Category: Art

Cragg’s abstract, sinuous sculptures are made by exploring unconventional shapes and materials. Whilst very different in their scale and design, Cragg’s works are drawn together in likeness by their twisting and rippling forms. Artnet has described his works as “embody[ing] a frozen moment of movement,” almost akin to a blurred motion. Cragg has shown that there are endless material possibilities in sculpture. “It’s infinite,” he says in a short documentary film created for Tateshots. “Really, the job is to find out where it becomes more meaningful.”

Certain topics that have enchanted him since childhood include geology, natural history, and the study of landscapes—and what has truly fascinated him about them is the materials that can be found within them. Cragg explains that they are “like a painter’s palette… This is a palette where I can move a material around, and find my own path through the material”. Cragg understands sculpture as “just pure fantasy, there’s no natural model for it”. This is exemplified in the reworking of familiar objects into new and unfamiliar forms, in order to produce new meanings simply for the sake of it. “Sculpture is an enormously dynamic, and dramatically developing discipline and it’s one of the only uses of material that’s not utilitarian,” he says in the film. “It’s literally just about new forms, ideas and emotional experiences. When you see how ugly everything is built—simple geometries, flat straight edges, boring right angles, in the repetitive and inferior world we’ve built, sculpture is the only one that actually builds something crazy and interesting.”

‘The Elsewhere’ is a collection of seascapes, where silken water sits beneath swathes of mist and the milky light of daybreak. Yet despite the familiarity of these serene and imperfect landscapes, these locations can only be found by entering a geography of Hastie’s making. These works are in fact photographs of paperscapes that Hastie constructs using tissue, bicarbonate soda and dry ice. The results are both familiar and tellingly surreal. In Hastie’s ‘The Elsewhere’, water washes over rocky outcrops and stirs quietly at the edge of the sand, while white cirrus clouds draw lines across the horizon as the sun slowly dips behind it. “My mind is always in desire of purity and absoluteness, something that cannot and does not exist”, she explains. “Truth and deception lie at the heart of my work”.

“A transparent sphere, created soundlessly, sinks in silence”, she explains. In ‘Form of Gravity’, liquid drops from the top of a glass cylinder; after which its route south appears delayed as it slows to an unexpected pace. Excluding such instances, we rarely pay attention to gravity. Why would we? When we drop something, we understand that it will fall. Misawa’s creation grants new attention to the curvature of spacetime and the subsequent uneven distribution of mass—not because it changes it, but because it makes us look harder at it.

“To stare at it is to subvert one’s sense of weight, causing a mysterious sensation of time slowing down”, the project description continues. “Transforming organically in response to its environment, the sphere might be better described not as a shape but as the very essence of movement. To look at water—something you do every day without thinking about it—suddenly feels like encountering a substance you had never seen before. This experiment is mission of exploration to find possibly unknown properties hidden within materials and everyday experiences that are familiar to us all.”

Leotta was not the only artist to transfer a garden to a foreign space for the exhibition, though Australian artist Libby Harward’s reiteration of her 2018 work, ‘Ngali Ngariba – We Talk’, does this with far different intent. With a focus on Australia, this site-specific installation and sound work gives voice to plants whose arrival in European gardens occurred through conquest and colonialism. Consequently, the bell jars with perspiring plants hold much more than an organic part of the place that they are from.

As Dr. Glenda Harward-Nalder, an academic who works in tandem with Harward, explains: “First Nation Peoples listen to plants and plants listen to us. Ours is a reciprocal relationship.” In this work, invisible voices speak in the languages of the plants, asking in their mother tongues that we—like Australia’s first people—hear them. “In Gropius Bau Museum, when Gagil [the plant] asks Minyangu ngari gadji? (Why am I here) our Ancestors, who have been waiting nearby for 140 years, will answer, Yuwayi bunji ngali ganyagu wunjayi! (Farewell friend, we are going home now!)”, Harward-Nadler concludes in her essay about ‘Ngali Ngariba – We Talk’. She is referring to the ancestral remains of over 50 Indigenous Australians who—after a long battle—are being returned from German institutions to rest in their homeland this year.

The memo outlined a proposal to reduce both the borders and protection of four Western National Monuments; Cascade-Siskiyou, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears. The monuments are labelled as such because of their intrinsic value; they are both environmentally and culturally significant to America. Bears Ears alone is home to 100,000 ancestral Puebloan sites—cliff dwellings, kivas, great houses, room blocks, ancient roads and rock art. At the end of 2017, the Trump Administration had eliminated the protection of public lands and sacred indigenous sites in Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments. The modification to these areas served to open the land to corporate developers; and in 2018, mining companies traveled there to stake their claims for oil, gas, and uranium.

