Posts filed under 'Artists & Art'
Loss
collage
Nicole Natri
Nicole Natri is a Swedish collage artist whom I’ve been following for a while. My favorite piece of hers is Loss. . . a simple justaposition that defies simple interpretation. Nicole’s work illustrates that it can be more challenging to create an unpredictable, ambiguous scene than a linear story. As she puts it, “In the progress of making Loss, I made a physical loss a symbol for the psychic one.”
You can see more of Nicole’s work here. Be sure not to miss Halloweenhead and Anguish.
The best part is that Nicole reveals her influences - vintage books, photography, medical art - and works-in-process through her highly individual blog. One of my favorite recent entries include this intimate peep at a vintage fold-out medical book, soon to be subsumed into art. As Nicole says, “I’m obsessed with the cultural history of our body.” No wonder I love her work!
PS. Nicole is stylish as heck (I love her Halloween costume). So jealous!
November 7th, 2007
laser cut paper
Emily Morris
lots more photos via Rag & Bone Blog
November 6th, 2007
If you didn’t get enough skulls last night, here’s an interesting art show via Simplistic Art.
Lustmord Table
Jenny Holzer, 1994
And some Embroidered skeletons by Angelo Filomeno, via Ullabenulla:
The Grand Circus: Death of Presumptuous Philosopher
Embroidery on silk shantung
Angelo Filomeno, 2005
And the granddaddy of skeleton art is of course Sedlec Ossuary, Czechoslovakia.
A few pictures from The Flying Kiwi via Ullabenulla:
And a beautiful, intimate photostream of Sedlec from Curious Expeditions:
Bone chalice
Curious Expeditions
November 1st, 2007
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
Before their nursery sanitization, fairy tales were savage. Remember how Cinderella’s stepmother mutilated her own daughters’ feet to fit the glass slipper, but was betrayed by the oozing blood? Or the rape and cannibalism in early versions of Sleeping Beauty? If you don’t, then you haven’t read the oldest versions of these now toothless, Disneyfied stories. Fairy tales once captured the primal violence in human nature all too well.
Fairies themselves were often grotesque and inhumanly cruel, and that’s the pre-Victorian tradition to which the work of artist Tessa Farmer cleaves. Her work juxtaposes dead insects and the remains of birds and snakes with tiny, skeletal fairy sculptures so small, she needs a microscope to assemble them, and viewers need a magnifying glass to appreciate them. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, butterfly-winged fairy girls you find on greeting cards, Farmer’s corpselike fairies rip their prey apart bare-handed, gnawing on the legs of hapless insects like ravenous, humorless Gollums. I would normally find a dead, twisted spider corpse disgusting, but Farmer’s gremlins are far creepier than their victims.
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
A 2006 review by Stephen Feeke describes Farmer’s later work, The Terror:
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs (sic). Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. . .
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
In the artist’s own words,
In 2005 I first observed parasitic behaviour among the fairies, which had shrunk to some 7mm tall. ‘Nymphidia’ (named after a sixteenth century fairy poem by Michael Drayton) is another swarm, again revealing scenes of torture and consumption. The focus of the attack is a wasps’ nest, surrounded by fairies battling with wasps and other insects. On closer inspection they can be seen hatching out of wasps in the cells of the nest, by pushing off their heads and climbing out of the hollow shell of the consumed wasp.
The interesting thing to me is that, in reviews and comments on Farmer’s work, and in her own statement, the violence is described in increasingly naturalistic, pseudo-scientific terms. Are these “fairies” or “parasites”? Are they out of nature, or embodying nature? Is Farmer-the-artist, like Dr. Frankenstein before her, a meticulous scientist who reanimates flesh in order to understand it, or a monomaniac blind to the moral implications of her creation? Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” never seemed so appropriate!
At dinner last night, I disgusted my companions by sharing the appalling reproductive habits of the mite Acarophenax tribolii (courtesy of the Evilutionary Biologist - I warn you, it’s icky). I wish I could claim I was inspired in this misbehavior by Halloween, but as a biologist, I wander into inappropriate dinner conversation all the time. I can’t help it, really. Thinking about it scientifically, objectively, blunts the horror that kicks in when one begins to instinctively anthropomorphize the mites. Curiosity dominates empathy, and fascination displaces disgust - at least for a time. Biology is full of violence and broken taboos, but these natural relationships carry only the moral baggage we bring to them. The mites don’t know how to live any other way, and judging them or reviling them for it is absurd.
