March 26, 2014 Biennale continued-Humble materials

Some of you, especially those from the Southwest U.S. such as Santa Fe and environs will be familiar with milagros, also called ex-votos, religious folk charms used to elicit healing from the divine.  In that part of the world they are little charms, fashioned in the form of body parts such as an eye, leg or arm out of silver or less precious metals.  I’ve been told that in some parts of the world they are much larger and made from wax.  The ex-votos at the Biennale, made from papier-mâché, originally painted and numbering over 5,000, were collected over many years (1600-1900) from the Santuario di Romituzzo in Sienna, Italy.

James Castle, born deaf in 1899, expressed himself entirely in art, never learning to communicate with any form of sign language.  He was born in Idaho and lived his entire life there.  His artist materials were all forms of paper and packaging, some donated by his postmaster parents in the form of discarded mail.  He produced constructions of paper and handmade books.  For the birds, he sewed strips of paper and attached them to the bodies with thread or twine.

Interested in customs of dress, Phyllis Galembo (born 1952, New York) has done large scale portraits of people in ceremonial garb.  This work was inspired by the actions of two men from Ghana, Janka Abraham and A.K. Yamoah, called the “Nobles,” who put on their own masquerades in the 1920’s, mimicking festivals held earlier by the Dutch and British traders.  While the characters portrayed were usually of local figures, the masks were European and they even used Halloween costumes.

Don’t know what to do with all the odds and ends in your studio?  Trimmings, buttons, odd pieces of wallpaper, buttons?  Check out Enrico Baj’s (1924-2003) work.  Baj rebelled against the conformity he saw in the 1950’s in art and politics and instead worked more in the Expressionist style of André Breton and Max Ernst.  HIs Dame series, begun in the 1960’s, comprised collage and assemblage portraits of women in forms alluding to puppets which he also actually made.

In addition to the main exhibition hall at the Giardini, there were also many pavilions representing different countries.  Throughout the Biennale were several exhibits of works carved from books.  In the South African pavilion, were sculptures by Wim Botha of heads and a whole body, completely carved from books. For other sculptures he has used stacked newspapers and prison release papers.

March 20, 2014 Video interviews

Back in November when my show as up at aBuzz Gallery in Denver, I was interviewed by Quilters Newsletter.  A couple months later, the team came out to my studio to videotape the process I use to create my colorful abstract textile works.  Bill Gardner, Editor-In-Chief, Mary Kate Karr-Petras, show host, and Brian Buss, videographer made the whole experience a lot of fun.

The first video, the gallery interview, will air tomorrow, March 21, and the second, the computer process, will air March 28.  You can see them QuiltersNewsletter.com, QNNtv.com and on the Quilters Newsletter YouTube channel.  Hope you will tune in !!

March 13, 2014 More about the Biennale

One aspect of the Biennale that I really appreciated was the opportunity to see a wide variety of work across different time periods.  One artist, Arthur Bispo de Rosario, a Brazilian former navy man, did most of his artwork after being admitted to an asylum in 1938 after sharing a vision he had that God had asked him at the end of time to present those things in the world that he judged worthy of being saved.  He worked in wood, textiles and many other media.  The embroidery he did often used blue thread that he unraveled from uniforms at the psychiatric hospital.  The Biennale featured a room-sized installation of his work.

In another large but quite different installation, Matt Mullican, a contemporary artist, presented collections of pages grouped on many room dividers.  On these pages, using signs , symbols and schematic drawings, he tried to create  the sense of a complete vision of the universe and explore the contrast between lived experience and objective reality.

Originally from Senegal and later studying and working in Paris in the middle to late 1950’s, Papa Ibra Tall moved his art from the sort of aesthetic principles he had studied in Europe to strong color and a decorative way of working to represent stories and myths from Senegal. Moving back to Senegal after independence, he continued to root his art in the traditions of Senegal.

In an enormous room, presented singly and in small groups were the eerie life-size plastic sculptures of Pawal Althamer.  Entitled The Venetians (2013), the faces were of local Venetians cast in plaster and then connected to thin bands of extruded plastic formed into bodies and limbs.  The cavernous space of the room in the Arsenale with its cement floors and brick walls intensified the feeling of human frailty expressed in the positioning of the bodies and their facial expressions.