installation

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Art

Viruses and Microorganisms Emerge from Agnes Hansella’s Macramé Installations and Sculptures

In a Time Magazine article published during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientist Elizabeth Fischer describes viruses and their aptness for destruction. She refers to their “beautiful symmetry,” adding, “they’re not malicious in and of themselves. They’re just doing what they do.” This straightforward statement contrasts much public sentiment centered on the overwhelming fear and grief and is the basis for a new body of work by Jakarta-based artist Agnes Hansella (previously).

Recently on view alongside pieces by Mulyana (previously) at NA Arthouse, Hansella’s macramé installation and sculptures magnify the tiny world of microorganisms through fiber. The nearly six-meter “Under Our Skin” hung at the entrance of the show, creating an intricate curtain of knotted and looped rope mimicking the epidermis. A large hoop evoking a microscope lens stood nearby, with Mulyana’s crocheted bacteria clinging to the loose net of threads.

Inside the gallery were several sculptures of phages, a tall navicula, and the infamous coronavirus. Two wall pieces spill out from their white frames, creating textured topographies of organic forms that appear to grow outward. “I want to explore microorganisms and viruses in (their) beauty to remind myself that we are part of a complex world, and getting close to these small unseen things helps me value simple everyday actions more, as simple as breathing,” Hansella shares.

For more of the artist’s elaborate rope-based works, visit her site and Instagram.

 

Animation Art

Kongkee Resurrects an Ancient Chinese Poet in an Energetic Cyberpunk Vision of Asian Futurism

The story of the legendary Chinese poet Qu Yuan ends in tragedy. Living during the destructive Warring States period that ran from 481 to 221 BCE, Qu Yuan was an influential writer and politician who was banished by King Huai of Chu and subsequently spent much of his time traveling the country and working on verse. The life of exile didn’t suit the poet, though, leading him into a deep depression and toward his eventual suicide in the Miluo River. Created as a hunt to retrieve Qu Yuan’s body, the annual Dragon Boat Festival continues to this day in celebration of his legacy.

A forthcoming exhibition at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 imagines the poet’s afterlife “as his soul journeys from the ancient Chu Kingdom to a retro-futuristic Asia where he is reborn as an android in a psychedelic cyberpunk landscape.” Melding history with a distinctive sci-fi vision, Kongkee: Warring States of Cyberpunk features works in several mediums by the London-based Chinese animator and artist Kong Khong-chang, known as Kongkee. Using videos, projections, installations, ancient objects, and graphic pieces, the artist explores Asian Futurism through the energetic and luminously rendered narrative of a Chinese icon.

 

An extension of a comic series Kongkee created back in 2013, the show considers existential questions of immortality, how the body and soul interact, and the tenuous relationship between humanity and machine. Bold, saturated colors emphasize the role of the digital in the visionary realm, while mountain ranges, clouds, and vast starry skies incorporate more natural and classical motifs that have existed for millennia. Rippled waves and water feature prominently, referencing Qu Yuan’s drowning in 278 BCE.

Although based on a life of immense suffering, Kongkee’s works are optimistic as he envisions a universe where redemption and reconciliation are possible. The artist shares in a statement:

I asked myself, what happens when a soul emerges after 2,000 years from underwater—does it seek out something new? Does it return to familiar places? Qu Yuan’s poetry has a psychedelic, wandering quality that I tried to reflect in my art, but I also wanted him to reflect the disorientation, as well as the hope, of our era.

Following its U.S. debut at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Kongkee: Warring States of Cyberpunk opens in Chicago on April 14 and will be on view until July 15. Find more from the artist on Instagram.

 

Art

Jeffrey Gibson’s Ecstatically Colorful Sculptures Fuse Modernist Aesthetics and Indigenous Traditions

“The land is always speaking and has memory,” Jeffrey Gibson says, as he describes his work in an audio guide for his solo exhibition The Body Electric at SITE Santa Fe last year. “I am frustrated to see how many people continue to abuse the land, take from it, never thank the land, or care for it. Or allow it to rest. So I ask the question: Are you listening? Are we listening?”

Rooted in the myriad ways narratives are constructed and shared, Gibson’s practice incorporates a vivid palette and a multitude of materials that range from glass beads and artificial sinew to fiber fill and sea glass. Vibrant color and graphic forms outline geometric patchworks that include words of affirmation, mottos, and acknowledgments. Quilt-like compositions mingle intricate patterns with symbols and references to myth, Indigenous knowledge, literature, and queer identities.

 

Throughout his childhood, Gibson moved often and spent periods in Germany, Korea, and the United States, travels that prompted him to suffuse his practice with a multicultural perspective and percolate on popular culture, identity politics, and personal experience. A member of the Chocktaw and Cherokee nations, he fuses the visual languages of Modernism and Indigenous American traditions, drawing inspiration from music, storytelling, and performance. He often incorporates song lyrics into his works or presents provocative snippets of text, like in the bead-framed painting “WHAT WE WANT IS FREE” or one of his Punching Bags titled “I AM A RAINBOW.”

In a group of figurative sculptures, some of which are life-size, Gibson blurs the boundaries between regional traditions and historical eras. He was inspired by a series of dolls from the Plains tribe region that depicted a spectrum of genders, which he encountered when he worked as a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act assistant at Chicago’s Field Museum—NAGPRA is a congressional provision established in 1990 for federal agencies and museums to repatriate or transfer items from their collections to lineal descendants and tribes. Gibson uses these works to explore the way dolls represent the aesthetics of peoples around the world and serve as a medium of social instruction. He carefully avoids assigning the sculptures a gender, which he describes as a proposing a “future hybridity” in which identity and cultural associations are fluid.