The way Farmer speaks of her work, with clinical detachment, is an invitation to follow her into a morally neutral scientific space. She must know full well that the viewer will be unable to sustain that detachment, because her fairies are not mites. They’re nearly human. And we also empathize with the fairies’ helpless victims - birds, ladybugs, bees, even that unlucky spider, curled and twisted in attitudes of pain that are universal. So despite our best efforts to remain detached, we won’t. Like looking at an optical illusion that oscillates from an old woman to a young girl, or a vase to a pair of profiles, we’ll find ourselves identifying first with the victims, then with the cruel aggressors (in these battles, the fairies seem to rarely be at a disadvantage).
By doing this - by forcing human emotions onto her invented ecosystem - Farmer alludes to the destructive effect humans have had on our world. In the scene below, from Nymphidia, a corpselike fairy erupts from a parasitized honeycomb, snaring an unsuspecting wasp. Nymphidia predates the news of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD) - but isn’t it an appropriate representation? Some unknown force, which we may as well depict as a wasp-sized demon, is invading beehives and destroying colonies in the “real” world. This fairy is the wasp/bee Grim Reaper: fanciful, inaccurate, but standing in for a destructive force that actually exists. And it’s fitting that the tiny Reaper is anthropomorphic, because CCD is almost certainly is due to human influence: something in our husbandry practices is making the bees vulnerable.
Nymphidia (detail)
Mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2005
via Miniature Worlds
In the end, Farmer’s art is barely about “fairies” at all. That is, it’s barely about Disneyfied fairies: Tinkerbell, wishes, magic, romance. It is, of course, very much about the cruel, atavistic fairies of the primal fairy tales - disturbing representations of the extremes of human nature. And it’s human nature that pits us against Nature.
My lingering question about Farmer’s work is this: do the fairies know any better? Are they, like the mites, innocent by reason of insentience? Or are they, like the humans whose skeletons they mimic, not merely violent, but unnecessarily, deliberately cruel? I’d like, as a biologist, to embrace the former. But I think - based especially on her use of words like “torture” - that Farmer intends us to believe the latter. We are Farmer’s fairies. Nature, and we, suffer for it.
October 27th, 2007
Protein #324, 2003
enamel, silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
The protein-inspired art of Steve Miller in turn inspires Visualizing Science: Image-making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge, a cool-sounding symposium to be held next Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
Miller’s strongest work is reminiscent of Japanese brush painting or Hubble photographs: darkly tangible, stylized forms floating in luminous space. But other pieces, like “Protein #330,” rely on the intrigue of the incomprehensible. What can that scribbled notation mean to the audience? Yes, it’s imposing a certain quantitative context on the protein’s inscrutable, cloud-like form, inviting reflection on the tension between the unlabeled natural artifact and the scientist’s interpretation of it. But I have no idea what it means. Nor would it matter if it was mathematically nonsensical; no one would notice. Not sure how I feel about that.
Protein #330, 2003
silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
Steve Miller’s work
Via the indispensible Biomedicine on Display (bookmark it!)
October 20th, 2007
Microviridae: bacteriophage φX174
Bugle beads, seed beads, Czech crystals
Holly Wichman
This sculpture made of purple and clear glass beads depicts bacteriophage φX174, a virus that infects bacteria. It rests on a surface that portrays an adaptive landscape, a conceptual visualization. The ridges represent the gene combinations associated with the greatest fitness levels of the virus, as measured by how quickly the virus can reproduce itself. φX174 is an important model system for studies of viral evolution because its genome can readily be sequenced as it evolves under defined laboratory conditions. (source)
The beaded bauble above represents a virus of the family Microviridae - icosahedral bacteriophages, or bacteria-eating viruses. The Microviridae include a bacteriophage that infects and kills Chlamydia, and another bacteriophage that infects Bdellovibrio - itself a parasite preying on other bacteria. Bacteriophages don’t cause disease in humans, and in some cases may even be used therapeutically (for more, see this interesting article in Science).
The artist is Holly Wichman, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. Wichman makes beaded models of the bacteriophages studied in her lab. Wichman infected Bentley Fane, a professor at the University of Arizona, with the beading bug, and the two have collaborated on a collection of beaded virus sculptures.
