The important issues...and Bill Viola
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| Leah: Artist Inspired work, Rackstraw Downs |
Failure by Sewing Deanna
Failure to make taller, Abrey
Limited and damaged canvas, constrained painting, Anna
Kiki Smith
Kiki
Smith's work explores the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and
storytelling. Smith turned the figurative tradition inside out by creating
objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous
system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and
narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales.
Liz Magor makes
uncannily realistic casts of humble objects—garments, cardboard boxes,
ashtrays—that speak to mortality and local histories. Magor’s delicate copies
are often combined with found ephemera, whether tiny vices—such as cigarettes,
candy, and alcohol—animals in the form of taxidermied birds and stuffed toy
dogs, or small mementos given to her by friends or scavenged from the limbo of
thrift stores.
Social
narratives of how things in the world are created, enter our lives, and depart
to the junk heap as part of a vast human waste stream are folded together with
personal anxieties and small worries, such as the desire to afford nice things,
to mend what’s broken, and to preserve order against inevitable entropy.
The visual doubletake in Magor’s work—of things appearing one way
but being quite another—are on dramatic display in the artist’s large-scale
public projects where an architectural column resembles a towering Douglas fir
trees and a rickety clapboard shack from a bygone era is carefully remade in
cast aluminum. By resurrecting uncared for items and moments from the recent
past, Magor preserves faint whispers of life in artworks that function as
fossils do—exacting copies of existence.
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