Featured Artist: Florian Maier-Aichen

Again, I'm sorry it's so short.

Florian Maier-Aichen’s images offer reinterpretations of traditional landscape photography. Often shot at obscure angles or from aerial views, he represents sites in a way that makes the viewer feel slightly dislocated, addressing ideas of globalization and virtual perception. This dislocation is multiplied by the computer enhancement he performs on the photos, heightening the images’ tension. Replacing classical landscapes with futuristic scenes, Maier-Aichen takes the romantic idea of the sublime and places it within the context of modern day life and experience.

Though photography is inherently considered a “documentary” art form, Maier-Aichen approaches it as a way of creating illusion. Fact and fiction are indistinguishable in his pictures, creating an impression of constant change.

Untitled, Print, 2005



Untitled, Print, 2005


Untitled (Freeway Crash), Print, 2002


Untitled, Print, 2005

Featured Artist: Philip Guston

So I was celebrating that I had the official 8 artists in when I realized I never put in the missing two from last time. I'm utterly and completely out of descriptive creativity, thus these won't be nearly as detailed as my other entries. Will be "borrowing" a lot of info too. I'm sorry! :(

Philip Guston began his career painting scenes of social issues before becoming well known for his work in Abstract Expressionism, which often depicted blocks, masses of gestural strokes, and marks of color. During the 1960-70s, Guston returned to representational painting, though this time his characters were stylized, abstracted, cartoonish.


To BWT, Oil on canvas, 1952

“The upheavals of 1960s made Guston increasingly uncomfortable with abstract painting, and his work eventually developed into the highly original cartoon-styled realism for which he is now best known. This took him back to his early years - to the style of the comics he loved as a boy, and to the imagery of Klansmen that he first explored in the 1930s.”


Bad Habits, Oil on canvas, 1970

“These images are [often] populated by enigmatic hooded figures, reminiscent of members of the Klu Klux Klan; they are not meant to directly reference racism but rather to take a stand against war, injustice, and the hypocrisy Guston witnessed in American politics. During the years before his death in 1980, Guston continued to hone this imagery, creating increasingly enigmatic compositions reminiscent of still lives or spare landscapes, with clusters of figures, heavy boots and tools, and cycloptic heads” (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-guston-philip.htm)


Edge of Town, Oil on canvas, 1969


Head and Bottle, 1975


The Studio, Oil on canvas, 1969

Featured Artist: Shigeo Fukuda

And now for something completely different...

Japanese graphic artist and designer, Shigeo Fukuda, enjoyed using visual contradictions, illusions, and abnormal combinations of objects in his works of art, which ranged from posters to complex sculptures.

Fukuda's sense of moral responsibility is shown through his posters, addressing social causes such as pacifism and environmentalism.  His most famous poster, Victory 1945, depicts a cannon barrel with its shell pointing downward, back towards the barrel, sealing it forever. The simple design offers a biting criticism of the pointlessness of war.


Victory 1945, offset process, 1975

Though his posters are beautiful, I find Fukuda’s illusionistic art to be more fascinating. His work spans both two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums including impossible objects, ambiguous sculptures, distorted projections, and anamorphic art.

He once described his philosophy this way: "I believe that in design, 30% dignity, 20% beauty and 50% absurdity are necessary. Rather than catering to the design sensitivity of the general public, there is advancement in design if people are left to feel satisfied with their own superiority, by entrapping them with visual illusion."



Constructed out of 848 forks, knives, and spoons, Lunch with Helmet On appears to be a formless object until a light is shone behind it from a certain angle. Suddenly the impossible shadow of a motorcycle appears out of the chaos.


Lunch with Helmet On, Knives, forks, and spoons, 1987

Similarly, his Duet was a structure which looked like a pianist from one angle and a violinist from another.


Duet

Fukuda also created structures based on M. C. Escher’s lithograph prints, which distorted space and perspective to create “impossible objects” which could not exist in three dimensions. An example of this was his Disappearing Column a three-dimensional rendering of the famous impossible trident.


