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LOUISE BOURGEOIS

THE FRAGILE 2007

Medium: Series of 36 compositions: 29 digital prints and 7 screenprints, 30 with hand additions

Dimensions: sheet (each approx.): 11 1/2 x 9 1/2" (29.2 x 24.1 cm)

https://www.moma.org

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/129798

Bourgeois created The Fragile when she was 95 years old. A series of self portraits from her youth to old age, the work deals with her feelings about motherhood and vulnerability. The artist is well known for her monumental spider sculptures, but the spiders in The Fragile differ from those iconic, strong figures— instead, they are slight and frail. Yet, the spiders in The Fragile are also buoyant, befitting this prolific artist who made work until her death in 2010.

According to Bourgeois’s assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, the artist created the series of drawings that served as the source for the 36 printed compositions of The Fragile in one 9 ½ x 8 inch drawing pad, while sitting in bed. Bourgeois then employed the expertise of Raylene Marasco, of Dye-Namix, to translate the source drawings into prints.

The Fragile is comprised of 29 digital prints and 7 screenprints, all printed on fabric. The source drawings of the 7 screenprints were done in pencil only, whereas the source drawings of the 29 digital prints were done in watercolor, colored pencil, or a combination of watercolor and pencil. According to Marasco, the 7 screenprinted compositions were at first printed digitally but Bourgeois preferred the screenprint technique for these, and liked the combination of the two types of printing, and later, the hand additions, within the series.

Another step in the proofing process was deciding on a range of background tones. At first glance, the varying background tones of the individual compositions seem to be the tones of the fabric itself. In fact, the backgrounds were printed to resemble old fabric.

Once the proofing process was complete, the edition of 7 and 3 artist’s proof sets was printed at Dye-Namix, and their fabric edges were hemmed. Later, at home, Bourgeois added to many of the printed compositions by hand, using archival dyes. Pictured below are three examples of the same composition in three different sets, with varying hand additions.

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Sophie Calle

‘What attracts me is absence, missing, death…’ 

In 1978, when she was 25, she returned to Paris after seven years abroad. Her father, a doctor and pop art collector, had paid for her travels as a prize for completing a degree under Jean Baudrillard, who agreed to fake her diploma to help her escape round the world. Back in Paris, her mother now on her third marriage, she moved in with her father. To impress him, she decided to make art. Weeks passed, and she struggled to find a routine. One day, she decided to follow a stranger. She chose a person a day, stalked them through their lives and, in doing so, found her own. One of these trails (which took her to Venice in a blonde wig) became a piece called Suite Venetienne, which launched her strange and mutable career, one anchored in rules and routine. In the accompanying essay, Baudrillard considers, “the sensuality of behind-the-scenes power: the art of making the other disappear”.

She is an expert in short sharp stories, intimate revelations extracted with or without the subject’s consent, and her pieces speak to non-art audiences, too. She invited strangers to sleep in her bed, she filmed people seeing the sea for the first time, she worked as a maid, photographing guests’ belongings and once, after finding a stranger’s address book, she phoned everybody in it to create a portrait of its owner. As revenge, he found and published a nude photo of Calle – she, typically, was delighted.

Her art is accessible because of its deadpan romance and drama, the voyeuristic thrill of it like a trawl through a private inbox. Her confessional pieces (including the book Exquisite Pain, where she recounts her heartbreak to everybody she meets, asking them for the worst moment of their lives in return) are almost a tease – autobiography wrung dry of all emotion, pathologically honest, and often hilarious. It’s intimate, but... not. She was shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse photography prize, and the serenity of the photographer’s gallery in summertime was broken only by small snorts of laughter.

