Amazing broken glass sculptures by Daniel Arsham [www.danielarsham.com]
Japanese artist Mika Aoki uses the ethereal quality of glass to get us to look differently at subjects like viruses, reproduction and the origins of life.
Excerpt from an interview with Janine Antoni.
As a child in the Bahamas, I heard pirate stories that were more reality than fantasy. The islands were subject to bootlegging, blockade running, illegal immigration and drug trafficking. My brother told me stories about Anne Bonnet, an Irish-American woman who masqueraded as a male pirate in the Caribbean during the 18th century. One of the ways Bonnet deflected suspicion about her double identity was by using a ceramic apparatus that enabled her to urinate standing up.
As a young girl, I was fascinated with the idea of Anne Bonnet’s device. Recently, I encountered commercially made objects designed exactly for this purpose that brought back this memory. I couldn’t resist the complex implications of such an object. Like Anne Bonnet, I, too, wanted to live out the fantasy triggered by the use of this object. My fantasy, like most, took me to an unlikely place. Such is the unexpected journey of the unconscious.So here’s the leap: What if the apparatus for peeing while standing up was a gargoyle? And what if I actually cast this apparatus as a sculpture and used it to pee off of a landmark building in New York City? Gargoyles fascinate me, not only as hellish creatures but because they signify the mythical, shadow side of our psyche. There’s no consensus on the source of their grotesque configuration. They are functional, though, designed to disguise a funneling system that reroutes rainwater away from a building. I chose to sculpt a griffin gargoyle, which is a hybrid—a mythical composite of different animals. It occurred to me that to use my invented apparatus was to make myself into a hybrid, because as a woman my anatomy doesn’t enable me to pee standing up.
(via Artnews.org: Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine New York)
Sabi van Hemert is a Dutch artist who creates sculptures that are a fusion between child and animal. Her sculptures have a quality of alternately denying and confirming what you think you see in them and what feeling they give you. Because it is not immediately clear what you are seeing, the relation between viewer and sculpture is more complex.
Kreatworks creates an awesome array of sculptures made entirely out of recycled metal, auto parts, and other scrapped machines. Each of the highly detailed works is created by Mr. Sudjai, a Thai sculpture artist, and his skillful team. Pieces vary in heigh from 20 in. to 9 ft. and depict a multitude of different figures like the Predator and Alien pictured above.
Kreatworks is based out of Phatumthanee, Thailand, which is near Bangkok, and sells their works through their website and Etsy. Awesome!
See more sculptures by Kreatworks over at My Modern Metropolis!
Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972
These photos document Antin dieting and they are taken from all sides of her naked body every day for a 36 day period. She is both the sculpter and the sculpted as she carves away at herself, removing fat. These photos act as anthropometric photography; a type of photography that was supposed to convey objectivity to measure the human body.
The main idea of this conceptual piece was a physical manifestation of the pressures put on women in Western society. She was inspired by how physical standards for women are continuously designed and re-designed according to trends, fashions and perceptions of society. Her method of carving her own body was referencing the -male- sculptor as he carves out the ideal female shape in classical art, and then puts that particular representation on a pedestal.
blind sculptor circa 1952
A tiny little bronze nipple-stretcher dude. It looks like he’s rolling bread dough.
can we agree that that toy is perfectly unisex?
Just gotta love that nipple piercing