Disappearing Column, Sculpture in wood, 1985

 Taking advantage of an Ames Projection, Fukuda has constructed a bizarre piano so that the lines of it still coincide with the lines of sight of a real piano. Seen from one special angle, the reflection of the physical model looks perfectly normal.

Featured Artist: ROA

ROA is street artist renowned for his fascinatingly detailed spray paint art featuring black and white animals that can be found inhabiting cities all over the world, all in varying stages of decay. To some, using public spaces as canvases is vandalism, simple defacement of property. Others see ROA’s work as refreshing, unrestrained by financial gain or institutional demands.



He seems to find inspiration in adversity, choosing to depict animals that get overlooked, yet persevere despite man’s determination to destroy. Giant black and white ant eaters, enormous rats, decaying rabbits, skunks, ferrets, sloths, raccoons and birds constitute much of ROA’s repertoire, yet something feels slightly odd about his depictions, something that gives them an edge. “Even when they appear cuddly there is something beneath them that defies the cute tag – if not a danger then something urgent at the periphery of our vision which we can’t quite make out” (http://www.kuriositas.com/2010/11/roa-mysterious-belgian-street-artist.html).



At times, ROA sketches out his images before painting them, but generally, he draws inspiration from images he finds on the web. Sometimes he uses white latex paint to create a canvas for his works, most are created with spray paint alone.



I love how he incorporates setting so much into his work. The animals seem more like an extension of their environment than an intrusion upon it. Even the types of animals he uses reflects the setting in which they are placed. Fish fly from broken toilets, armadillos crawl from abandoned buildings in Mexico, rats and cockroaches crawl from rubble in NYC. I love it!











ROA's work is featured in many cities, including London, Berlin, NYC, and Barcelona as well as his home town of Ghent.

Featured Artist: Maya Lin

At 21 years old, Maya Lin’s entry won the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s design contest, launching her into a career as one of the most important current public artists with works ranging from large-scale, site-specific installations, to intimate studio artworks, architectural works, and memorials.


Peace Chapel, Juniata College, 1988-89

Landscape is the focus of much of Lin's art, merging the technological advancement and style of modern day life with ideas of natural beauty. “Her works address how we relate and respond to the environment, and presents new ways of looking at the world around us” (http://www.mayalin.com/). Some of her pieces are partially or fully embedded in the earth, merging completely with the environment, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic.


Eleven Minute Line, Earth and Grass, 2004

An example of such works is The Wavefield at University of Michigan, which consists of tall, undulating waves made entirely of soil and grass, and the Vietnam Memorial, a V-shaped wall of black stone, sunken into the earth, etched with the names of 58,000 dead soldiers. 


Wave Field, Earth and grass, 1995


Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982


Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982


Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982

Her Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama displays inscriptions on a disc of black stone beneath a thin layer of moving water. On the disc are names of people who died in the name of civil rights and the dates of important events in civil rights’ history. Lin describes the piece in her book, Boundaries: “In choosing to intertwine events with people's deaths, I was trying to illustrate the cause-and-effect relationship between them. The struggle for civil rights in this country was a people's movement, and a walk around the table reveals how often the act of a single person -- often enough, a single death -- was followed by a new and better law.”


Civil Rights Memorial, Stone and Water, 1989


Civil Rights Memorial, Stone and Water, 1989

Not just an environmental artist, Lin’s studio works also reflect her love of landscape.

2 x 4 Landscape, Wood, 2006


Blue Lake Pass, Particleboard, 2006


Water Line, Aluminum Tubing & Paint, 2006

Featured Artist: Jill Sylvia

Jill Sylvia’s medium is ledger paper, including some that her father used and discarded during his career as an accountant. Her work transforms 2D utility objects into beautiful 3D pieces that evoke a sense beauty within the businesslike repetition of her medium.


Untitled (U.S. Capitol Building), Hand-Cut ledger paper, dimensions variable, 2008


Untitled (U.S. Treasury Building), Hand-Cut ledger paper, dimensions variable, 2009


Untitled (U.S. Treasury Building), Hand-Cut ledger paper, dimensions variable, 2009

Using a single-edged razor blade held against a straight edge, she cuts away the tiny rectangles of paper from within the ledger pages' ruled grids, yielding lattices that evoke architectural facades and the constraints of everyday business routine.