Calle designed her home in 1979, and she filled it with animals. A giraffe’s head is mounted behind the fireplace, and it is named after her mother. A stuffed monkey sleeps beside the sofa, and under the iron staircase each member of her small taxidermied zoo is named after another of her friends. Her father is a tiger. There are two workspaces, one desk covered with found Victorian photographs of babies; she collects them for the hidden mothers shadowed in the background. The other is a white wall on which she’s pinning works in progress, including a project with the Museum of Hunting, about the “hunting of women”. She’s been trawling through the personal ads in a paper called Le Chasseur Français, to work out what men are looking for in a wife. “Between 1895, when it started, and 1905, it’s mostly money. And after, it’s virginity. And after that, it’s sweetness.” What are men looking for today? “A woman who is nearby.”

When, at 51, her boyfriend broke up with her via email, signing off with the line “Take care of yourself”, she sent it to 107 female professionals to analyse. He was evaluated by a physicist, shot by a markswoman and performed by actor Jeanne Moreau. The effect was that Calle’s emotion was blurred and distorted with the women’s professional work. The piece, which has been touring for the past 10 years, took on a life of its own, finding Calle a new audience of young women. And her work suddenly has company, not just in Tracey Emin’s bed, but in the raw telly, say, of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and the novels of Chris Kraus, female artists who elevate the interior lives of women, with all the pain and blood that implies.

There’s something of the “quirky” about her, of course, that word used so often as a dismissive pat on the head of women that tell intimate female stories. But, even in the shadow of a giraffe that is her mother, her eccentricity is the last thing you notice.

Sitting in a straightbacked chair, her feet bare, she warns me she compiles journalists’ mistakes about her, for a future project where she intends to carry out the errors they make. I laugh; she doesn’t. Perhaps, I say, there is another way to collaborate on this piece. She says she’ll consider it, and then we talk about death for a while.

“Hospitals and graveyards are not places that paralyse me. They inspire me and my work, it’s what has always been attracting me – absence, missing, death…” She has already commissioned her headstone. At the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, 200 people told her their secrets which she wrote down and dropped into her grave, then hung around for a cheery picnic. To some, she says, she was an artist, others a priest, others a brick wall.

As she prepares for her first major US retrospective, I ask what she learned about American pain from listening to all these secrets. “What the work teaches me is not important. It’s what people take from it.” I wait, and finally she elaborates. “I found the people incredibly fragile.” She sighs, thoughtfully. “It seems the really tough things made people suffer less than the small things. Maybe because for the tough things you are in a group, with more people and it becomes a fight. The little thing that someone says to you happens in solitary.” She scoffs suddenly. “But it’s stupid to try to do a scale of suffering.”

“I always feel sorry for people who have children. It’s ridiculous because they look happy and say it’s a most beautiful thing. I think they are lying to themselves and to me. But it’s a defence.” She puts her head to the side. “It’s not that I’m afraid to have regrets, because I’ve never had regrets. Maybe it’s a defence in advance. I feel… ‘light’ not to have that constant fear that something may happen to them or that they could be unhappy.”

Here is something she bonded with the actor Kim Cattrall over, later inviting her to read excerpts from her late mother’s diary (December, 1985: “Sophie’s selfish arrogance! My only consolation is, she is so morbid that she will come visit me in my grave more often than on Rue Boulard”) to be played alongside the video of her last breath.

I’m not surprised people queued in the sun to tell her their secrets – her fearlessness, the spine of her work, is insanely seductive. I wasn’t prepared for the dizzying effect she’d have on me, sitting with somebody who hasn’t given even a crumb of a damn in more than 40 years, whose singularity of intent means she makes notes on Post-its about Tinder as we talk, who seems genuinely surprised people might be shocked she filmed her mother’s death. “I was told people die when you step out of the room. So I wanted to make sure if she had something to tell me, I’d be there.” A shrug, so simple.

She’s standing at the kitchen counter, eating small slices of cheese. From the fridge she retrieves an already poured glass of wine and explains why she lives alone. “I don’t want other people’s dirty laundry. I want to be able to feel free, even if I’m not completely. Friendship requires effort, but I don’t think of it as compromise. I don’t go against my nature, and sometimes it’s not fun, but I like it like that.”