 

A series of intricately beaded bird pieces based on “whimsies” evoke small beaded objects made by Haudenosaunee peoples around the turn of the 20th century that reflect Victorian motifs like paisley or flowers applied to soft objects like boots or pin cushions. “I think they’re beautiful,” Gibson says:

…but they fell into a category of being kitsch novelty because they weren’t seen as being native enough or Victorian enough for the times they were being made in. They were on the shelf of objects that fell outside of clear, culturally-specific objects, and that’s what drew me to them. I was like, ‘Who made these? What are they?’ and I guess I felt myself reflected in them to some degree.

Central to Gibson’s work is a celebration of what he calls “outsider-ness,” collectivity, cross-pollination, kinship, and respect for each other and for the land. Described as Indigenous futurism, his practice emphasizes optimism and a focus on moving forward as he re-contextualizes versions of history that have long misrepresented or omitted Native American stories.

Find more of the artist’s work on his website, and follow updates on Instagram.

 

Art

In ‘Uprooted’ by Doris Salcedo, a House Made from Hundreds of Trees Morphs into an Impenetrable Thicket

We use the phrase “to put down roots” to express a desire to make a place our own, whether purchasing a house or deciding to live in one location for many years. A sense of community, family, being surrounded by one’s belongings, and feeling safe and secure all help to form the idea of home, which evokes myriad emotions and associations—especially if any of those fundamentals are missing. In Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s monumental installation titled “Uprooted” at the Sharjah Biennial 15, the concept remains nebulous.

Salcedo is known for sculptures and installations that incorporate quotidian, domestic objects like tables or garments. Her practice often takes historical events as a starting point, focusing on the effects of major political actions on people’s everyday mental and emotional experiences. “Conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means,” she once cataclysmically cracked the floor of Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern and lowered more than 1,500 chairs between two buildings in Istanbul to address displacement caused by war. In “Uprooted,” the theme of migration continues in the form of hundreds of dead trees that have been shaped into the recognizable silhouette of a house, its meticulously constructed walls and pitched roof gradually morphing into a thicket.

 

Salcedo contemplates transformation and loss that can be interpreted in many ways, especially in the context of Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine and the devastating earthquakes in Syria and Turkey that have displaced millions of people. By utilizing trees that are colorless and lifeless, she also references a rupture between humans and nature, examining how our connection to the environment is dissolving.

Visitors can walk around the installation, but the impenetrable tangles of the wood prevent them from going inside. Gnarled roots protrude from all sides, densely clustered trees obscure the entrance, and in place of an inviting front door is a forebodingly dark and impassable juncture between the domestic structure and the wilderness.

“Uprooted” is on view in Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present at the recently converted Kalba Ice Factory in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, through June 11.

 

Art Design

Azuma Makoto’s Temporary Sculptures Freeze Hundreds of Flowers on a Snow-Coated Lake

On a frozen lake in the Notsuke Peninsula, a tendril of land that juts out from Hokkaido’s east coast, acclaimed floral artist Azuma Makoto (previously) has constructed the third botanical sculpture in an ongoing series called Frozen Flowers. The first edition was composed in this same location in 2019 and again in 2021, and every year, the conditions have been a little bit different. The artist is interested in how variables like temperature, wind, or snowfall can alter the surrounding environment and make every version unique.

An important facet of Makoto’s practice is working alongside and adapting to nature and striking a collaborative balance so that he’s neither trying to control it nor controlled by it. Arranged on a scaffold and surrounded by a field of snow, bunches of flowers and foliage in a range of colors and textures are doused with water before they solidify into thousands of icicles. The artist and a team of assistants worked through the night, waiting until temperatures were at their lowest so that the ice would form quickly. The following morning, the sun revealed the finished composition, and by design, ultimately melted it.

Through the seasons, Makoto sees how the area transforms and over time has witnessed the effects of climate change on the peninsula. He aims to continue installing new versions of the icy blooms for years to come in order to document the ever-evolving environment. Find more of his work on his website and on Instagram.

 

 

 

 

Art

Memory and Knowledge Intertwine in Chiharu Shiota’s Immersive String Installations

In Signs of Life, a dense installation of knotted and wound string fills much of Galerie Templon’s New York space. The work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (previously), the solo show transforms the gallery into a monochromatic labyrinth of intricate mesh that ascends from floor to ceiling. Shiota considers the multivalent meaning of the web, from the structure of neural networks within the human brain to the digital realm today’s world relies on.

One of the works features bulging cylinders and dangling threads in red, while another white structure traps numerous book pages within its midst. Created during a two-week period, Shiota envisions the installation as connecting personal memory and the collection of knowledge. “I always thought that if death took my body, I wouldn’t exist anymore,” she says. “I’m now convinced that my spirit will continue to exist because there is more to me than a body. My consciousness is connected to everything around me, and my art unfolds by way of people’s memory.” The show also includes previously unseen drawings and sculptures, many of which contain quotidian objects that prompt questions about how items become meaningful, sentimental, and precious with use.

Signs of Life is on view through March 9. You can find more from Shiota on her site and Instagram.