Description:
Caption Contest.. Cheryl Molnar's Landscape Collages.. Susan Graham's Sugar Sculptures.. The Dumpster Project..
Contents:
Caption Contest
 | | "So close" |
From my walk to work this morning, a lost half-mannequin on the street. Does anyone else want to play the "what is she thinking game"?
 | | "I wonder if this is how Venus d'Milo got started." |
 | | "Well, my mother was right. She always said Steve had an obsession with that chain saw. And it was just one limb after another." |
Cheryl Molnar's Landscape Collages
The Hamlet
Cheryl Molnar is a collage and multimedia artist, and in fact what I first thought were sharp-edged paintings are carefully composed and assembled landscapes. Unfortunately, my camera is adding the 70s yellowish cast to these photographs (and no, this is not an Instagram filter, just a bad photo). I liked how her landscapes captured the quintessence of places, even as the collage pieces fractured the space into geometric, almost abstract designs.
Detail of collage The edges show just a bit at the end, and you can also see the transparency of the layers here.
Industrial Park
Voila--something not yellowed...! But I'll spare you and just show you some of the lovely images you can also find on her website:
New Highway
American Dream
Park Homes
Susan Graham's Sugar Sculptures
Susan Graham's Toile Landscape is a collection of works that were just at Schroeder, Romero & Shredder Gallery that the artist moved back to her Smack Mellon studio in time for DUMBO Arts Festival. I loved the intricacy of her all-white creations (yes, despite the yellow tint to my photograph these are white.)
 | | Detail of above |
Graham presents trees, towers and other tableaux here with delicate lines. Graham made these pieces out of sugar--in fact out of sugar, egg whites, wood and wire. (In fact, sculptures made of sugar are by no means a new thing, and apparently can last quite a long time.) In addition to sugar, the artist also works with porcelain. Here we have small landscapes of sorts, but more confrontationally in terms of material vs. content, she makes delicate white guns and lawnmowers.
The Dumpster Project
 Some people, like me, clean house when they move, getting rid of the extra stuff that has accumulated along the way. Others, like artist Mac Premo, move to a smaller studio and decide to put all the stuff to good artistic use. In The Dumpster Project, Premo doesn't chuck his decades-worth of collected objects into a dumpster as I would: he obsessively makes a home for it in the interior wood structure he built inside a dumpster.
Each of these objects have a personal meaning for the artist, recalling memories and stories. In addition to loving sorting them here, he posts an entry about one every day on the project's blog. So for example, you might learn that the Chairman Mao watches pictured above were gifts from friends, and similar stories exist for each object on display.
Currently The Dumpster Project is (or at least was this weekend for the DUMBO Arts Festival) on view in the tunnel in DUMBO.
A "tilted" view of DUMBO: Isidro Blasco at Smack Mellon
Tilted by Isidro Blasco, at Smack Mellon during the DUMBO Arts Festival, was a large wooden framwork installation that sprawled out across the first gallery, dividing the space into little rooms covered in photographs. The photogrpahs themselves were of local neighborhood, but cut and pasted into and around each other in a way that created its own 3-dimensional, and tilted, space. They recreate the DUMBO streetscape and the Smack Mellon gallery itself.
Blasco is Spanish artist with a background in architecture. That comes across clearly here: the bare sticks of wood at odd angles suggest deconstructed-construction.
It's rather like taking apart the pieces of something to figure out how it works, except in this case rather than a toy or an engine, it is a nieghborhood, and more specifically a gallery in a neighborhood. One of the more interesting and visually-stimulating pieces I saw during the DUMBO Arts Festival, Tilted really succeeded in taking over and interacted with both the space and the viewer.
For a view of some of the artist's earlier work, checkout James Kalm's video walk through of a early 2011 show at Black and White Gallery.
Three of the Greatest Painters of the Past 150 Years?
Now this is an exhibition I can get behind: Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm promises to be a brilliant and insightful exhibition. I heard the title, and I immediately got it: the loose brushwork and rich colors that developed over their long careers can seem remarkably similar despite the very different times and places in which they worked.
Twombly's 2008 Lepanto versue Monet's 1914 Waterlillies:
"J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly are three of the greatest painters of the last 150 years. This groundbreaking exhibition focuses on their later work, examining not only the art historical links and affinities between them but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style." - More on the background to the exhibition here.
Monet's Japanese Bridge (1918-1924) and Turner's Sunset:
I would love to see how they flesh it out--in the flesh, so to speak. Anyone want to plan a trip to Stockholm this October?
Blue Morph at Governor's Island
Mark di Suvero work isn't the only thing up on Governors Island this summer. Blue Morph is an interactive installation by Victoria Vesna that is taking over the St. Cornelius Chapel on Governors Island. Vesna's work is part of the WAVE(form)s: Electronic Art Exhibition and was created in collaboration with nanoscientist Jim Gimzewski.
The morph is that of a butterfly, which you can see in the blue light on the large screen in the apse. The rather haunting sound that echoes through the chapel is meant to correspond to cellular changes in the butterfly as it emerges from its cocoon.
But the interactive element makes this installation really come to life. The participant sits on a blue disc that lights up, and places the white crochet hanging thing on his head. Suddenly the sounds are amplified in his ears and he has the best view of the piece in front of him. It soon becomes clear that if the person moves, the image on screen changes, or perhaps one could say distorts. It feels as if the participant is the heartbeat of the whole glowing exhibition. |
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