She says she has a suggestion for a collaboration. I should make a list of the questions she refused to answer. I look back at my notes, reading out loud. “Do you feel brave? What did you learn about pain? How does it feel to be told someone’s darkest secrets? What’s your responsibility when a stranger cries to you?”

Smiling, she pulls her feet up beneath her, and looks immediately relaxed, as if she’s solved a problem by keeping even this little bit back. “Yes.” Gazing off towards the garden, it’s as if she has, quite suddenly, disappeared. So I gather my bags.

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MELANIE MANCHOT

11 / 18

Produced over the last seven years, Manchot's '11/18' is a nine-channel video installation, composed of edited footage collected from filming the same person every month for the duration of one minute, recording her countenance between the ages of eleven and eighteen. Employing the restricted palette of a studio portrait and filming on analogue Super8 filmstock the work becomes an enquiry into time, duration and commitment. Investigating the boundaries between documentary and fiction, '11/18' comes forth as a study on the notion of subjectivity, where its constituting parts surface as gestures and mimicry. The portraits fade in and out, displaying the changes that Manchot's subject has gone through, as her appearance and ways of relating to the camera alters. Manchot's subject responds to the camera, as if she is responding to someone familiar and to something uncanny. '11/18', thus emerges as a quest for identity and character, whilst pronouncing its inexplicable and ever-changing nature.  

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HANNAH WILKE

Intra-Venus (1991-1993)

In 1991 Wilke began to document the physical changes caused by her cancer using her typical style of self-portraiture, with the help of Goddard. In this photo series of thirteen portraits, quite unlike in her earlier photographs, Wilke presents herself with a brutal honesty. They show the artist naked and bloated from her chemotherapy treatments, without make-up, and bruised where the intravenous tubes entered her body. These tubes give the series its name, Intra-Venus, which, typical for Wilke's work, makes a play on words that compares her post-cancer body to the "Venus" typical of conventional artistic representations of women. In one photograph, Wilke looks at the camera through the remaining strands of hair on her nearly-bald head, a far cry from the abundant dark tresses that are so key to her aesthetic in her earlier works. These photographs act as a rebuttal to Wilke's critics, some of whom claimed that Wilke's works were purely narcissistic and self-congratulatory. This work helped shift critical opinion away from the idea that she focused only on her own "essence" as a woman, i.e. her own beauty and sexuality. Thus, this series further answers her earlier rhetorical question about what difference her beauty made. These photos are a testament to Wilke's commitment to her practice. She asks the viewer to consider the objectification of women by society, and the way in which they lose media coverage and public visibility when they become old, ugly or ill. The work makes a strong feminist statement in the challenge it poses to societal expectations about the female body - the discomfort caused by images of a less-than-ideal body. By challenging this, as Amelia Jones puts it, Wilke "refuses the construction of woman as the pathetic, obscene, victimized subject of the patriarchal gaze" by "offering her body within a fully theorized array of expressions [...] that articulate a pro-active rather than re-active feminist subject."

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HANNAH WILKE

Needed-Erase-Her (1976)

Wilke was one of the first feminist artists to create vaginal forms, something that she did in various media beginning with terra cotta in the 1960s. With these sculptures, she wanted to create positive associations with female genitalia "to wipe out the prejudices, aggression, and fear associated with the negative connotations of pussy, cunt, box." These shapes show up most famously in her Starification Series, where she used gum as a medium. In the Needed-Erase-Her series, she uses kneaded erasers to make the vaginal forms, using word play to further underscore the feminist bent of her work. She placed these organic shapes in patterns on postcards of architecture and landscape, such as the Parthenon or the Lincoln Memorial that were meant to reference patriarchal history and tradition. In addition to overlaying references to patriarchy with symbols of female sexuality and reproduction. Wilke's use of geometric patterns in her layouts, appropriates the forms of the hyper-masculine Minimalist movement into a very different, Feminist context. Erasers, like the chewing gum in Starification, are highly malleable and thus relate to cultural notions of femininity. Much as her Starification series implies the ability of women to be wounded (as well as the cultural association between vaginal forms and wounds), her Needed-Erase-Her series also recalls women's vulnerability in a culture that often wants to erase or ignore women's sexuality.

