Hitoshi Kuriyama creates elaborate light installations using complex clusters of shattered fluorescent light bulbs. With Kuriyama, fluorescent lights and LEDs become life forces that animate the darkness of the universe with an irregular, unpredictable rhythm.
Artist Berlinde De Bruyckere‘s installations are disturbing. Horses, apparently deformed or mutilated, are scattered throughout the gallery. Some are draped lifeless; others are seem to be frozen while flailing in panic. The forms are clearly horses, their shape undeniable. However their faces are elusive and missing as if in a nightmare. De Bruyckere’s installation’s inspire conflicting feelings of compassion, disgust, and fear. It should be mentioned that none of these horses were killed or harmed for the art work. Rather, De Bruyckere selected the horses while alive but did not use their bodies until they died of natural causes.
The sculptures of Mihoko Ogaki are deeply felt. Her sculptures often deal with the heavy ideas of life and death. This series titled Milky Ways follows suit. Plastic sculptures of people inhabit darkened rooms. Lit from within, the bodies illuminate the surrounding walls and ceiling with a starry-like pattern. Each body carries a universe within it, projecting it out onto the world around it – it isn’t difficult to draw out a metaphor from there. It is further interesting to contrast the dark unlit plastic bodies in the well lit gallery against the glowing beings alone in the middle of the dark room. [via]
When not attending to his family’s masonry business, Hirotoshi Ito turns a more playful eye to the stones of his work day. Hirotoshi deftly works stone transforming it into sculptures that appear to be anything but the hard material. Rocks look as if they’re thin skinned pouches, melting like butter, and laughing faces. Hirotoshi’s sculptures – their playful forms and use of material – betray the artists sense of humor and a desire to pleasantly surprise the viewer. Indeed, the artist’s statement says that his work welcomes a laugh and a smile.
The installations of Carly Fisher may at first appear to be trash strewn galleries. However, closer inspection reveals that none of the items are actual garbage. Rather, Fisher carefully recreates litter from little more than paper and glue. The meticulous attention she gives to sculpting trash replicas, so to say, may seem odd. However, the familiar international name brands dotting the gallery floor raise the question: do these corporations possibly give the same meticulous attention to the branding of litter as Fischer? As one of her gallery statements puts it, “Perhaps there is a marketing edge to trash?”
At first glance the work of Vincent Tomczyk appears to be normal ready-made objects. However, each piece is carefully constructed almost entirely from different types of paper. Yeah, paper. You can’t sit on these chairs or slip into those shorts without ripping it. In a way, this seems to be Tomczyk’s intention. Tomczyk and his viewers investigate these objects by painstakingly rebuilding them without their utilitarian properties. He says:
“Although my work can be categorized as realism, my intention is to distill the emotion of an object, then through expression, reconstruct it into my view of its essential self – free of function.” [via]
Eric Franklin‘s sculpture’s glow with a certain life. Though the series focuses on skulls and skeletons, it isn’t exactly dead. These skulls are carefully made of flameworked glass, or glass melted and shaped with a torch. The hollow skulls are then filled with ionized neon, krypton, and mercury gases. The ionized gases cause the skulls to glow from within complimenting their eery shape. [via]
