Colombian artist Cesar del Valle has a characteristic way of combining his often hyper realistic drawing with a certain amount of modification to whatever surface he is working on, so that it interacts with his subjects. De Valles human figures are depicted interacting, sometimes with the paper surface, sometimes with the room itself.
Colombian artist Cesar del Valle has a characteristic way of combining his often hyper realistic drawing with a certain amount of modification to whatever surface he is working on, so that it interacts with his subjects. De Valles human figures are depicted interacting, sometimes with the paper surface, sometimes with the room itself.
Kris Kuksi has been called as a post-insustrial Rococo master. His intricate and sculptures are the results of hours of collecting, manipulating, assembling and re-shaping thousands of small parts, using materials such as old toys like plastic soldiers or small model parts, miniature engine blocks and assorted debris.
The artist is critical to the greed and materialism in the world today, and wants his art to expose the fallacies of Man. His works challenge ideas of organized religion and morality and depict a challenge to understand, and bend, the limits of morality.
For more detail, visit his website at kuksi.com.
(Source: kuksi.com)
Miguel Endera: The making of "Hero"
Beautiful video documenting the work progress behind Miguel Endera’s drawing “hero”, commemorating his father. “Hero” is hand drawn, and composed by about 3.2 million (!) ink dots.
(Source: miguelendara.com)
The work of Maskull Lasserre explores the unexpected potential of the everyday, with elements of humor, nostalgia, accident and the macabre. Created in the most various of materials, his sculptures show strangeness in the familiar and uncertainty in the expected.
(Source: maskulllasserre.com)
Glass artist Mika Aoki
Glass as a material holds the conflicting qualities of solidity and fragility, as well as visible and invisible. Aoki’s beautiful and alien-looking work is often inspired by forms found in microscopic life, like spores or viruses. She calls it “Singing Glass”.
“I perfectly control the changing of the transparent material from solid into liquid, and again into solid, and at the same time, being controlled by this phenomenon, I converse and convey ‘time’.”
For more on Mika Aoki, visit http://www.sing-g.net.
Bethany Krull - Dominance and Affection
The current work of Bethany Krull, Dominance and Affection, explores the duality that can be seen in how we relate to the rest of the natural world, and the wild animals we have turned into companions by genetically altering them into sweeter, less dangerous versions of themselves. In her work she wants to illustrate this contradiction between affection and absolute control.
“The success of the relationship lies in our complete domination over all aspects of their existence”.
Most works are made in porcelain, sometimes combined with other materials.
Bethany Krull has a beautiful website at http://bethanykrull.com.
The works of Paul Villinski, an artist cocerned with environmental issues, will often feature repurposed discarded materials. Materials like gloves or beercans are transformed into quite poetic pieces, in metaphores of transformation. Metaphores of flight are also frequent in the works of this pilot of sailplanes and paragliders, and as a record collector Villinski has also re-used records. Before he alters each record with a saw, he listens to it - a kind of eulogy for what it represented before the alteration.
In the words of the artist himself:
(About the beercan butterflies:)”I am drawn to humble, yet evocative materials; in this case, crushed beer cans from the streets of New York - every one of them once raised to someone’s lips. My process of “recycling” them into images of butterflies is a quiet physical meditation, a yoga of tin snips and files and fingers.”
(About the gloves:) “They have qualities we fear coming to know: carelessly left behind, forgotten or discarded, weathered, damaged, exhausted and worn through, run over by life, homeless. Lost and found. So I bring them into the studio and into pieces and give them homes, with the others.”
(Source: paulvillinski.com)
The salt installations of Motoi Yamamoto
The works of Motoi Yamamoto often take the forms of complicated labyrinths, ruined staircases or narrow tunnels. An important staring point was dealing with the death of his sister, in brain cancer. Salt, according to the artist, seems to possess a close relation with human life beyond time and space. In Japan, it ispart of the death culture. After the death of his sister, he began examining how death was dealt with in the present social realm.
“In the beginning, I was interested in the fact that salt is used in funerals or in its subtle transparency. But gradually I came to a point where the salt in my work might have been a part of some creature and supported their lives. Now I believe that salt enfolds the ﾒmemory of livesﾓ. I have thus had a special feeling since I started using it as a material.”
(Source: motoi.biz)
Kim Joon: fragile-flow blue (2011)
Kate MacDowell works in hand built porccelain. Her painstakingly detailed work covers the conflict between the romantic ideal of union with nature and our contemporary impact on the environment. There is also a reminder of our own vulnerability to our destructive practices.
(Source: katemacdowell.com)
