Art 21 Artists

Arlene Shechet: Sculpting Time

During a time when she was facing the coming death of her friend who was diagnosed with cancer, she talked to a Buddhist teacher who said “Stop making such a big deal about it”. While mourning the loss of her friend she decided to throw away everything and start her studio anew and began working with plaster. Plaster is a “timekeeper” meaning that every second as it dries it's also changing. She makes her work in whatever amount of time she has to work with the material. “Whatever time I have is exactly the time I need”. After a while, she made something similar to a buddha form which then became a jumping-off point for her to create the form with direction but not too much direction. The real meaning of an icon for her is that it is there to keep her remembering what she wants to remember. Some inspiration I drew from Arlene Shechet came from how much she respected time. I think a lot of artists including myself struggle with time in their work and I found it interesting how she uses the lack of time to her advantage when creating forms with plaster, a somewhat quick hardening material. I would like to incorporate more of her carefree attitude into my work and remind myself to “stop making such a big deal about it”.


Guadalupe Maravilla and the Sound of Healing

He felt a deep connection to Myans because of his heritage and loved the architecture and art that was used to tell stories and perform rituals. He wasn't interested in imitating the old rituals but more about learning from them and creating his own. He considers his work autobiographical. He was born in El Salvador as the revolution was starting and his family had to flee so he was left by himself. At 8 years old he was told he'd be reunited with his family in the United States. While traveling to cross the border he played Tripa Chuca: a children's game in which players draw lines between pairs of numbers to create abstract patterns. On his birthday 12/12/12 he was diagnosed with cancer. Radiation became an empowering time for him as he was experiencing sound baths and began to think of sound as medicine. He said that if he overcomes this experience he wants to learn how to play this for other people. When he went into remission he began his own workshop for undocumented immigrants and when the pandemic hit a priest who was feeding over 3,000 people was attending his sound baths. They decided to work together which was when he brought his sound to the church. After overcoming cancer he viewed art differently. He became more interested in creating his own path using art and healing. Healing can be difficult and challenging but with others, it can be empowering Inspiration I drew from this artist was how he used his life's troubles to feed the passion of his work instead of being overcome by them. I would love to try the game Tripa Chuca.


Firelei Báez: An Open Horison (or) the Stilness of a Wound

“I don't want to create narratives of victimhood, I want to flip it”. She wanted to create bodies of constant transition and subversive beauty. Firelei Báez is from The Caribbean and focuses her work on looking at some of the first scientific illustrations of flora and fauna from the new world and how barbaric views of new world people. Ciguapa is a creature with backward legs, and luscious hair, female creatures hypersexual can derail culture. Others define it as a woman who is highly independent self-possessed and feels deeply, who wouldn't want to be that. Reframe things seen as unwanted and see them as beautiful with an eye of desire. Think of yourself as part of long cycles in front of them and before them. Every choice we make is predicated on the people we hope to love in the future and the people we love in the past. Always within your grasp to make something new, it's exhausting but limitless


Arlene Shechet: Pentimento in Paper

“Sometimes the thing that is unseen is way more interesting than what people want you to see. Like a construction site, there are the things you don't see there are the bones, they can be beautiful.” She took silicone molds of things that have happened in her studio as she was working with the clay. For example just her fingers in clay, brick with glaze on it, firebrick. Then makes highly pigmented paper and lays it in many different ways. Color and form are one thing where the color is the paper, a concept similar to ceramics where clay and glaze become one thing, one structure, surface, and form. She says that the thing about working with paper is the immediacy of the process, seeing the thing and responding to it, working with 5 or 6 pieces at a time. Talked about it like an athletic event, prepare, prepare, prepare, but you really don’t know anything until you're in the moment. Being a Ceramics BFA I related a lot to what Alrene had to say about her process. Similar to working with ceramics, the paper never looks as good as when it does when it's wet. When it is wet you are “closer to the aliveness to the actual experience” I related to what she said about how you make something in ceramics when it is wet you love it, once it's dry and fired it loses its life and the only way to get it back is through the right glaze. I was also inspired by the way she said she has a sense of restlessness and a desire to investigate on a much broader scale


Yayoi Kasama Obsessed with Polka Dots

Yayoi wanted to be a painter when she was a little girl and began painting at the age of 10. Her mother told her she wasn't allowed to paint and she was to marry a rich man so her mother took her canvases and inks from her. Her early drawings are beautiful and realistic and painted in opposition to her family with immense talent. But as a female Japanese artist, she knew that at some point she would have to escape. She traveled with a suitcase full of her drawings and came to New York in a cutthroat man's world period of art. Yayoi devoted herself to her work. She painted nets from dawn to dusk on 33 ft long canvases and as she was going the pattern would expand outside the canvas and fill the floor and wall. As she stood back she had a hallucination looking at the piece and this was how she became an environmental painter. She took away the ability to focus in space and made a name and reputation for herself as an artist in New York. She painted so much that she fell ill and exhausted she returned to japan to start from scratch again. Yayoi currently lives in a mental institution in Japan but works across the street in her own studio with a team of assistants handling her emotions through her work in a clean and productive way.

“Accumulation is how the stars and the earth don't exist alone but rather the entire universe is an accumulation of the stars”


Do Ho Suh: Rubbing/Loving

He had a friend who was giving up his apartment in New York so he took it and it became his living space and studio for 8 years. In this piece of work, he remembers and memorializes the space with meaningful intention. Going through each inch of the place and rubbing a crayon and thinking of memories associated with where he is rubbing. He said that if he wrote rubbing in Korean, people could read it as loving because there is no distinction between r and l in Korean alphabet. The rubbing shows how much he interacted with the space trying to show the layer of time interacting with the space. From afar it looks like a drawing but up close it is very sculptural. After it is done being shown he will peel the paper from the space and from the object the paper holds that shape. He even previously did a fabric version of the same space. I can relate to him in the way that I understand how a space can feel monumental and so significant to a person's life.