David Gallagher: Neo Directional Night Light, 2011, Translucent Cast Porcelain, Digital Processor, LEDs, Acrylic Rod, Wood
contemporary art
Aneta Regel Deleu exhibition / Puls Contemporary Ceramics, Brussels
Aneta Regel Deleu exhibition / Puls Contemporary Ceramics, Brussels
September 8 - October 6, 2012
Prize winning Polish-born artist Aneta Regel Deleu is a rapidly rising star on the European ceramic art horizon. She is an honors graduate of the Gdansk, Poland Fine Art Academy and London’s University of Westminster and Royal College of Art. This is her first exhibition at Puls Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.
“The main focus of my ceramic forms is the exploration of materials and their combinations. I am particularly interested combining the rough natural qualities of materials such as rock with malleable materials such as clay. The resulting juxtaposition of the natural and human-made creates a dramatic friction and tension. This reinforces the transformation and sense of movement that objects undergo during the passage from one state to another throughout the making process.”
Aneta Regel’s work seeks no functional path other than that of the communicative and expository power of art itself. Like certain of her mid-20th century pioneering artistic antecedents, she utterly rejects the label of potter. Simply because her medium is clay, fire and occasionally glaze, that does not make it craft. The designation of ceramist or ceramic artist—or better yet, ceramic sculptor—is both more expansive and accurate.
The human figure is not her vehicle of expression. Rather it is the trees, rocks, fields, and river-beds first encountered in her native northern Poland and later in her travels. Her formal language is abstract, creating a sort of equivalent to the natural world rather than attempting to describe it. Hers is a landscape, or more precisely, aspects of a landscape that create images through which she seeks to convey her vision of a reality we may already have encountered or indeed might yet encounter.
Regel is a romantic seeking to capture the forms, energies and rhythms of the forests and natural phenomena that have surrounded her. She has repeatedly been confronted by native rock, split and ground into powder by the power of glacial ice.
Tim Hawkinson - Mobius Ship, 2011
Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco, California, in 1960. A graduate of San Jose State University, he later earned his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1989. Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. His installation, “Überorgan”—a stadium-size, fully automated bagpipe—was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. Hawkinson’s fascination with music and notation can also be seen in “Pentecost,” a work in which the artist tuned cardboard tubes and assembled them in the shape of a giant tree. On this tree, the artist placed twelve life-size robotic replicas of himself, and programmed them to beat out religious hymns at humorously irregular intervals. The source of inspiration for many of Hawkinson’s pieces has been the re-imagining of his own body, and what it means to make a self-portrait of this new or fictionalized body. In 1997, the artist created an exacting, two-inch-tall skeleton of a bird from his own fingernail parings, and later made a feather and egg from his own hair; believable even at a close distance, these works reveal Hawkinson’s attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time. Hawkinson has participated in numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Venice Biennale (1999); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2000); the Power Plant, Toronto (2000); the Whitney Biennial (2002); and the 2003 Corcoran Biennial, Washington, DC. Tim Hawkinson resides in Los Angeles with his wife. (via)
Tim Hawkinson on art21.
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(Source: likeafieldmouse)
David Gallagher: William Jennings Bryan Gets a New Hat, 2011, Cast Porcelain, Enamel, Dimensional Lumber
David Gallagher: Gavage (Fracking Scanner), 2011, Coil-built Stoneware, Wood, Foam, QR Code, Website, Digital Processor, Laser
Note: Laser Scans are surrounding the Vinyl QR code, which directs viewers to a website with Image Mapping.
David Gallagher: Domestic Inversion, 2011, Porcelain, Enamel, LED, Wire, Lithium Rechargeable Battery
Martin Creed on My Modern Metropolis
Contemporary art doesn’t get much more fun than this! First created in 1998 with white balloons and then redone many times over, Half the Air in a Given Space is an interactive installation, by British artist Martin Creed, that’s comprised of hundreds or thousands of balloons of the same color. As the name suggests, half a room’s entire volume is filled with air-inflated balloons and then visitors are encouraged to walk through. “It is important to me,” says Creed, “that the situation is normal, that, as usual, the space is full of air; it’s just that half of it [is] inside the balloons.”
Meant to evoke a sense of celebration and remembrance of childhood, the installation is almost guaranteed to leave everyone with a smile on their face.
Last year, Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas was graced with 9,000 giant gold balloons that filled half of an eight-foot high gallery. To get a sense of what it feels like inside the room, Anna Merian of the Dallas Observer wrote, “People kept emerging from the balloons and startling each other — you’d feel totally alone and then suddenly, a face would come looming up out of the yellowness and you’d smile sheepishly at each other, then go back to flailing and squealing and butterfly-stroking your way through the balloons.”
In Chicago, Creed has installed four versions of this work in neighborhoods throughout the city, choosing a different color balloon for each site. The first two installations (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) can be experienced through October 2nd and October 15th at the Hyde Park Art Center and Garfield Park Conservatory. In addition, this fantastically fun installation is coming to The Cleveland Museum of Art from September 30 through November 25, 2012. (via)
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Shane Porter: Self Portrait, 2012, Earthenware, Stainless Steel, Rubber band. Photo by Chris Jones.
Clean is a series of work concerning the sterile and the sanitary within shared spaces. The work expresses my need for order and cleanliness within the home. I am interested in people’s need for the physical and mental cleaning of spaces when moving into a new home, which in turn removes any traces of previous tenants. To me, home is a space where I have both physical and mental control.