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HANNAH WILKE

S.O.S Starification Object Series (1974-75)

This is one of Wilke's best-known works; it constitutes a series of photographs of Wilke posing topless much like a glamorous pin-up girl in which she parodies traditional representations of "femininity". The difference between these photographs and typical glamor shots is that Wilke has created tiny sculptures out of chewing gum and stuck them to her body. The gum is formed into vulval shapes, a shape that she explored in other media throughout the 1960s. The title, "Starification" is a neologism that refers to a concept of creating a "star" or celebrity. The term also recalls "scarification," which could refer to the coming-of-age scarring rituals undertaken in some non-Western cultures or the numbered tattoos on Holocaust victims, while also suggesting a relation between women's bodies and wounds/vulnerability. By juxtaposing ideas of celebrity and scarring, Wilke points to the complexity of responses to images of women's bodies. This piece continues the theme underlying most of her works in which she is shown as both an object for viewing and as the agent of the objectification. Her goal, therefore, is to bring attention to depictions of women in popular culture, thus dismantling stereotypes about femininity and disrupting the pleasures of the male gaze.

Wilke's series received a mixed response. Many feminist critics in particular condemned Wilke for being narcissistic, and for confirming the conventional male gaze by using her own traditionally beautiful body as her subject. However, later interpretations see Wilke's work as openly questioning the representation of women. Joanna Frueh, for example, sees the Starification Object Series as evidence of Wilke "representing herself as a woman damaged by female embodiment in a culture that subordinates woman to man." Wilke who also made independent sculptures from chewing gum, explained her use of this ordinary and everyday material: "I chose gum because it's the perfect metaphor for the American woman - chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece."

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The Saatchi Gallery: I Am A Camera

There is often a big gap between the subject of design (as it is taught in art college) and the reality of design (the clients, the expectations) and this book, designed by Graphic Thought Facility, seemed to bridge it beautifully.

Art books usually suffer from such respect for the artwork, and such concern about how it is reproduced that somewhere along the process it’s as if everyone has forgotten about the book itself. What I like about this book is its boldness in acknowledging that the project is first and foremost a book. Get that right, maybe you’ve got something. Get that wrong, and the artwork won’t matter because what you have is a conservative, uninteresting book. The “front cover,” which is tucked away one third of the way into the book, is a lovely, foil-block surprise.

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JESSICA BACKHAUS

http://www.jessicabackhaus.net/

“EXPERIMENTATION IS AN IMPORTANT PART IN WHAT I DO..”

Jessica Backhaus’s vibrant color photographs endow negligible objects—the yellow pages sitting in a pile of snow (Small Wonder, 2008), a water bottle floating in a puddle (Bottle, 2006)—with gravitas. The images, which are never staged, stem from her curiosity about things that get left behind in the frenzy of contemporary consumer culture. “How do things get to where they are?” she asks. Her works focus on quiet moments or unexpected visual passages, such as the reflection of a venerable tree on a rain-soaked tennis court, rather than the literal depiction of her subjects.

What Still Remains - 

Backhaus takes photographs of left-behind objects and rooms devoid of people, lending significance to things usually cleared away or overlooked. Her images ask the viewer to imagine where, why, and who — writing a story that illustrates the transience of time.

She began this project in 2006 and attests that the images are purely incidental — nothing was staged, no props were added or taken away. Although "What Still Remains" shows no people, each image is alive with the lingering energy of those who have left the scene as it is. A bent and mangled green tea can bears the imprint of a thirsty and perhaps angry drinker. A hand-print on a dirty kitchen window sparks our own curiosity about what was for dinner. Backhaus sees the everyday with an artistic eye. "What Still Remains" is a testament to her ability as a photographer. She manages to create a composition and a muted color palette out of random items, shadows and puddles. She picks details and meticulously frames the shots, centering on just enough information to incite the viewer's imagination. In the introductory essay, photo critic Jean Dykstra points to the symbolism of emotional-things-lost when a mundane object is left behind. I would argue there's no need to delve into a greater philosophical analogy of "What Still Remains." Backhaus's photos, on their own, are thought-provoking, and simply lovely to look at.

