Anastasia Pelias

All the Flowers (for Mikey)

2018

ESPERANZA CORTÉS is a Colombian born contemporary multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Cortés has exhibited in the United States in solo and group exhibitions in venues ...

ESPERANZA CORTÉS is a Colombian born contemporary multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Cortés has exhibited in the United States in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Smack Mellon Gallery, Neuberger Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MoMA PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park and White-box Gallery in New York City. Nationally Cortes exhibitions include Cleveland Art Museum, OH, CSU Galleries at Cleveland University, OH, Helen Day Art Center, VT and The Lorenzo Homar...

The election of Donald Trump placed a spotlight on lower-class white families. This work lampoons the stereotypes we often have of those families. The piece is intentionally whimsical. The point is that until we see beyond superficial (and misleading) stereotypes, we have little hope of making any progress toward solving issues related to this, or any, class of individuals. --- Kat Flyn is a self-taught assemblage artist working presently out of San Diego. She began her career as a costume designer in Southern California. Over the years she amassed a trove of artifacts and collectables, which she began using to create assemblage art in the 1990's. In 2000 she sold her business and moved to Cuyamaca, a remote community in the mountains outside of San Diego to devote herself exclusively to her artwork. In 2003 her work was interrupted when the Cedar Fire swept through San Diego county and destroyed the forest, her home & studio along with almost all of her collections and works of art. Following the fire she relocated to San Francisco, where she spent a decade concentrating on her art in her studio in SOMA and exhibiting at galleries in the Bay Area. In 2015 she returned to San Diego and now works out of her studio in La Jolla, exhibiting there and in Los Angeles. Kat Flyn refers to herself as an Assemblage Sculptor and her works as Political Art or Protest Art. She separates herself from other assemblage artists in that she only employs “saved” as opposed to “found” objects in her work; and her pieces always have a political or cultural narrative to them rather than being surreal or abstract. She also constructs or refashions many of the pieces which she uses in her art – a soft drink box into a tenement building (Affordable Housing 2017), a jewelry box into a wheelchair (Last Lily Foot 2016), an old shoe shine box into a hearse (Katrina 2018). The result is her work is closer in appearance to Folk Art than Assemblage Art. STATEMENT: Strictly speaking I am an assemblage artist, but in fact I construct more than assemble my works. I search out collectables, artifacts and woodcarvings and then build scenes to make statements regarding American society. Even when using artifacts from earlier centuries, my theme is almost always about contemporary America. Social injustice, racism, sexism, and violence - aspects of our national psyche – exist in the present but have their seeds planted in our past. Additionally, the artifacts I use often are meant to amplify the meaning of the work. For instance, the Black stereotype wood figures I use in many of my pieces were almost certainly crafted by a White person. By using such artifacts I ask: what kind of society produces such items in the first place? In my art I make a strict distinction between found objects and saved objects.. A found object - which most assemblage artists use in their works - is devoid of intrinsic or emotional value, having been discarded by its owner as worthless or broken. A saved object on the other hand has retained value, either because it was intrinsically valuable or because emotional value had been added to it (such as a photograph, an old shoe, a vintage toy) and consequently it was saved rather than discarded. The fact that I only use “saved objects” often results in viewers being attracted to the individual pieces within my works rather than seeing the narrative I am attempting to portray. The pieces on display in this exhibit are from my American Home Series. I have assembled an array of old artifacts, carved figures, and iconic symbols, each spotlighting an aspect of living conditions within our borders; and as is consistent with my art, focus is placed on failings in our social contract – overcrowded tenements, trailer parks...

This work is a crude – but of course that is the point – depiction of Harvey Weinstein's alleged serial acts of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape; acts long and shamefully ig...

This takes dead aim at how being Black in our culture is a very dangerous game. The imagery is of an old arcade shooting gallery. Throughout the 1800s, right up until the 1960s, carnival games...

Foot binding was a practice that crippled Chinese women for a thousand years and vestiges of it linger in the spiked heel and high heeled fashion popular in the present day. The idea...

Like flowers in a garden, Susan Rankin’s beautiful glass columns appear to sway in the breeze. An avid gardener, Rankin has created a series of outdoor sculptures inspired by the for...

Susan Rankin has captured the luminous colour of water—from pale blue and turquoise to ocean blue in her latest series of garden columns. These hand-blown glass outdoor sculptures ar...

Jamie Harris straddles the disciplines of painting and glass blowing approaching his work, “more from a painterly perspective than as a traditional glassblower.” His work is primaril...

Pohlman and Knowles began their collaboration in 1992. They use a variety of materials in their rich assemblages, including hot-sculpted glass, various metal works, found objects and...

Jamie Harris straddles the disciplines of painting and glass blowing approaching his work, “more from a painterly perspective than as a traditional glassblower.” His work is primarily about something simple: ”loud splashes of color, capturing the innate way glass transmits, reflects, and absorbs color.” The viewer often witnesses this sensitivity through a number of techniques and forms that Harris has mastered: “from the strictness of my blown work to the organic looseness of my fused panels,” he uses color systems and theory to develop his forms. Yet the other critical layer to Harris’s work is expressive and visceral. The colors are intended to imprint an immediate emotion on the viewer’s experience of his objects as a very direct experience of color. Harris also straddles divergent historical epoch’s: “I merge a classic Venetian sensibility with a modernist approach.” blending the look of Murano glass with Twentieth Century modernism as typified by the Bauhaus, Harris hybridizes the functionality of vessel and the aesthetics of sculpture. Jamie Harris also teaches at UrbanGlass, in Brooklyn, NY. He has studied at the most prestigious glass studios in America: The Pilchuck Glass School, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Penland School off Crafts, the Haystack School, and the Corning Museum of Glass and Tiffany & Co. Selected Collections Sergey Brin, Palo Alto, California Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama Museum of American Glass, Millville, New Jersey Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn, NY "Threaded Infusion Block in Gold, Purple and Red", Blown and Kiln Cast Glass

Pohlman and Knowles began their collaboration in 1992. They use a variety of materials in their rich assemblages, including hot-sculpted glass, various metal works, found objects and beads, achieving a fine sense of formal balance. Three notable research field trips...