Inspirations, Eighth Annual Juried Exhibition at Off the Wall Gallery in Dirty Franks
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Symphony in D Minor, Chris Klapper & Patrick Gallagher at Skybox
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Delainey Barclay, Atmospheric at Main Line Art Center
Atmospheric, curated by Executive Director Amie Potsic, at Main Line Art Center features the artwork of three InLiquid member artists: Delainey Barclay, Dianna Koppisch Hricko and Maureen Ciaccio. The 75 year old gallery space is activated throughout with an installation of artwork using information sources in new ways that will expand how you think about the everyday texts we use in our lives.
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Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Allianc
Michelle Post‘s show of carvings are unusual and beautiful, they look like cast sculptures but they are actually carved from styrofoam. The illusion of heaviness is ironic because of the texture on the outside. Some people think the busts are made from paper mache, the plinths are actually blocks of styrofoam. When the artist grabs a head to show the plinth it’s startling because they look so heavy but are as light as air. Michelle Post explained, “They’re in banged up beat up condition when I get them because they’re cast offs. And they can be in pretty deplorable shape. Gouges and hunks missing out of it but I like that. And I incorporate it into the piece.”
The sense of authenticity is uncanny. “Styrofoam is not normally a sculptural material, it is in the trade, however. Especially for enlargements like the MGM Grand lions out in Las Vegas. They’re cut in styrofoam and coated with material that’s very hard. The cost to have had those cast would have just been astronomical. There are companies now who take your maquette or your sculpture they scan it into a computer and then they have machines cut it out of a large block of foam. Now, you can do a lot of things with it afterward, you can mold it and cast it in bronze or aluminum or whatever or you can actually use the styrofoam.”
Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Alliance
“For me, I work into the foam directly but it can’t go outside right now. So, these ten pieces here, the heads, are the commission for the Grounds for Sculpture. It’s so great. It kind of grew from eight heads to ten heads. The Sculpture Foundation commissioned it, it’s going to be a permanent installation at the Grounds for Sculpture around the amphitheater. The amphitheater has all these stone seatings that go up this gentle incline and so these guys are going to flank all the stone seating. It’s like they’re watching what’s going on down in the amphitheater.”
“They will be cast in aluminum and painted in my style but not necessarily these colors because they’re going to be treated as a whole. All ten pieces are one piece. They’re just a little bigger than life size.” DoN asked how she was awarded the commission? “Well, that’s sort of a hard one because I’ve seen a lot of former atelier people that have commissions there so I said, ‘Hey, what about me?’ But, what I was doing before wasn’t good enough to be put outdoors. I actually met Mr. Johnson and showed him my work. I like showing him my work. And when he saw these, I had seven of these heads done, and he went just like, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what I’m looking for!’ and I went, ‘No! Get out of here!'”
J. Seward Johnson II is the founder of Grounds for Sculpture near Trenton NJ, a large sculpture park and he is also a well known sculptor himself specializing in trompe l’oeil painted bronze statues. He said yes to Michelle Post‘s idea to fulfill his idea of contemporary sculpture of portrait busts without being antiquity style. “He calls the the Mucky Mucks with Bruno as the head Mucky Muck and all the others in a hierarchy.” The work will be installed at Grounds for Sculpture in late 2013 after being sent off to be cast. “This is starting to expand how I see these heads now that they’re being put into a narrative.”
Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Alliance
Sculptor Michelle Post explained to DoNArTNeWs the concept of her new work Post Industrial, a mixed media sculpture of a goat pulling a cart with a man, a woman and a blue dog. “The cart is actually a real cart, an antique back from the turn of the century (20th) and the goat is actually reminiscent of that time period. They did have goat carts. They would hook up the goat, put the kids in there because the kids were too tiny to do horse and buggy, so the goat was perfect. This piece came about because my husband says,’Michelle you’ve got that cart. You better do something with it.'”
“The heads were the perfect thing, I just piled a bunch of heads in there and do a goat which now is something different I’m bringing to these pieces. Before it would be just the heads. And the plinths which would be the bodies; the plinths become part of the sculpture so it’s not a pedestal piece. With the goat even the base becomes it’s little foot, if you will. The goat set a whole new set of things to figure out. I’m used to going vertical and goats are horizontal. With legs you can’t just put a big old body down, a plinth, and have it represent the body because, well, it’s different.”
Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Alliance
Referring to the busts Michelle is known for she explains, “These guys are done all in one shot and I’ll work on ten to twelve pieces at one time.” You should know the artist has a magnificent octogonal shaped studio on her property near Millville, NJ big enough to build the heroic sized sculptures. “And about ten of them will turn out OK, there’s going to be a couple that are rejects, it just happens that way. And when Post Industrial came around I thought to myself, ‘OK. I’m bringing in something else.’ I do the stand alone pieces but now it’s time to do something different. With the busts they actually get named afterwards, when I’m carving it’s what comes out.”
DoN noticed that there was more of a narrative than just the personality of the busts; the sculpture reminds him of William Faulkner’s book Light in August where the young girl travels in a cart across the country in search of the father of her unborn child. Michelle said, “My husband, Dave, makes up all sorts of stories about it like, ‘Why’s the dog riding in the cart? Shouldn’t he be running along side?’ And they all have names, this is Cuthbert J. Twillie. If you’re an old movie fan you will know who he is. Think of, ‘My Little Chickadee.’ This is Sadie Twillie in the back, she doesn’t like it back there and that is Blue. Blue Twillie. And the goat is Willie. Willie Twillie.”
Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Alliance ends this weekend, 10/28/2012 with a Halloween costume party in the gallery from 2:00 – 5:00pm. 704 Catharine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147.
Written and Photographed by DoN Brewer
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Tronies: Michelle Post at Da Vinci Art Alliance is one of the last new stories for this blog, www.brewermultimedia.com, as a new improved format is developed with larger images and better search engine optimization. Thank you to all the fans of DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog for your continued support. Subscribe to the new DoNArTNeWs.com by e-mail: DoN@DoNBrewerMultimedia.com
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Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
October 13th, 2012 artist Hiro Sakaguchi presented an artist talk to a crowd of art enthusiasts at Seraphin Gallery on Pine Street. DoN exerpted and transposed some of the lecture as best as he could.
“This photo was 2011, I think it’s after everything happened in Japan, the tsunami and everything. I had the chance to go to New Hampshire and had the chance to view this mountain. But for me I wasn’t thinking about the mountain, looking at the horizon line, like everybody else, when you have this kind of landscape in front of you. For me, I thought about the tsunami, the tragedy you know and I started thinking about it. So this is the feeling I got on the top of the mountain when I was thinking about my native country, I know what people are thinking about, it’s very meditative that way. This was the first thing I was thinking about and it starts from here. It’s how it started in my head, every artwork. ”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
“Let’s start with drawing here. This drawing is called Flower Happening and as you see, there’s an image of an airplane. I think because of the apocalypse thinking in my head, documentary movies about war, natural disasters type of movies, so, one movie showed airplanes carpet bombing in Germany, Japan, everywhere. So it’s kind of like I had this it occurred to me that this violent act, I wanted to make it to something positive. Somebody told me the other day, like 60s people put flowers into the barrel of guns, you know Make Peace Not War, so putting instead of bomb, I put flowers to make it peaceful. You can see underneath is actually the town where I came from. Chiba City, Japan. This is a drawing and then a painting. The drawing was different, conversation wise, was fast but the painting was next.”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
Table top battle field with toy soldiers whose guns are replaced with flowers, tanks made from thread spools and hills made from Art Forum magazines on a soccer field of fake grass. “I was thinking about this one when I was making it, first of all, as a kid I didn’t have the technique to do this, but if I was ten years old and I did this I would be so happy. But, it came back to me know that I can make a child’s toy on this battle field. And also a toy I kind of think represents society, how our society functions, how we always build a toy, you know? Kids love their toys. It’s a questioning of functional toys and our society. And also a question of human violence.”
“I just got a FaceBook advertisement for a video game saying, “Peace is Not An Option!”. It’s really a violent way we have these games, war as a game. It’s kind of interesting because we don’t have to do it in real life. I always kind of question those things. So this has three things going on here: the field is a soccer field, a game field and also a battle field. And like I said about the question of human violence, soccer is one of the most popular sports in the world but supposedly started from an eighth century England people started kicking someone’s skull. So, it’s a violent game. And yet as a child we crave something like that. Of course, this is artwork, so you’re questioning the function of art. See how thick this Art Forum is?”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
“I enjoy doing splashing, throwing paint, my technique is actually air rifle used to splash the paint. This one is similar, a picture of a battle ship, the idea is a 21st Century Noah’s Ark. So, it’s a lot of bad things have happened in the world, somehow I saw this World War II Japanese battle ship, so similar (to the drawing) I wanted to make something peaceful. So I take all the weapons out and change and added trees, a green roof, and also solar and wind power, and then far away you can see the big tsunami coming in. It’s like like combining a History Channel program with recent events. I think if you go to Japan or Europe, you’ll see these mangled concrete, to stop the force of the waves.”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
“These sculptures, I don’t know if you know this, this whole show is about Love and Peace. This is a toy from when I was a kid, this is a simple toy made from a spool, chop stick and candle. And when you wind it up it moves. And because of the cuts, it can climb over the landscape.”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
“This big painting first I started from that rapid drawing. I imagined one theory of how wars end, a kind of imagined myself, start from that one (the drawing) then expand to that one (the battle ship) to this one. It’s kind of three different stages of my thinking. You have to start from somewhere. For this painting I was thinking of a color field painting with the splash, kind of more of an abstraction. The painting started from a floor splash, paint and let dry, paint and let dry, then I out the drawing. So it is horizontal and vertical where it came together, a combination of drawing and painting.”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
“There is an animation by Takaji Matsudo, he made an animation about a space ship based on WWII battle ship and then in the future aliens attacking it, so people on earth decommissioned this battle ship and made it into a space ship…I never grew up drawing comics but for me I enjoyed history stories, but I thought now it’s kind of funny for me to make a comic image here, right now.”
Hiro Sakaguchi, Two Zero One Two at Seraphin Gallery
This last drawing combines the photograph of Hiro Sakaguchi on the mountain top staring at the moon surrounded by swirls made from another child’s toy, the Spirograph. Today is the last day for this inspiring show at Seraphin Gallery, so while you’re out visiting POST shows take some time to visit and remember your childhood.
Make Love, Not War 2012.
Written and Photographed by DoN Brewer
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