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HELENA ALMEIDA

Helena Almeida’s black-and-white photographs of herself depict performances and various actions inflicted upon canvases, color, and other art objects. Inspired by the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil, Almeida experiments with ways of shattering the confines of a canvases and pushing color into three dimensions. She paints vibrant colors onto many of her photographs, and attaches objects to others, forcing the depicted events into dialogue with the surface and transforming the past action or performance into something perpetually ongoing and present. For her best known series “Study for Inner Improvement” (1977), Almeida altered photographs of herself so that she appeared to be manipulating blue paint on the surface of the photographs. In her most famous photograph from the series she seems to be eating the blue paint, a symbolic gesture of domination over a color reminiscent of Yves Klein’s trademark International Klein Blue.

Almeida started out making three-dimensional paintings, but soon grew to resent the absence of self-representation in the form. By 1969 she had turned to photography instead, finding that the medium permitted her to incorporate painting, performance art, body art and drawing into her practice, and to reinterpret her own body as a sculpture. That same year, she exhibited a photograph of herself wearing a canvas, and the image marks the beginning of the artist's groundbreaking move to identify her body with the being of her work.

The legacy of conceptual art is tangible in Almeida’s appropriation of the striking blue strokes of paint she often employed, reminiscent of Yves Klein’s trademark hue, ‘International Klein Blue.’ These flashes of colour appear repeatedly in Almeida’s work, menacingly blotting out the artist’s face in one image, and operating as barrier that Almeida is tearing apart with her hands in another. Almeida disagreed with Klein’s use of women in his own practice, and responded to it with artistic ferocity, tenaciously tearing the colour apart and emerging from the supposed void behind.

Almeida’s work is a refreshing combination of a number of distinct art forms, which she successfully combined by introducing paint into photographs of her own performance and body art.

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ANNA VALIEVA

http://anna-valieva.com/

Anna Valieva is a young Ukrainian painter and installation artist inspired by the nature of light. Through the use of light and shades in her installations and paintings, she is investigating both bright and dark side of human relationships.

“I believe that we have the world inside and outside ourselves. And the soul should live in harmony with both of them. In this case even a person’s exterior will be beautiful and balanced. When I was a child I went to the Serge Lifar Ballet Competition. I still remember very well those handsome men with strong legs jumping on the stage in the limelight… They looked beautiful, but transient. And only when I found myself behind the curtains I realized that what was happening there was very different. It was the world of dark, muted colors; there was a ballerina somewhere in the middle of it, stretching in a plaid before her performance, completing her sacral ritual. And the maroon curtain divided these two worlds. It’s the same with people. Deep inside we are very quiet; when we go to bed we think about tomorrow, knowing the day will be rough; we come up with ideas. The whole thing – the blanket, our state of mind, the atmosphere – it’s a red velvet drape. So I wanted to create a room with artworks made of this material. I thought they would give people an emotional impulse, but just the opposite is happening: as if you retire into your shell, feel the silence. Red is exciting only when it’s surrounded by other colors, but when it’s the only color around, it provides you with inner silence. And it’s a very important feeling. It lets you create, and where’s movement, there’s chaos. Though it’s not even yin and yang. It’s like two cells become one and turn into something new. And cells divide harmoniously. If anything goes wrong, the organism – especially the one that has just been conceived – will immediately die.”

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JANE AND LOUISE WILSON

Internationally acclaimed artists Jane and Louise Wilson are known for their film and photographic works, often exploring states of consciousness and the experience of place.

The Wilsons are known for their multi-screen installations. From colonialism to mental health, they consistently produce visually arresting, often beautiful images and narratives which grapple with challenging subject matter.

