The ethos of the American landscape has been and continues to be a subject of great fascination among thinkers in any field or interest. The country’s flora and fauna intrigue even the most oblivious due to their extreme diversity and limitlessness. It is of little surprise then that an artist, in this case, painter Jake Longstreth, has chosen the American landscape as the launching-off point[…..]
Ryan Brennan‘s work typically presents multi-faceted collage sculptures that layer evocative materials–whether home videos from his youth, personal memorabilia from his parent’s basement, items culled from thrift stores, and iconic or diaristic personal symbols, such as boom box radios, string, video game parts, or baroque ornamentation. Brennan reassembles these mementos in an organic and free-spirited fashion, recontextualizing their unique histories to create beautiful realms of[…..]
It is a truism that artists see the world much differently than other people. But what about those artists whose eyes literally deceive them? It is not thought odd for a gifted musician to be blind, although we often grant them an additional aura of wonder. To be sure, the inability to see does not affect the ability to hear, or listen. A blind person[…..]
Mend: love, life, & loss, featuring ten nationally recognized fiber artists, opened at the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday, October 24. Curator Mark Sloan has brought together works substantiated by a variety of non-traditional materials, such as hair, thread, fabric, paper, and plastic, many of which are marginalized by their use as craft supplies or in historically female trades. The[…..]
In the decade since her breakout success in 1996, Liza Lou has won a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, kept a studio in Durban, South Africa, and continuously mesmerized the world’s critics and collectors. She works with millions of tiny glass beads, taking the traditionally craft-oriented medium and elevating it to astonishing artistic heights.
On October 8th, LACMA opened Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets–Sports and Masculinity, a survey exploring the intersection of masculinity and sports in contemporary culture and artistic practices. Curated by Christopher Bedford (himself a player of rugby and American football), the show poses athleticism not in diametric opposition to artistic expression, but rather as a kind of male-dominated theatrical spectacle of gender performance. In Bedford’s accompanying[…..]
Andy Warhol ate a hamburger for Jorgen Leth‘s 1981 documentary, 66 Scenes from America. He sat alone in a gray-blue room, wearing a suit coat and a tie that matched the ketchup bottle. He chewed slowly, fidgeted, stared off into space, removed the top of his bun, rolled his burger up like a taco, then fidgeted some more. He looked at the camera only once,[…..]