Untitled (City), Hand-Cut ledger paper and matte board, dimensions variable, 2007

To prevent her works from becoming too monotonous, Sylvia inserts variation into her pieces by selecting sheets of different sizes — 4, 10, or 25 columns — and often attaching them together.



The resulting confetti of scraps are not wasted. They’re carefully collected and reassembled into textured collages such as "Untitled (Reconstruction Birds I)."

“The aesthetics of office supply design is reflected in the minimal palette available — green and brown on light green; blue and red on buff” (http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-06-13/culture/jill-sylvia-ledger/) In “Untitled (Calendar),” Sylvia mounts 31 yellow sheets on the wall like days in a month.

Featured Artist: Lorretta Lux

Loretta Lux specializes in creating photos of children that are haunting, unique, and just a little bit strange. She started out as a painter but eventually changed her medium to photography after deciding painting was "too messy." Using photoshop, Lux to alter her images until they emit a vague but tangible distance between the audience and the subjects of her portraits. Though hesitant to spell out any specific meaning that is communicated through her works, she admits that they represent childhood and the experiences/interpretations that individuals can draw from those memories.


The Paper Airplane, Photo, 2004

Lux employs a muted, pastelle color palette with no harsh light or shadow. Almost always, her subjects are children, dressed in vintage clothing and formally staged in isolated locations. Their expressions are blank, distancing themselves from their viewers. Finally, the strangest element of her work is the way she elongates their limbs, oversizes their heads and eyes, and distorts some of their features. The subjects seem to merge with their settings: backgrounds sometimes painted by Lux or taken from her photograph collection. Together, these changes make the childrean appear to be something out of a dream: realistic yet strange, unengaged, remote, and just a little bit impossible.


Study of a Boy 1, Photo, 2002

Purposefully devoid of any indicator of specific time or space, the photographs do seem to imply a sense of narrative. In The Waiting Girl, Lux depicts a girl and a cat sitting on a couch, waiting for nothing in particular. As the artist herself described, "It's a picture about time, and timelessness. The girl and the cat are frozen in time. For me, they are sitting on the sofa as if they are waiting for eternity" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/nov/23/photography).


The Waiting Girl, Photo, 2006

Other Examples of Her Work:


Hidden Rooms, Photo, 2001


Girl with Marbles, Photo 2005


The Rose Garden, Photo, 2001


The Walk, Photo, 2004



The Drummer, Photo, 2004

Featured Artist: Do-Ho Suh

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1962, Do-Ho Suh earned his BFA and MFA in Oriental Painting from Seoul National University and served in the South Korean military before relocating to the United States to continue his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University.



Interested in both the physical and metaphorical implications of space, Suh constructs intricate sculptures that do not follow conventional ideas of scale and site-specificity in order to explore the relationships between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity in today’s increasingly global society.


Screen, 2004


Screen, 2004

Much of his work communicates its ideas through forcing the viewers to think about the way they occupy and interact with public space. For example, in his work, Floor, Suh invites his audience to walk across a thick glass floor which is supported by more than 180,000 small PVC plastic figures. A little over two inches high and cast from six-different molds, the figures were differentiated by reductive characteristics of gender and race, their legs bowed with the effort of supporting the glass plates raised above their heads. This idea of "the many" supporting the weight of "the few" easily lends itself to interpretations of class and social hierarchy. Additionally, it could also speak to the nature of what we are capable of doing collectively that would be impossible on our own.


Floor, 1997-2000


Floor, 1997-2000

In “Some/One,” the floor of the gallery is coated with a blanket of polished military dog tags that join together to construct a  traditional Korean jacket in the center of the room. The work speaks to the way an individual soldier is part of a larger, collective identity (his troop).


Some/One, 2001


Some/One, 2001

More Works:


Reflection, 2005


Cause and Effect, 2007


Staircase-V, fabric, 2008