I just love the digital composites of Maggie Taylor. They’re all so playful and whimsical! Especially her two bodies of work that illustrate Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass.
It’s Always Tea Time
Explain Yourself
All The Better
Beware The Jabberwock
The Same Story
Night Watch
Here’s a video that provides some great context and behind the scenes looks at her process.
To see more of Maggie’s work, visit her website.
Andrea Dale has some really lovely pieces that she titles Ash Paintings. She gathers ashes from recent wildfires and suspends them in resin, which results in an image that has the appearance of rising smoke and ash and fire. Her work falls right into that category I'm such a fan of: beautiful and yet ugly at the same time. Beautiful, because the Art of the work is beautiful, and/or well crafted, but ugly because of the content. In this case, something had to burn to ash in order for the pieces that Andrea creates to exist. She even mentions this in her artist statement:
Destructive wildfires provide the art material, while the ma, or vast empty vertical space, represent the absence of the ash's original form. The alchemy of transforming this base material into art with an emotional weight and presence, portrays a dance between grace and gravitas. My work lures the viewer in by relying on humanity’s love of beauty, but delivers a statement about the danger of living life in a state of disconnect from nature, the self, and empathy.
Check out more of Andrea's work on her website.
Back in 2008 I wrote about Robert Smithson, and how influential he and his writings were becoming on my art then. Through all that reading I learned about Nancy Holt, who was married to Smithson. I really only remember getting familiar with only one of her works, Sun Tunnels in north-western Utah.
Holt, who passed away in 2014, really was quite a prolific artist. Many of her works no longer exist, due either to their intentional ephemerality, or to their being destroyed, as in the case of her Missoula Ranch Locators (1972), which was destroyed so that the owners of the property could build a home.
Her work was made to be an interactive experience. At Sun Tunnels, the viewer stands in one of four concrete tubes and looks through holes cut into walls that line up with certain constellations. Or, the viewer might look through two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the winter solstice, or the other two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the summer solstice. Through this interaction, or participation, Holt views her pieces are fully complete.
“I have a strong desire to make people conscious of the cyclical time of the universe”
If you feel like making the trek to the Sun Tunnels, you can find some info here: Sun Tunnels info from Utah Museum Fine Arts
And you check out the Sun Tunnels on Google Earth
You can read more about Holt here.
Back in college, I took a book arts class, where we learned to make our own books, and learned several ways of stitching signatures together. One of the assignments was to alter a found book in a way that it changed the narrative of the story, or eliminated it altogether. Ever since, I've loved handcrafted books, and altered books as pieces of art. So when I saw a piece of Cara Barer's through Klompching Gallery, I was stunned.
Cara mentions that a "chance encounter with a Houston Yellow Pages" served as the inspiration for her work. After that, she began searching out other books and how to recreate what she'd seen from that phone book.
Visit Cara's website to view more of her work.