Burt Payne 3

Rapunzel

1993

The artistic collaboration of Kelly Bugden + Van Wifvat has produced a thought-provoking body of sculptures, paintings, and constructions. Nature, childhood memories, and everyday archetypes take shape in unexpected combinations of materials. The works emerged as the tactile and visual senses channeled the ritualistic power and materiality of selected artifacts. The resulting objects exist in a space between what they were originally and what they could become. A wheel, for example, is distorted as if seen through a prism. Their collaboration grew out of years of shaping materials into one-of-a-kind objects. Intuitively, the process of creating with their hands took an inward turn. Prism is a travelogue through memories and dreams, yielding abstract forms that capture moments of transformation. Van Wifvat grew up with eight siblings and studied sculpture and environmental design in Minneapolis at MCAD. In 1979, he opened a storefront art gallery to promote the work of local artists. The space featured printed materials—art books, periodicals, fanzines, and postcard’s. Wifvat moved to New York in 1983 to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons. In 1987, he co-founded Van Gregory & Norton design studio, specializing in convex mirrors and curtain hardware...

There are two Little Oil installations available with 6 sculptures each on top of LED light boxes. Little Oil 19 is a digital photographic print on aluminum for the flat files. Katherine Jackson has been working with glass and light together for many years, Recently, she's been making glass castings of vintage oil cans, and displaying them -- singly, in small groupings, or in vitrines -- on light boxes. So far she has created about 90, each one unique. The series is called Little Oil, alluding to Big Oil, and sometimes Small Oils, as in oil painting. But “oil” can mean many things. It has been a source of light (sometimes from unconscionable sources) since ancient times as well as a source of eternal light in many faith traditions. Set atop lightboxes, where each work glows from within, these pieces can simply seem like vessels of light itself. At times, they appear to me to transcend their relation to oil altogether, appearing anthropomorphic or creaturely, even biological. These days, I think of them as archeological artifacts, relics of a past, oil-based, civilization. Necropolis is a print of a painting inspired by a map of the necropolis where the terra cotta soldiers...