Category: Art

A fateful job in a wood workshop lead San Francisco-based artist Julian Watts to a sculptural practice based in the interstice between art and craft.

Throughout his undergraduate degree as a sculpture major in Fine Arts at the University of Oregon, Watts never worked with wood. After graduating in 2012, he returned to his hometown of San Francisco, there he began working in a furniture workshop that specialized in tables. It was during this period that Watts began to apply his cumulative knowledge of woodwork to his sculptural practice. Today, Watts’ work is based upon the traditional wood carving and furniture making techniques that he stumbled upon in that workshop. He creates sculptural pieces that allude to function and domestic objects in the subtleties of their form. Their unexpected shapes appear the have grown organically from the wood; knots and furls becoming features of the sculptures themselves.

Italian painter and installation artist Alberonero has created an artwork titled ‘86+73’, that visually transforms a large white architectural space as a part of Sicily’s Periferica Festival.

Located in Mazara del Vallo, in the southernmost part of Sicily, Italy, Alberonero’s two-dimensional work layers multicolored squares that progress across multiple levels of space; along walls, up roofs and across floors. ‘86+73’ accordingly borders on being three-dimensional, as the geometric shapes stand in stark contrast to the angles of the museum space’s all-white facade. Alberonero’s signature look of colored squares reminds the viewer of the affecting, energetic influence that chromatic interactions can have. Speaking of this intention, the artist explains in his biography: “I want to continue the research about the relation between man and landscape, spaces, buildings, [and] nature, reducing them to chromatic sensations.”

‘Art Safiental’, currently in its second installment, is the art biennial located in the remote alpine mountain ranges of the Safien Valley, Switzerland. The current exhibition includes 14 pieces of contemporary art that are scattered throughout the Swiss mountains, and runs until October 28, 2018.

The Safien Valley is known for its meadows and mountains, with deep ravines and avalanche passages separating individual farmsteads and woodlands at high altitude. The ‘Art Safiental’ experience is therefore part exhibition, part adventure hike—visitors are given an art hiking map providing the exact location of the large format artworks, which they must find themselves (unless guided by a tour group). The theme for this year’s edition is ‘horizontal-vertical’, which has seen international artists create temporary art pieces that work in tandem with the surrounding scenery.

German artist Bob Gramsma for example, created ‘Egschi Shell’: a floating concrete shell that incredulously weighs 20 tonnes and is still buoyant. The artwork is secured with a long rope to the bottom of the lake and constantly changes location. ‘Himmel III’ (meaning ‘heaven’ in English), is an 11 meter tall curved wooden sculpture, by Swiss-Austrian artist duo Bildstein Glatz. The ramp-like shape catapults the view of visitors from the horizontal to the vertical, “Most of the works of this year’s show are repositioning and reinventing the landscape”standing in stark contrast to the surrounding landscape and giving perceptible meaning to its title. Further artworks are positioned atop mountains, on the edge of rocky cliffs, and other destinations discoverable by foot.

“In this field of tension between mountain and plain, most of the works of this year’s show are repositioning and reinventing the landscape”, explains founder and artistic director Johannes Hedinger. Many local craftspeople and landowners volunteered to help bring the exhibition to life, adding value and cultural meaning to an already authentic and unique experience.

Image © Lita Albuquerque

The latest artwork by British artist Alex Chinneck is titled ‘Open To The Public’, a surrealist installation where an oversized zip appears to open up the facade of an abandoned office building.

Located in an unassuming street in Kent, England, the eight meter installation appeared overnight and features an illusion of the zippered wall opening to reveal the derelict interior. The artist’s website states that his work produces “contextually responsive interventions that animate the place in which they stand”. A fitting explanation for the artwork, which facetiously reimagines a public space that is currently empty and facing demolition, whilst also referencing the building’s history as a leather and textile manufacturer. Chinneck is known for his inventive public installations that appear to distort the physical world, including the brick facade of an apartment sliding off, a building splitting into two, and a upturned car on an asphalt wave.

The world’s most acclaimed art museum is immersed in water by a fictional flooding in ‘Breaking News: The Flooding Of The Louvre’, the latest video work by Georgian visual artist, Tezi Gabunia.

Natural disaster linked to climate change, and the responses of our modern media culture, are the concerns at the helm of Gabunia’s project. Of particular concern to the Tbilisi-based artist are the Paris floods of 2018, and the subsequent laissez-faire attitudes shown through news media coverage at the time. In ‘Breaking News’, water enters the prestigious museum venue, slowly filling it and destroying the famous exhibits it holds. The miniature Louvre was borrowed from an earlier exhibition by Gabunia titled ‘Put Your Head into Gallery’, where viewers were encouraged to put their head inside the museum models to literally become part of the art on display. The uncannily realistic video footage is Gabunia’s reminder that the threat of catastrophe is perhaps not as far fetched as would seem.

Brooklyn-based artist Simone Bodmer Turner works with clay, and though drawn to functional forms—she isn’t a potter. Instead, she works as a hand-build artist, creating distinctly contemporary works that draw from traditional clay vessels.

Bodmer Turner’s works have character that cannot be thrown on the wheel; idiosyncrasies that refuse to be replicated: “I hand build because of the irregularities, indents, and fingerprints are evidence of clay’s partnership with the human hand to take form”, she explains. Her poetic relationship with this earthborn matter is evident in the shapes her works take as vessels and vases—homages to the role that clay has played throughout history. “I am moved by ancient forms that once held such a rudimentary and crucial role”, she explains, “keeping water cold, fermenting foods, cooking over an open flame, serving tea to honor your guests.” Her pieces are artful attempts to return us to a time when ceremony was a part of daily life, when rituals of eating and drinking had not been replaced by takeaway food, plastic plates, and disposable cups. In creating pieces inspired by more traditional forms, Bodmer Turner hopes that her work has the magic and ritual that such vessels once held.