Art

Tara Donovan Layers 200,000 CDs into Twisting Totems of Physical Data

Despite claims that CDs are raring back into the zeitgeist, only a small number of people today consume media through the slim, shiny discs. In an exhibition at Pace, artist Tara Donovan presents an ode to the outmoded, if not beloved objects through 11 towering works.

The artist is known for her large-scale sculptures and installations of common, mass-produced objects like pencils, styrofoam cups, and Slinkys that consider accumulation and aggregation. For Stratagems, she bought about 500,000 CDs from eBay, sorted them by color, and glued two together so just the reflective areas were visible. She then layered the doubled components into undulating patterns and twisting helices reaching up to ten feet tall.

Because of their mirrored surfaces, the monumental sculptures catch and reflect light depending on the time of day and confront the viewer with the stunning weight of information. Donovan described the material in a recent interview:

The silver CDs are commercial discs with music, movies, audiobooks, porn, Jesus, Celine Dion. Everything. The green are CDRs, so they’re recordable. They contain whatever people valued enough to put on them, whether it’s a Grateful Dead concert or a mix. The CD is the last quantifiable object of data that exists in the world. We moved from filing cabinets to clouds. These are relics of a very recent past. I remember when the CD became a thing, it was marketed as the future. They made “forever discs” which were gold. When you think about the amount of information that is in this room is staggering.

Stratagems is on view through August 16 in New York, and you can find more from the artist at Pace.

 

Art

Uncanny Phenomena Derail Domestic Bliss in Marisa Adesman’s Luminous Paintings

Marisa Adesman unsettles domestic stability by twisting common sights into the surreal. From her studio in St. Louis, the artist infuses still lifes evocative of the Dutch Golden Age with a strange animism: forks coil around lit taper candles, an upside-down terracotta pot appears to levitate, and an illustrated kitchen tile seamlessly morphs into the feathered flesh of a duck. The luminous oil paintings use food and dining to explore issues of gender, culture, and politics, including the invisible labor women historically have undertaken.

A seemingly simple tool, the fork becomes a loaded metaphor in Adesman’s works. The sleek metal cutlery is buoyant and feisty as it shape-shifts and writhes, transforming a static instrument into a lively actor. “As a symbol of both nurturance and control, the fork’s pliability questions the hierarchies of value that we’ve placed on the ideas of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized,’ ‘domestic’ and ‘wild’…By using various cutlery to feed ourselves, we dine rather than eat, believing we are somehow more refined, more civilized than other species,” she shares.

Whereas the fork paintings imply a human presence, Adesman’s newer works translate the body into phantasmic forms. “By a Thread,” for example, witnesses shiny, translucent fingers grasping at a pulley rope, while lace-gloved hands in “Out From Under” emerge from the floorboards alongside a bouquet.

“I aim to create tension between contrasting sensations: sensual yet horrifying, nourishing yet violent, familiar yet surreal, alluring yet deceptive,” the artist adds. “These dichotomies serve as a metaphor for the paradoxes of human life and especially the feminine experience.” Enchanted by a mysterious force, the paintings call attention to the immense labor of maintaining domestic life that, to those who have traditionally benefitted from it, may have seemed like magic all along.

Explore more of Adesman’s paintings on her site and Instagram.

 

Art Craft

Anja Brunt’s Clever Collages Give Ephemeral Articles a Second Life

Inspired by Dada and Surrealism, Anja Brunt’s instinctive paper medleys evoke a sense of whimsy, spontaneity, and randomness. The Amsterdam-based graphic designer has been creating assemblages for six years as a way to relax. After falling in love with the many possibilities of the medium, she began to work intuitively, cutting and arranging vintage ephemera into iterations of bodies, buildings, and bold text.

Brunt collects materials from every place imaginable. From papers she finds in chocolate boxes and antique playing cards to instruction leaflets and train tickets, the artist sources both aged pieces and contemporary media gathered from her daily life. As she accumulates promising morsels over time, she organizes each fragment into boxes and old stamp albums, where they await their addition into a montage.

At the moment, Brunt is exploring collage animation. Keep up with her newest projects on her website and Instagram.

 

 

Sponsor

Open Call: The 6th VH AWARD for Emerging Asian Media Artists

Since its establishment in 2016, the VH AWARD, hosted by Hyundai Motor Group, has offered a platform for emerging media artists to showcase their artistic expression and discuss diverse cultural and socio-political issues.

Artists interested in applying for the 6th VH AWARD can submit proposals to produce audiovisual screen-based artworks that may include but aren’t limited to video art, moving images, film, motion graphics, computer animation, gaming, and more. Individuals or collectives whose work engages with the context of Asia may now submit applications through the VH AWARD website.

“The VH AWARD is globally recognized for its boundless exploration of participating artists from the Asian region, as well as those of Asian descent and diasporas from around the world,” said Dooeun Choi, art director of Hyundai Motor. “We eagerly anticipate the active participation of artists who embrace diversity and inclusion in shaping the past, present, and future of Asia.”

In 2021, the VH AWARD expanded its eligibility beyond South Korean artists to include those whose works creatively portray and question the vast array of issues across Asia. This expansion received a tremendous response, attracting diverse participants and remarkably enhancing the award’s stature as a global accolade. The award is gaining prominence as a significant platform for emerging media artists who engage with the context of Asia.

 

For the 6th VH AWARD in 2024, applications will be reviewed by an international panel of jurors, who will select finalists based on their originality and aesthetics, compelling conception and innovation, quality of presentation, and sophisticated employment of technology. The jury members include accomplished artworld professionals such as Christl Baur, festival director of Ars Electronica; Sabine Himmelsbach, director of House of Electronic Arts; Martin Honzik, chief executive officer of Festival X; Sook-kyung Lee, director of the Whitworth; and Roderick Schrock, curator and executive director of Eyebeam.