According to the artists, beading has generated some intuitive insights into viral structure:
When Bentley Fane made his models of structures from T=1 through T = 16, he discovered that some beaded structures were very stable, while others (T = 9, 12, 16) were quite unstable. This is because the sides of the numerous facets directly coinciding with the main edges of the icosahedron. Whether this instability can be extrapolated to viral structures in nature is unknown, but the structures that are unstable when beaded tend to be rare in nature. There is only one known T = 9 particle, and no known T = 12. The T = 16 in nature are the Herpesviruses, and they have both envelopes and teguments to add to stability.
“Crystal Structures: Viruses in Glass” opens tonight at the University of Idaho Reflections Gallery (through October 29, 2007).
Thanks to Jane for the heads up!
For more phage-related art, check out this archive from the 2005 American Society of Microbiology, and this collection, both hosted by Forest Rohwer of SDSU.
October 11th, 2007
Der mensch gesund und krank, menschenkunde 1940 . . . . Vol. 2
Zürich-Leipzig, 1939. Relief halftone.
National Library of Medicine
Fritz Kahn
Street Anatomy recently posted a selection of industrial-influenced anatomical art by Fritz Kahn. How I wish the publishers of modern textbooks took design and aesthetics as seriously - it is neither wrong nor wasteful nor unscientific to make a functional illustration artistically challenging.
Bibliodyssey hit the same topic last year. As did Morbid Anatomy. Unfortunately, there are very few Fritz Kahn images online, mostly at Dream Anatomy and the British Library. Like Peacay, I’ve been stymied in my efforts to find more. . .
October 8th, 2007
New from Made with Molecules artist Raven Hanna, creator of the serotonin necklace: protein jewelry! This is incredibly clever, because the single-letter protein code is a language most biologists speak. You stand a pretty good chance of running into a fellow bio geek who’ll be able to decipher your signals. The above bracelet is the perfect example: if you can read it, you are one!
But the best part - why I love Raven’s work - is that non-geeks will have no clue. The silver shapes are elegant and simple enough to pass as abstract art. After coveting her serotonin necklace for several months, I finally bought one, and I’m so glad I did. It’s much lovelier in person than on her site, and I received a lot of compliments on it - even though most people weren’t quite sure what it was (the neurobiologists knew, the chemists got the general chemical class, and the physicists said, “is that a molecule?”)
Bay Area residents can see Raven’s work in person on Friday October 5 at Feria Urbana in Oakland, or check out her etsy shop.
October 3rd, 2007
The Sower
Robert Parkeharrison
Have you ever encountered an artist whose work seems so familiar, you feel as if he or she has ensnared your memories? I had that feeling when I first saw Robert Parkeharrison’s The Architect’s Brother. His photographs are like feverish childhood dreams: a Brobdingnagian world in which impossible tasks out of a fairy tale retold by Roald Dahl are documented by the director of La Voyage Dans La Lune. At least these images resemble my childhood dreams, which typically involved gigantic waterclocks, desolate post-nuclear landscapes, and garbled concatenations of literary references. Mr. Parkeharrison has been rummaging around in my brain! So of course I have to buy this book, and you should too. The Architect’s Brother traveling collection will next visit the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee, Florida.
I wish there was also a compilation of the newer work he has completed with his wife, Shana Parkeharrison. Some of this work is visible at the Jack Shainman Gallery. Unlike the Architect’s Brother collection, in which the conflict between madman and injured nature is blunted almost into whimsy, the newer works are starkly ominous. In “Stolen Summer,” butterflies are nailed to a wall, their pigments running down like blood. A bandaged tree bleeds into a glass tumbler. An old man sits oblivious as vines creep under a door towards his legs. These images are also the stuff of fairy tale, but a harsh, fluorescent-lit, urban iteration - less Brothers Grimm, more China Mieville.
Undergrowth
Robert and Shana Parkeharrison, 2006
Jack Shainman Gallery
The Wound
Robert and Shana Parkeharrison , 2006
Jack Shainman Gallery
October 1st, 2007
What lies behind our nose?
photography (CT scan rendering)
Kai-hung Fung, 2007
The 2007 Science Visualization Challenge winners have been announced. I love the two (tied) first place winners; although they are both photography, they look like watercolor. Above is Kai-hung Fung’s rainbow rendering of nasal sinuses:
Fung chose to use the patient’s CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because “[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful,” he says.
Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.
