jim denevan

"Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in sand. At low tide on wide beaches Jim searches the shore for a wave tossed stick. After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws-- laboring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles. The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim's motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing."

Jimdenevan.com

Denevan's work is reminiscent of land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson. Land art began as a movement against the perceived artificiality and commercialization of the art world. It calls to question issues of permanence, authorship, and the organic.

kumi yamashita

City View , 2003
Light, Aluminum, Shadow

Origami, 2005
Light, Aluminum, Shadow

Feather, 2006
Light, Wood, Shadow

Exclamation Point, 1995
Wood, Light, Shadow

A Japanese artist who uses light and shadow to play with our sense of reality. See more of her work here.

If you like this work, also check out Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

anonymity and the artist

From Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art

In all respects the traditional artist devotes himself to the good of the work to be done. The operation is a rite, the celebrant neither intentionally nor even consciously expressing himself. It is by no accident of time, but in accordance with a governing concept of the meaning of life, of the goal is implied in St. Paul’s Vivo autem jam non ego, that works of traditional art, whether Christian, Oriental or folk art, are hardly ever signed: the artist is anonymous, or if a name has survived, we know little or nothing of the man. This is true as much for literary as for plastic artifacts. In traditional arts it is never Who said? but only What was said?

What role does the identity of artist play in the perception of an artwork? And consider how and why this has changed over time. What function does art serve today, and how does this compare with the function of art in the past? With that in mind, does the existence of an art market eliminate (or at very least limit) the an artist's anonymity?

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Image from Suicide Blonde

dominique blais

Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled I/92) 9'00 (1993)”, 2009
Powdered charcoal on paper, 31 x 42 1/2"

Dominique Blais's exhibition...hinges on oppositions and dualities. Eleven works play on the contrasts between sight and sound, resemblance and difference, intangibility and materiality, and question the process and limits of perception. The pieces near the entrance of the gallery are auditory or visual conundrums...

The most outstanding pieces here, however, are those that explore the interplay between the senses, generating interstitial sensory states and an almost palpable sense of the unreal. In the tenuous and insubstantial Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, 2009, a video of a performance by a percussionist is projected onto a wall in broad daylight, while two speakers muffle the sounds instead of amplifying them. Viewers must reconstruct the performance by associating the barely perceptible sounds with the ghostlike flickers on the wall. The complementarity of sight and sound is also addressed in the charcoal drawing Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled 1/92)” 9'00 (1993), 2009, which is Blais’s visual equivalent to the nine-minute-long musical composition of the same name. Here, charcoal dust deposited by Blais on the loudspeakers was projected onto paper throughout the duration of the piece by the sound vibrations. The faint, blurred traces on the drawing materialize the passage of time. The tenuous materiality of sound is even more apparent in Distorsions Spectrales, 2008, in which a Plexiglas disc coated with ferrofluid turns silently on a turntable outfitted with magnets. Peaks and undulations form on the disc’s surface when it passes over the magnets, creating a tangible and ever-changing visual image of sound.

Rahma Khazam
Artforum.com

erika iris simmons aka iri5

Bob Dylan

Jimi Hendrix

Jim Morrison

iRI5 creates portraits of music legends made from recycled cassette tape. As she states "The idea comes from a philosopher's (Ryle) description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging."

ron mueck

The following video was filmed during Ron Mueck's residency at The National Gallery, London. The exhibition Ron Mueck is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, November 3, 2006 - February 4, 2007. Video courtesy of The National Gallery, London.

simon schubert

The main installation of “In Apnoesie,” Simon Schubert's first solo exhibition in Berlin, collects crisp, clean black-and-white sculptures that recall horror-film tropes. At first glance, its cool presentation suggests that our nightmares have become domesticated, maybe even sanitized. But somehow, they still do not feel safe. The distance that Schubert achieves by removing any hint of gore and by addressing his darkly surreal source material with a levelheaded aesthetic slowly accentuates the creepiness of his work, even for viewers jaded by graphic violence.

...The show’s most impressive images are almost invisible at first. Lining the walls and ceiling are stark white panels of paper, which Schubert has folded and layered over other white sheets to evoke subtle sculptural images of classic wall moldings, long corridors, staircases, and halls with mirrors, like a stately, but probably haunted, house.

Ana Finel Honigman
Artforum.com