The five finalists will each receive a $25,000 grant to produce new artworks. Additionally, through a partnership with Eyebeam, a prominent nonprofit art and technology center based in New York City, the finalists will be invited to an online residency program. Led by artists and curators from Eyebeam, the program will occur before the submission of their final works.

The recipient of the Grand Prix will be announced in June 2025 and receive an additional grant of $25,000. All works will be exhibited across various art institutions and platforms around the globe, including the Vision Hall of Hyundai Motor Group in Yongin, South Korea; the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland; the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; the National Art Council in Singapore; and other venues.

The call for entries closes at 11 a.m. EDT/12 a.m. KST on July 5, 2024. Applications with the required materials must be submitted online via the official VH AWARD website.

For more information, visit vhaward.com.

 

Illustration

Frenzied Symbols and Vibrant Vignettes Overlay Sam Rodriguez’s Figurative Illustrations

Sam Rodriguez sorts his works into three categories: nouns, verbs, and typography. Nouns comprises his portraits that zero in on a singular person and their expressions, while verbs takes a step back to portray figures in action. Typography is more abstract and centers on letterforms and graphics informed by Rodriguez’s early forays into graffiti.

These classifications help the San José-based illustrator “bring order to the chaos of making art,” freeing him to focus on the stories he wants to tell. Employing bold, chromatic palettes, Rodriguez superimposes symbols, signs, typography, cartoons, and patterns atop his subjects as a means of expression. The frenzied additions visualize the sitters’ unseen preoccupations and interests, whether it be a childhood love for Dragon Ball or verdant, cabbage-like clusters sprouting from a figure’s eyes.

In addition to his personal projects, Rodriguez has worked with dozens of brands including Adobe and The New Yorker and is currently collaborating with the estate of MF Doom on a collection to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MM…FOOD. He also recently released Human 2.0: A Celebration of Human Bionics with author Patrick Kane, a richly illustrated book about the incredible advancements in medical engineering.

You can find an archive of Rodriguez’s work and follow his upcoming projects on Instagram.

 

Art

Using the Building Blocks of Myers-Briggs, Jason Boyd Kinsella Puzzles Together an Expressive Cast

“For me, the studio is a place of discovery,” says Jason Boyd Kinsella (previously). “It maybe sounds silly, but it’s a little bit like a Christmas morning when you get a gift, and you’re excited to open it because you don’t know what’s inside… Something is going to be revealed, and I am excited to see what it is.”

The unexpected encounters Kinsella describes arise naturally in his Oslo studio as he conjures enigmatic characters. Large-scale canvases—his preferred size is 20 x 100 centimeters—line the walls of the airy, industrial space and allow him to envision life-sized figures he confronts as he paints. This positioning creates a sort of dialogue between the two, which he approaches with openness and curiosity as if meeting someone for the first time.

Kinsella often begins with a rough, preliminary sketch that pulls on a few emotional threads and helps to lay the foundation for a temperament to emerge. “Looking back at (the sketches), very often I’m struck with the feeling that the person I’m looking at in one of these drawings is someone that’s very familiar to me. It’s really about discovering feeling as opposed to being super rational,” he adds.

 

Like a jazz musician who practices improvisation and gains confidence in spontaneity, Kinsella has learned to follow his intuition. He might layer a pair of bubblegum pink planks or bisect a face with two peach columns, decisions that, like chord progressions and syncopation in an unrehearsed run, are made more interesting by their surrounding components. “You can look at sheet music and understand the individual notes themselves,” the artist says, “but it’s only when they’re assembled and played that you really get the true magic of it.”

He constructs a persona in the way that many of us build the public-facing identities flooding our social media profiles. His figures are complex but not messy, their feelings compartmentalized in perfectly round spheres and angled forms. Based on the 16 possible outcomes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, the subjects fit into neat constructions that resemble something familiar but are uniquely puzzled together, each shape nested into an individual spot.

The artist first encountered the personality test after his mother gifted him a book with the questions when he was growing up in Toronto. He answered the prompts and recognized himself in the outcomes: his introversion, intuition, and empathy were all easily identifiable. “There was this realization that we’re all made up of the same stuff, right? All of these simple components are very interchangeable depending on how you answer these questions,” he says. Although he didn’t think much about the book after that, it followed him around and slowly seeped into his practice, eventually becoming the backbone of his work.

 

Earlier this year, Kinsella opened Emotional Moonscapes at Perrotin in New York, where his painted portraits were on view alongside sculptures and video. In addition to singular figures, pairs of people appeared in this show for the first time. “The Twins” depicts siblings in pink and blue plainly conjoined by a horizontal bar, while “Connection” is more eager and complicated. Two seated characters inch forward in hopes of interacting, only to find the other just out of reach.

Like realistic portraits, these abstract personalities aren’t static. Experiences offer new perspectives, and over time, our understandings of ourselves and the world shift. Kinsella’s “Mille” portraits draw on the inevitability of change and portray a figure at varying points in life. The first in the series features a disjointed face that plays outward, while the second is tightly constructed, the same shapes rearranged into a recognizable but new configuration.

Stripping away outward appearances in favor of fundamentals, Kinsella looks to emotional DNA, how it sequences within an individual and replicates over time. As Max Lakin writes about the body of work, the artist’s “presence wrapped up in his pictures… a feeling that hangs between the shapes.” The portraits suggest that intimacy is about filling in the gaps and finding space where connections flourish. “If you want to know what’s happening in my life, just look at my work. I’m baked into every single piece,” Kinsella says.

In August, he will open his next exhibition, Ghost in the Machine, at Perrotin in Seoul. Until then, find more of his work on his website and Instagram.