Young British Artists and identical twins Jane and Louise Wilson collaboratively explore sites rich with dark associations—ranging from former Nazi interrogation rooms to failed examples of modernist urban planning—in multi-screen video installations and photography. They are fascinated by altered states, paranoia, and lingering energy in unpeopled spaces. “A lot of our work has been about architectural, psychological sites where the sense of space and place feeds down into their own narratives, introducing a performative element in terms of a person or a persona[…]” Jane has said. Gamma (1999), for example, was a four-part video investigation of a decommissioned military base that housed missiles during the Cold War.

Throughout their career and through carefully choreographed film installations, sound works and photography, Jane and Louise Wilson have explored some of Europe’s least accessible architectural sites: a former Stasi Prison in former East Berlin, the British Houses of Parliament and the huge Star City complex in Moscow, a key site of the Russian Space Programme.

Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum), 2010 is a suite of eight photographic prints depicting deserted interiors from the abandoned town of Pripyat, situated within the 30km wide Exclusion Zone around the site of the disaster. Books remain on shelves and desks, bed frames remain intact and once-exquisite parquet flooring lies on the ground like rubble. A yardstick appears within each image and is a recurring motif throughout the exhibition. These objects of measurement – functional yet obsolete – act as a marker of scale and order, alluding to the tensions between association and analysis, memory and material fact.

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JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN

BEDTIME TALES FOR SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

http://jakeanddinoschapman.com/

"Sticks and stones

Shall break thy bones

And words will

Surely hurt you

Eyeball and teeth

Shall be wrenched by grief

As nightfall comes

To shroud you."

Jake & Dinos Chapman re-imagine the classic Victorian morality tale. While their own immorality Tales are wrought from the innocent language of children’s story books, the messages they sagely propose are far from the saccharin coated yarns familiar to this genre. The scenes these Tales depict are vivid, dark and troubling, and will have dramatic consequences on the nocturnal serenity of the reade

The Chapmans' favourite artist, Francisco Goya, once produced an etching called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. "That phrase has long been held to show that Goya was a supporter of Enlightenment rationality and the progress of reason. But I prefer the version of that phrase by Deleuze [the French philosopher]. He said it was insomniac rationality that produces monsters. The Enlightenment has made a fetish of reason. Goya didn't and we don't."

"Goya, and the makers of all great artistic experience, is as untrustworthy as his self-portrait suggests, a man as much fascinated as repelled by disorder and sudden death,"

The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not."

"Our interest is in what adults do to children and the image of innocence they project on to them. Our thought about children is that they're pretty much psychotic, and that through sweets and other forms of coercion they are civilised. The things we've imagined in our art are anaemic compared with what kids imagine. "

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MINJUNG KIM

http://www.minjung-kim.com/

http://www.minjung-kim.com/E-S-S-A-Y

‘Minjung Kim’s work is a projection of the imaginary and the imagination. It is a rogue wave made up of energy-charged refinement that swells up in an unspeakable progression; it is a dizzying poem that is at the same time solid – a poem that describes the universe and the soul.

Kim is a lyrical and mysterious artist who works with the effects of sublimation and the tangible results of a work that contains experience, sentiment and life.

There cohabits in the creations of the Korean artist the transversality of Western art and the boundless magic of Eastern transcendence, spirituality and laicism, a patience inbred with the biological structure inherent to her being an artist with intelligence at the service of a creation that is a total sign.

Her reminiscences, unknowingly, come from an atavistic past, a personal trace made up of symbols that retrace, through their position, the temporal past by bringing it back on the clear track of her current individual form.’

Kim’s work is profoundly infused with a number of key Korean vernacular notions and techniques, including the use of traditional Hanji paper and ink, the appropriation of calligraphic techniques and a meditative, repetitive approach to art making, which uses tension between filling and emptying the canvas as metaphor for the cycles of human life.

The elegantly framed abstract compositions on paper belie a textural richness and technical complexity that can only be grasped up close, nose almost touching the artworks. 

