Honoured to travel with the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, I had the opportunity to lunch and look into Nick Cave’s eyes last week. What struck me besides an incredible kindness, was the intensity of those eyes. They translate his double vision of the world perfectly: how intensely he sees and feels the divides plaguing our society and how resolute he is to shake this, with a dance and many Soundsuits.
Nestled in New Canaan, Connecticut, Grace Farms is a bucolic place where art meets architecture in a natural setting of green meadows.
Time we don’t have and don’t take. Time we can’t get back and most crucially time we can never acquire…I knew nothing of Valeska Soares and her art but how apt that her works poetically speak of time and memories. Since I saw her exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, her pieces have lingered on my mind so much that I am in no danger to ever forget her name. And her world might just bring you a welcome dose of mindfulness as we all get ready for a bit of summer madness…before it’s time to face school supplies again.
Visiting Christopher Puzio’s Studio was a real treat: his work plays a lot on the “frame the view” concept, a key sub-line from the beginning of Reinventingrid, back in January 2017. That is how my eye travels: I simply love capturing in pictures how some art installations encapsulate what lies around them. Bringing the world to attention… San Diego is incredibly fortunate to have many Christopher Puzio works around. All have this uncanny versatility of framing a view while opening up space. He is literally, and figuratively, drilling on what an open work can be.
It comes as no surprise that Iris van Herpen interned with a fashion genius like Alexander McQueen. What is more surprising is that, Iris, age 36, a young Dutch designer who has been making fashion for the past 10 years, is already the subject of an exhibition/ retrospective at the Phoenix Art Museum. I use the word retrospective here due the sheer magnitude of her body of work and the unique creative mind she brings to each and every one of the dresses she conceives and creates. Fully at the intersection between couture, sculpture, science and technology lies…the art of her fashion!
The art of Howardena Pindell makes for an explorative journey of the difficulties she encountered as an artist of color in the US, yet this is all wonderfully retraced in her current retrospective held at MCA Chicago. Entitled What Remains to Be Seen, the exhibition shows how her artistic experimentation is deeply rooted in the interaction she observes between dots and grids, two elemental forms she has used since the Space Frames she started with as an artist in the late 1960s.
We all recognize the flags, targets, numbers or colors, these motives Jasper Johns has used in his art since the mid 1950s. They are omnipresent signs in our everyday life. We are drawn to them instinctively as they are instantly recognizable and neatly sum up abstract concepts we may find hard to describe with words. We see the signs but are we fully awake to the concepts? Try this with the American flag, for instance. If you think about it long enough, one ideal and many ideas are encapsulated in this flag…
Not only are Mark Bradford’s typical works monumental in vertical and horizontal scale, they are also layered, built-up thick, oozing a palpable density. These layers can be pages from old comic books, newspaper prints, all glued down and up with shellac. Mark Bradford then works on taking his paper strata from collage to decollage.