Fung digitally removed the bones, soft tissue, and fat from the rendering to create a solid “cast” of the sinuses’ air envelope. “The sinuses are hollows in the bone just like the central cavity in a papaya,” he says. One way to get a feel for the shape of such a cavity is to look at a cross section of it, but, he says, it’s much more readily apparent in a mold. (source)
Tied with Fung’s sinuses was an elegant botanical photo, “Irish Moss,” by Andrea Ottesen. The unfurled algae glows against deep black, like a golden mandala.
All the winners, including some remarkable videos, can be seen in this slideshow. The competition was jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science. Felice Frankel was one of the judges.
Notably, no awards were made in the category of illustration (defined as “Traditional or computer-assisted illustrations and drawings produced to conceptualize the unseen or recreate an object, process or phenomenon (technique). Illustrations and drawings rely primarily on the created image to convey meaning.”)
Also, none of the winners were in traditional media, like watercolor or ink. Does this represent a shift away from using traditional media to depict scientific concepts? I’m really not sure. I hope not. But I do know that traditional media can be a hard sell, both for the added time required to execute a piece, and perhaps because of an implied subjectivity/inaccuracy/”artistic license” when compared with photography. As scientific imaging techniques generate more and more intuitive, even “artistic” results, the need for an artist to reinterpret those results may be diminishing. It’s an interesting question.
September 29th, 2007
New York Movie
Edward Hopper, 1939
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
I went to the National Gallery’s Hopper exhibit last weekend - it was crowded, hot, and really long. I had no idea so many Hoppers could be concentrated in one space. It was too substantial a retrospective for a single visit - about halfway though, I hit my art appreciation saturation point. Which might be why I saw the luscious red-and-green theatre scene above and immediately thought, Ok, so she’s stepping out to talk on her cell phone.
Ack! Have cell phones gotten that ubiquitous? Has the classic pose of the pensive thinker, head in chin, become merely the crook-necked giveaway of the inappropriately chatty?
I hope I was just tired. Really, really tired.
If you can’t make it to the National Gallery for your surfeit of Hopper, try this excellent Smithsonian website for an overview of his art and context.
September 27th, 2007
La Belle Rosina (Two Young Girls)
Antoine Wiertz, 1847
Morbid Anatomy has some excellent posts lately - if it’s not on your blogroll already, you should go investigate! I was particularly taken with this painting. I suppose it’s memento mori, and I should be thinking about my own mortality and all. Or - wearing my former-anatomy-professor hat - admiring that nice skeleton. But my first impression was astonishment that the living girl - obviously meant to symbolize blooming health - is so Rubenesque. Scholar Peter Gay calls her “strapping,” and she is - strapping in the healthiest sense of the word. I wish I had as little cellulite as she does! The Belgium-born Wiertz, a somewhat controversial but popular painter in his own time, was clearly influenced by Rubens. Today, most Americans would probably consider Wiertz’s nude overweight - what is she, a 12? Egad!
Bless those Romantics, who would no doubt have found Britney Spears too bony in her recent VMA appearance, and would have fattened her up with some nice mutton and beer. (Or, alternatively, bled her. I didn’t say the last century was all good).
It’s also worth noting that in this picture, “beautiful Rosine” is the skeleton, not the living girl. So says the helpful label pasted to her skull.
September 26th, 2007
Pecoxus Ferexus
ink and resin
Dustin Yellin , 2006
Resin blocks are commonly used to preserve medical specimens so they can be viewed from all angles without the prgressive fragmentation of a specimen suspended in solution. But in artist Dustin Yellin’s hands, resin is used to deceive: “specimens” such as the one above are not really solid objects, but illusions created using ink. And although the result is convincingly 3D, like a true biological specimen, it can defy classification. Consider the Pecoxus above - is it flora or fauna? Are those skeletonized leaves or the brittle wings of an insect?
According to Culture Catch,
The art of Dustin Yellin is a cross between painting and sculpture, science and science fiction. His magical objects, some taller than the viewer, are comprised of dozens of layers of resin that are meticulously painted with acrylic and inks - layer atop layer - until a sinuous “life form” appears that looks like it would be at home in sea, sand, or air.
Each object is a comment on nature, genetic experimentation, color and form, culminating, in this reviewer’s mind, in some of the freshest and most distinct art being made today. I was reminded, even before I saw the exhibition’s title, of suspended animation because these works are expressions frozen in time. And they have an otherworldly feel, like encapsulated specimens brought back from space exploration, that gives the entire installation a strange viral cast. (source)
It’s absolutely exhausting imagining the process that must go into Yellin’s work. My favorite is this one, which reminds me of some kind of transdimensional alien overlord from Dr. Who. . .or wait. . . is that the Eye of Sauron?