Constellations of circles made of pleated paper that have been collaged together seem to be proliferating like viruses, the ragged outlines of the mulberry Hanji paper barely contained by the frame. Kim has mounted the sprawling composition on a canvas, so the circles appear to be floating, their plum, black and silver hues twirling into each other.

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ETSUKO ICHIKAWA

GLASS PYROGRAPH SERIES & THE SHORT FILM  2100°/451°

http://www.etsukoichikawa.com/

Etsuko Ichikawa is a Tokyo-born, Seattle-based artist who creates mesmerizing abstract “paintings” through the art of pyrography. Specifically, Ichikawa removes fiery, molten glass from a kiln as it glows at 2100° F, and then manipulates it over thick paper, leaving scorch marks and burns. The process is something akin to photography, in which light is recorded on film, capturing and eternalizing the immediacy of a moment.

We would encourage you to watch the gorgeous video above, directed by Alistair Banks Griffin as it illustrates Ichikawa’s process. “Ichikawa stands purposefully above the paper, making sweeping, expressive gestures with molten glass on the paper’s surface,” describes Winston Wachter, who represents the artist. “Her performative technique requires that she work quickly and deliberately to avoid the paper catching fire.”

“My working media varies broadly, from socially engaged art, performance, and film, to installation, sculpture, and drawing. What ties all my work together are the aesthetics that were once described as “visuals that evoke a haunting mix of fear and poetry”— drawing on paper with molten glass using fire as my paint brush, filming dripping water from the top of a 500-feet high nuclear cooling tower, recording my echoing voice asking “What is beautiful to you?” into the absolute darkness of a 1000-ft long tunnel, or sculpting replicas of Japanese ancient artifacts in radioactive uranium glass.

All of these actions and creations are inspired by my questions about what is important to us in our times, and to the societies to which each of us belongs. The Fukushima nuclear disaster that occurred in my home country of Japan in 2011 triggered a turning point in my art practice, as I started seeking a way to use art as a social and civic instrument.”

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LUCIEN SHAPIRO

http://lucienshapiro.com/

ANALECT-RITUALS

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LUCIEN SHAPIRO

http://lucienshapiro.com/

Dancing between life and death, Lucien Shapiro’s art is rife with found objects, textures, cast forms, manipulations, raw substances, oddities and multiple personalities. Treating forgotten objects and memories as treasure, he creates a kingdom under which new life is born through sculpture. Urban Obsessions explores both artist’s and viewer’s perception of identity, addiction, and time.

Composed of elaborately constructed masks and ornately armored weaponry, this collection of works examines a relationship between modern waste and memories of ancient cultural artifacts. Practices and customs from the past are brought back to light through Shapiro’s revival of discarded materials, transformed into objects analogous with self protection. Behind masks and armor, we’re enabled with the power to separate and shield ourselves from reality, creating new identities through a deliberate opposition of our true selves. Urban Obsessions tangibly relates the past’s and present’s ritualistic escape from stress, pain and even love.

Utilizing raw materials correlated to various forms of addiction such as drugs, violence, and collections, Shapiro’s sculptures embody the act of compulsive preoccupation. Through his own addiction to the process of painstaking repetition and meticulousness of his craft, we are presented with works that challenge preconceived notions of habits, impulses, and dependencies. Evident in his art is an acceptance of whatever result would come from the consolidation and manipulation of numerous imperfections.

In today’s day and age, the ease at which information and products are made available has led to a continual state of over-consumption. Everyday items have become neglectfully disposable, and there is an immediate desire for what’s new and what’s next. Shapiro’s work, a laborious craft and meditative consumption of time, transforms forgotten objects into nostalgically interesting and beautiful relics that compel viewers to re-evaluate what our everyday possessions represent and mean to us. Lucien Shapiro invites us to slow down, to not only gain appreciation for the artifacts that tell a story about who we are in this day and age, but to find inspiration in the value of time and craft.