(via Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Assembling Stories: The Rubble Art of Dominique Moody)

Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era. Her three-dimensional pieces explore her personal and family history that reflects her nomadic history from her birth in Germany in a military family through her odyssey of living at more than forty addresses in various locations throughout her fifty-four years.

curate:

fyeahwomenartists:

Desaparecidas
Clay, wood
2010

This work speaks to the constant disappearance of people around the world who fight for human rights.

lithy:

By Helen McDonnell @ Danse Macabre (2010)

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while now as a point of inspiration; these embroidered sculptures were part of a superb four-week project hosted by Catalyst Arts last year and were accompanied by a sound design created by Hornby (of Continuous Battle of Order).

Helen, as you may be able to guess from her drawing style, also works as a sumpremely talented tattoist. Her studio, Skullduggery Tatu, is currently hosting the Sew Risqué exhibition until the end of this month. I’d recommend checking out her altered photo postcards, too.

(via textilenerd)

(via Stephanie Metz Pelt X-Ray Dress)

The ‘Pelt’ sculptures, my newest body of work, reference a jarring truth that struck when I first became a parent. My infant had basic needs and desires that elicited in me physical and emotional responses of astounding intensity. The drive to care for, feed, and protect my young felt deeply personal and yet common throughout the animal kingdom. The messy, uncontrollable, and immensely satisfying elements of being a mother brought home to me that for all my education, tool use, and language, I am essentially a mammal.

One physical hallmark of being a mammal is possessing hair—something humans routinely try to shape, deny, remove, and contain that persists nonetheless.  In this work I combine found clothing items that carry their own layers of meaning with hair that intrudes on and reshapes them as a reassertion of the closeted mammal inside. Acknowledging our mammalian roots places humankind back among - not above - other animals.

curate:

Ruth Asawa in Her Studio, San Francisco, 1969. Rondal Partridge via  smalljoys

sexartandpolitics:

Portrait of Bharti Kher by Sumeet Inder Singh for India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists

She is posed in front of The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006
Fibreglass and bindi
ed. 1/3
167.6 x 152.4 x 457.2cm (irreg., approx.)
Purchased 2007
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation

Martin Herbert, ‘Bharti Kher’ in Art Review, no.39, March 2010:

Several years ago, Bharti Kher became fascinated by a four-by three-inch newspaper photograph of a collapsed elephant being loaded into a truck, and a sculpture was born – albeit slowly. The image was a rear view: to make the front, the artist needed a model. Kher’s studio is in Gurgaon, a thriving satellite city of New Delhi, and she knew where the latter’s colony of elephants is kept. She discovered that she could get one walked to her studio – it’d take a day – but the logistics were forbidding (and involved lots of bananas). Next, she went out alone and came across a beautiful female elephant en route to a wedding, but photographing it meant getting the animal into an untenably painful position. So Kher backed off, consulted, photographed surrogates (cows, for example), calculated how body weight would fall, improvised and – don’t tell – made the rest up. And, lengthily, after three attempts at realisation, voila: The skin speaks a language not its own 2006,

Watching this British guy from Sotheby’s talk about this piece is ridiculous. The shots at the beginning of them unloading the piece from the truck clearly indicate that it’s not supposed to be uplifting. He talks about how the bindis could be helping the elephant get up. Nothing about this piece says Oh, thank you swarm of sperm, I’m feeling better.

Hi followers, KP has been MIA due to the floods and clean up here in Brisbane,  back & catching up now! Apologies for missing a couple of your exhibition notices.

p.s Brisbane followers - Kher’s work including this piece is in the current Qld Art Gallery exhibition, plus Kusama’s infinity room, and they didn’t go underwater.

Qld GOMA twitter here for when they reopen.

(via brownpeople)

circusfolk:

Lilith’s Flight by Candice Raquel

I’m a huge fan of Candice Raquel’s work. Though it may appear a little rough, I think she has some of the coolest renditions of myths and legend. Her figures are always positioned in a very meaningful way. They’re just a joy to look upon. Lilith’s Flight is one of my favorites by her, not only because of my fascination with Lilith, but also the dramatic pose conveys so much emotion.

I love Raquel’s interpretation of the myth. Here are some words about the piece from the artist:

“My sculpted rendition of the Lilith myth captures the precise moment when Adam’s first wife, with hands raised in prayer, lifts her face, utters the name of God and begins to rise to the heavens. Adam, oblivious with desire, embraces her tightly and seeks to hold her down even as her body urges upward. Wind riffles Lilith’s hair; her toes lift. This tense moment of competing movement and purpose is what I have sought to convey in the work.

