other side – the underbelly – of that dream. While Ullman’s works may seem abstract at first glance, they are based on simple images drawn from everyday life: a glass, a table, a chair, a bed. “The things that are hardest to understand,” he explains, “occur in that space: my wife, my children … your home.” In his art he strives to capture reality and the flow of time directly – though not in a traditional manner, from an external point of view – and, above all, to raise questions about them. Equinox, 2009 Concrete and glass 500 x 500 x 500 cm Library, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1995 Glass, concrete, and plaster, excavation 530x 706×706 cm Library was designed as a room with a closed door facing the university from which, ironically, came many of those who burned the books. Standing on the glass top, viewers look down, as if into a dangerous abyss, to face recent history. The room’s dimensions – 706 x 706 x 530 cm – were determined by Ullman’s own height. Fourteen empty shelves line the walls of the room (the Hebrew letters whose numeric value amounts to fourteen – yod dalet – compose the word yad, meaning “memorial”). They evoke in a palpable way the void created by the burning of the 20,000 books, all of which might have fitted on Library’s vacant shelves.   Under, 2009 12 parts; iron and red sand (edition 2/2) Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin and Beijing All the objects on the edge of the Sand in Time exhibition are part of one work, entitled Under. The exhibition floor evokes the surface of a body of water, from which parts of furniture and household objects – corners of tables, backs of chairs, and drinking glasses or the interior of a house – emerge as if washed by something akin to a Tsunami. The strong sense of sinking and tragedy in this work is echoed in that which exists – though more vaguely – in Ullman’s other works. Another of Ullman’s works in sand, Wedding , is spread on the floor with almost no thickness. Among these works, the grand, sinking performance takes place. Midnight, from the “Containers” series, 1988 Iron and red sand 240 X 232 cm, height 253 cm Gift of Rivka Sacker and Uzi Zucker to The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in memory of Dov Gottesman Exhibited in ‘Micha Ullman’: 1980-1988: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem     Sand Book 1, 2000 Iron and red sand, 26 X 25 cm, height 8 cm, Collection of the artist Tikkun (Repair), 1990 Iron and red sand, 580 X 640 cm, height 45 cm, Collection of the artist Sand Library, 1997 Iron and red sand, 354 X 226 cm, depth 30 cm, Allianz Collection, Munich Television, 2001 Red sand and pigment on paper, 60 X 70 cm, height 140 cm, Collection of the artist   Camera, 2001 Iron and red sand, 16.6 X 11.6 cm, Height 8.2 cm, upright height 112 cm, Collection of the artist

Amanda Klimek

Artist Statement

The contemporary and on-going debate over climate and the environment has become a talking point for the growing political rift in the United States. We are feeling a pressure, a collective anxiety, coming to terms (or not) with our self-destruction. From house plants to hybrids, strip mining and oil spills, insecticide and granola, global warming and “green” consumption – nature has become a symbol for internal struggle.

My work reflects on this complicated relationship with the environment as a psychological manifestation, addressing themes of alienation, self-destruction and loss.

I insist on making work that cannot be produced mechanically and cannot be experienced digitally. I believe in the importance of the handmade object as a means of communication and of forming an intimate bond between the maker, the object and the viewer.

Personal Effects, 2009-2010

Personal Effects is a series of small porcelain pieces that explores habits of self-collecting. The porcelain pieces are hybrid-organic/bone forms created at an intimate, “collectable” scale.  A home, often a bedroom, accumulates bits and bobs that remind one of some experience or another. We live among these objects and they take on pieces of our identities.

 

Terra Forma, 2007- 2011

These works represent the mutual erosion of the human body by nature, and the landscape by human beings.

Leaf Instillation

 

I am working on an installation in porcelain to present at the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts this year. The installation will be a room with hundreds of suspended porcelain "leaves" that glow and softly hum. The leaves are crafted one at a time by pushing my hand into a small amount of porcelain clay until it is less than a millimeter thin. Peeling the clay off of my hand creates the organic, curled leaf-shape, and firing it to 2,300 degrees causes them to become translucent like a piece of rice paper. Suspended from above by silk thread and incredibly thin magnet wire, spotlights will illuminate them from above and behind, allowing the leaves to glow and the skin-print to become visible. The hand-prints will all be pointed upward, as if reaching toward the light. The porcelain is highly resonant, and attached to about 200 of them will be tiny piezo transducers that will vibrate them, allowing them to hum at their own tone. Each tone will be different depending on the size and shape of each piece. The viewer will enter the darkened room to the soft chorus of the reaching, glowing hands. 

The piece is entitled Left, the past tense of leave. It addresses ideas of the struggle of ascension, not necessarily in the religious sense, but in the sense of some rising above and some being left behind. The process of making the leaves speaks to manufacture, and the human face and voice behind the mass-produced object, liking the maker with the product. The voices together make a chorus, but this chorus not necessarily harmonious- but rather a collection of individual tones melding together in our ears. The suspended leaves hang in the formation of an arch, which can also be seen as a bell-curve and the crest of a sine wave. The piece creates a contemplative space, displaying a dynamic between the different leaves, as individuals and as a group.

New website up

http://cargocollective.com/patrickqueen

LEDscape: A Lightbulb Landscape in Portugal

 

taken from  http://www.thisiscolossal.com/page/7/

As part of a promotional effort to promote a new line of lighting solutions, IKEA Portugal partnered with LIKE Architects to create this fun illuminated walkway in the Belém Cultural Centre in Portugal. The lamps are programmed to have oscillating intensities, with each light possessing a unique pattern that results in a sort of shimmering maze of bare lightbulbs. See much more over on Domus. (via yellowtrace)

Ernesto neto