Xexus Knotilus
resin and ink
Dustin Yellin, 2007
Thanks to peacay for yet another heads-up on this one!
September 23rd, 2007
Zeppelin
Digital
Mikel Robinson, 2007
Candles and Ghosts (blog); Galerie de Illuminata (etsy)
I’ve always loved antique patinas, rusty found objects, and vintage photographs, but these days it seems like EVERYONE has joined the mixed media bandwagon. Suddenly we’re saturated with sepia ancestors, butterfly wings, grungy fonts, and faux-scientific labels. I’m hesitant to work on the mixed media pieces I have on my back burner, because I’m afraid they’ll seem too trendy! My protests that I was doing collage before ephemeramania may sound disingenuous, but I really was. (I also routinely anticipate Pottery Barn trends by a year. And I was never a fan of New Kids on the Block or Milli Vanilli. See? You don’t believe me, do you?)
Although there are hundreds (thousands?) of creative people out there making lovely collages, I rarely find an ephemera artist who makes a strong impression on me with his or her body of work. Mikel Robinson is such an artist. I love his judicious use of illumination, which evokes the primitive technology of advertising lightboxes and magic lanterns, or the gentle fading of souvenirs abandoned under a perpetually sunstruck window. He understands the light-spirited whimsy-wrapped-in-history that is the heart of ephemeral art.
But at the same time, there’s a deeper tension in Robinson’s pieces. Zeppelin, the steampunky image above, is at first glance ridiculous. Check out those coke-bottle goggles! But it’s also a tragic juxtaposition: a humble, self-taught amateur inventor, whose aspirations to flight are embodied in a broken wing and a black machine of war. Sadly funny; damaged, yet stubbornly resourceful - it’s a quintessentially American take on Icarus.
Lullaby
Mixed Media
Mikel Robinson, 2003
Although there may be a lot going on under the surface, Robinson keeps his pieces refreshingly simple, resisting the insidious urge to layer and texture an image to death. He lets the artifacts speak for themselves, with minimal (or no) framing: in short, he knows when to stop! In his restraint, Robinson is more closely aligned with the intimate assemblage tradition of Joseph Cornell, than with current trends in altered books or scrapbooking - though the stray butterfly wing here and there does keep his work looking current.
Mikel Robinson’s work is available through his website and through his etsy gallery.
September 20th, 2007
Author and illustrator Peter Sis has written a beautiful book called The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin
which follows Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and re-creates the naturalist’s travel-stained maps and notebooks. The book was released in 2003, and got a gazillion awards, but I haven’t ever seen it in a bookstore. Of course, I’ve also been living in regions where children’s books on evolution are not, uh, the hot gift concept of the season (though such a gift would be a good way to get yourself disinvited from future juvenile birthday festivities).
Anyway, if you happen to need a present for a budding young naturalist, this is ideal. View the gorgeous animated excerpt here and see if you don’t agree!
A MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Sis has written many books, including Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei
, and illustrated still more, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. He has a quiet sense of absurdity, particularly about domestic life. Here’s his explanation of why he switched from pastel to watercolor:
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. There was a shortage of everything (freedom most of all) — and only one kind of paper, one kind of ink, one kind of paint. I was one happy artist when I became an illustrator in the U.S.A. So many materials! I settled on oil pastels, which I scratched into. That created lots of residue, tiny pieces of paint everywhere. It didn’t matter as long as I was single. It started to matter a bit when I met my wife-to-be and we lived in a loft. It mattered a lot when we had our first baby. It mattered even more when Madeleine began to crawl. We built a wall, but I had nightmares about her getting into my paint thinner and X-Acto blades. I switched to watercolors, but I still wasn’t sure how safe they were. On the other hand, I found out that baby formula dissolves aquarelle. Madeleine loved it. I had to look for a studio outside the house. No more paints at home. I found myself a studio — a little apartment, really — with a kitchen.
I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil). (Peter Sis, “Tiny Pieces of Paint“, in The Horn Book)
One of the most amusing illustrations in The Tree of Life depicts the young Darwin fleeing a nightmarish theatre of dissection (and, fortuitously, his career in medicine):
Poor Darwin! But what a good thing for biology that he was so squeamish. . .
September 16th, 2007
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