Western Fronts is a dramatic, experimental video that combines aerial drone footage with 3D animation to create a sometimes-jarring documentary about the four National Monuments that were targeted by the memo. “The wilderness, scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into greyscale polygons—in these redactions, we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer vision aiding resource extraction”, Silva explains. The message of the video feels urgent; challenging not only because of the abstract way in which it is communicated but also because of the gravity of the story it tells. It is a warning; a mesmerizing, terrifying warning.

At opposite ends of the earth—north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle—the sun is visible at all hours of the day during summer. Six months are spent in light, and six months spent in darkness. Though neither poles are populated, the phenomenon has been long documented, the first known record of midnight sun dates back to 330BC when Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek astronomer who traveled widely, wrote of an island he called Thule in his book, On the Ocean: “At the time of the summer solstice there are no nights because the sun appears there more clearly and does not show any reflection on the water”.

Later, Greek mythology proposed that north of the island of Thule was Hyperborea: a paradisal place inhabited by a race of giants where the sun set but once a year. To date, neither Thule or Hyperborea have been found, but the stories written about them serve to intensify the magic and mythos associated with the phenomenon of midnight sun.

Giacomello uses vivid coloring in his geometric spaces, creating compositions that focus on a specific palette for each room. Characterized by light, shadow, and space, each architecturally-inspired render features curved archways, minimal furniture, low-hanging neon lights, and contrasting textures from the walls to the floors. Giacomello places sculpted vases, sinuous lamps, curved chairs and side tables in each room, based on real objects and furniture pieces by designers we have previously featured on IGNANT: vases by Valeria Vasi, a glass chair by Nendo, and lighting by Lambert & Fils, among others. The art director’s interest in light and space extends beyond digital illustration: much of Giacomello’s career involves set design, scenography, and lighting for clients such as Japanese fashion house Comme des Garçons and Milanese shoe designer Angela Mitchell.

Crea means ‘to create’ in Spanish, “and we take our name very seriously”, explains Bruno Canales, the founder and director of Crea. “We make one clip every day on top of whatever else we have on our plate, to satiate our curiosity, and explore whatever we feel like exploring”, he says. The digital agency works in the areas of brand identity, motion graphics, and three-dimensional rendering, with architectural training and a “heavy emphasis on proceduralism”. The playful animations seen in ‘Daily Reel’ are short loops of dynamic shapes; bobbing up and down, or twisting, bouncing, and disappearing. For Canales, “This reel is a compilation of our favorites so far”, reminding us of the importance of balancing our working lives with fulfilling personal projects.

Through their artworks, sculptures, and installations, each artist raised questions regarding the effects of technology on the human race, and how advances in capitalism have influenced our relationships with ourselves, and with the world. “The exhibition delves into the collaboration between the human and non-human, the boundaries of natural and artificial, organic and synthetic, real and fictional, and the aesthetic and the practical”, explains a statement from the gallery. Included in the exhibition is Estonian installation artist Katya Novitskova’s ‘Earth Potential (E. Coli)’. The public artwork is a 2.3 by 2.4 meter digital print on aluminum, with a steel and aluminum armature. To create the visual imagery of this installation, Novitskova scanned a microscopic photograph of E. coli, a common bacteria; magnified at a rate of 10,000. In recent years, E. coli has assisted groundbreaking scientific research, enabling new prospects for the future of human biology.

Additionally, Greek visual artist Eva Papamargariti created a digital installation titled ‘But for now all I can promise is that things will become weirder’. Unlike the scientific lens put forward by Novitskova, this work probes the experience of being human on a more sociological and behavioral level. “The acceleration of scrolling” is the first place the viewer’s eyes are drawn to; reminding us conceptually of how much our lives are spent online. Alongside the main exhibition program, Galeria Duarte Sequeira runs a curated public program and an artist residency to encourage the critical exchange of ideas.

Damnatio memoriae is a Latin phrase that translates to ‘condemnation of memory’; a term that referred to the erasure of a person from official and historical records as punishment for dishonoring the state during the Roman period.

In Sassolino’s work of the same name, he presents the destruction of a perfectly proportioned torso sculpted from marble as an allegory for the necessity of moving beyond the restrictions of classicism. ‘Damnatio Memoriae’ is composed of two parts: a stainless steel machine that stands at over three meters tall, and a male torso sculpted from marble. Over the course of the exhibition, the waterless diamond sander transformed the classically proportioned sculpture to dust.

In this conceptual and literal erasure of the classical aesthetic, Sassolino questions the value of the narrative proposed by the Western canon and asks if we can free ourselves from the rules of the past. While the statue is changed by the process of grinding, it does not disappear—becoming instead fine dust that spreads through the exhibition space like mist. This new form allows the sculpture, and thus classicism, to invisibly permeate the exhibition space. As it settles on the walls and floors of Galerie Rolando Anselmi, and on those who visit the show, the complex reality of extracting oneself from the restrictive idealism of classicism becomes abundantly clear.