(Above: Piece by Ursula von Rydingsvard . I love this particular piece, but I love her work even more when its placed out in nature. Stunning! ☆☆☆☆☆)
Art 21; Mark Dion, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Ursula von Rydingsvard
Mark Dion focuses a lot on "stuff" in his work. By placing and arranging both unique and plain household items in an instillation, Dion creates life like scenes from mysterious times and places. His work is also very focused on ecology, one of his best known pieces, Neukom Vivarium, focuses on the complex and delicate processes required to create life on this planet.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle creates video instillation and sculpture pieces often times making use of metaphors and symbolism. While he gets a lot of his inspiration from nature, a lot of his work seems really industrialized, modern, or architecturalized, such as in his piece Random Sky.
Ursula von Rydingsvard was the last artist we looked at this week, and also my favorite. She attacks ecological subjects by making natural wood sculptures resembling organic forms. The layering techniques she uses to create the colors in her pieces is not only extremely complicated and tedious, the end result is beautiful.While she uses a team of people to help create her vision, her pieces are enormous. I have always been a fan of natural wood works, but I have never seen it done this way before. While the individual pieces are ragged and rough, the layers make the overall image look rich, moist, and living.
(Left: Lou Lighting Aurele’s Cigarette, Nan Goldin. I just don't get anything from some of her photographs.)
Readings; Nan Goldin, Shirin Neshat
This weeks readings were some what uninteresting to me. The artists Nan Goldin and Shirin Neshat are both photographers, though their backgrounds differ drastically. Nan Goldin grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, born to Jewish parents. An early source of inspiration for her came from a trip to Boston's gay and transsexual community. You can also see the role her urban environment has had on her work, as she now resides in NYC, Berlin, and Paris.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist who focuses her art on more political issues. Her inspiration often times comes from religion and racism, as well as feminism.
(Right: Fervor, Shirin Neshat. This is one of the pieces by Shirin I really enjoy.)
I feel like my "happy place" lies some where between these two artists. While Nan Goldin goes to the extreme to show people shocking images of the gritty underbelly of society, Shirin Neshat's work is almost too pretty to interest me. With Nan's work, the images provide little stimulation for me, they don't really make me feel any kind of way. I feel like the dark and personal subject matter shown in these pictures can have a powerful impact on the viewer, but I feel her photos lack many artistic elements. There is usually very little symmetry or balance, the lighting is natural, the subjects are performing daily tasks, and the composition of many of the photographs are uninteresting, almost perfectly centered shots, as if you were taking photo's for a Facebook Icon or something. I feel bad criticizing such a successful artist, but I am not a fan.
While I appreciate Shirin's work more as art, It comes off as a little commercial. A lot of her popular photographs of women with writing covering their bodies is a well used subject in pop culture and the art world today.
Class Notes
This week we have been looking a lot at ecology and what some artists are doing to incorporate ecology in their work.I had some what of an idea of what I wanted to do for the upcoming ecology project, but after seeing some of Andy Goldsworthy's work, I am unsure. I was so inspired by his pieces, it slightly changed the way I wanted to go about this project. At first I was hoping to do something involving an urban environment, but now I would like to create something more organic.
On Thursday we went to the McColl center, but unfortunately I didn't feel a connection with any of the art on display.
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