For the ancient rabbis, Lilith was evil for her defiance. Contemporary feminist readings emphasize Adam’s domineering nature. In reality, both parties are guilty of a complete refusal to compromise. Thus, their situation is a caution against selfishness for any couple desirous of a lasting relationship. Lilith and Adam are mirror images both physically and mentally; with their eyes closed, both are so absorbed in their own agendas that no communication passes between them.

This negative equilibrium is represented, however, as a thing of beauty in Lilith’s Flight: the posture of the figures creates symmetry from front and back and a wonderful triangular geometry from all sides, which one can observe in the various views of the sculpture. Lilith herself is a brilliant gold, as if she is transforming into ethereal light, while Adam remains an earthier stippled brown.”

DORKBOT : SYDNEY

Dorkbot-Syd is having a group show at the Sydney Artist Run Innitiative Serial Space. The show will open on the Tuesday night, the 22rd of February, 2011. It will run for a week, until Sunday the 27th of February.

Dorkbot Sydney is accepting applications for this exhibition from anyone in any form that is Dorkbot related. The aim of the show is to exhibit work by “people doing strange things with electricity”. Submissions should not be limited to artworks only. Picture something between an art exhibition and a science fair. Some projects might involve robotics, installation, interaction, electronic sculpture, screen based works, web based work, audio instruments and performances. What is appealing about Dorkbot and would be great to exhibit, is the versatility of work that is generated from our diverse community.

Submissions of proposed work are due by 6th of December. [application pdf at Dorkbot]

mylove4u:

Serena Miller at Park Life.

www.parklifestore.com/

www.serenamitnikmiller.com

(Source: plentyotoole)

Kiki Smith: Rapture 2001 Bronze

If nothing else, one of Kiki Smith’s great contributions to art culture is this fact: artists don’t need big clean studios. Perhaps we can bury that requirement once and for all. If you can’t imagine how an artwork will look in a gallery without an ersatz gallery to see it in, then you shouldn’t be looking at art. Too often, dealers, curator, and collectors require the perfect white-walled studio, or they do not take the artist seriously — even though all it means is a mommy or daddy who can come up with the bucks.

I remember an artist whose work I had followed for years telling me a horror story. He came from a poor background and liked working in a modest, cluttered apartment. In fact, his apartment on the Lower East Side was part of his art. He was able to move to a bigger place in Hell’s Kitchen (now called Clinton), but soon it was merely a double-size version of his tinsel-strewn downtown digs. Once, an extremely famous and well-connected curator from Europe paid a visit. He took one look at my friend’s amazing workplace and, proclaiming “I cannot look at art in a place like this, you are not a serious artist,” marched right out the door.

Alice Neel painted in her living room. So did Hopper.

Kiki Smith, I am told, has birds flying around inside her house.

Glass Is the New Fat - Artopia

superflyyarns:

Rebecca Horn (1978) Der Eintänzer (Dance Partner)
film still; 47 min.; ©2009 Rebecca Horn
kinetic sculpture: The Feathered Prison Fan
(source)

(via joopy)

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1932, Tanaka was a member of the Gutai Art Association, the major experimental postwar Japanese art movement founded by a group of young artists in Ashiya in 1954. She was best known for sculptural installations made from non-art materials, such as Electric Dress (1956), a wearable sculpture made of flickering light bulbs painted red, blue, green, and yellow. When originally worn, the sculpture both made the body the center of artistic activity and masked it in a mass of light and color.

via Rhizome | Electric Dress (1956) - Atsuko Tanaka

abigail doan: Lace Revival by Jennifer Cecere

‘Rose Window’ by Jennifer Cecere (Socrates Sculpture Park, 2009)

Cecere exhibited one of her site-specific doilies in Socrates Sculpture Park’s ‘State Fair’ exhibition last summer, and this occasion marked the beginning of a new series of public works where Cecere has expanded on the mapping qualities of the doily template as a ready-made overlay for organic design in both urban and rural settings.

Louise Bourgeois with Femme Volage [1951] Copyright Louise Bourgeois Archive.

Born almost a century ago, Louise Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the development of contemporary art for more than 70 years, and continues to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision. Although her oeuvre includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric.

via Louise Bourgeois on Artabase

She was still holding artist salons in NY in her 90’s.

wolfandfox:

prostheticknowledge:

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 98.

Full article here