Tag Archives: Pattern and Decoration

A Figure Flattens Japanese Artworld with Robust Tradition

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Megan M. Garwood, Assistant Contributing Editor

CATM CHELSEA and Fund Art Now
SYNAPSE by Yasuto Sasada (Japanese artist)
November 3rd until December 4th, 2011
500 10th Avenue

Installation, photograph courtesy of CATM

Restrain from squashing the next cockroach you see: he may be your last. Could you imagine New York City citizens championing for our blackbeetle buddies? Artist Yasuto Sasada rallies people in Japan to help those who have been hurt by the series of natural disasters that have profound effects on the island—including the Ookuwagata beetle. Sasada not only portrays pests on the verge of extinction, but he more-accurately documents the current in Japan through tradition. Culturally, his artworks reflects rebuilding of Japan: each work is a whole comprised of individual parts echoing Japanese people’s engineering aptitude and embrace of Japan’s “whole.”

Continue reading →

Email This Post Email This Post
Posted in Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Art of Seduction & The Skeleton in the Closet

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Kerrie Welsh

A paperwork by Golnar Adili.

Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not.

~ Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 1997

The 1960’s brought the death of the author and the death of painting, two untimely deaths that occurred at a time when minorities and women were demanding recognition as producers of culture.  Years later, Continue reading →

Email This Post Email This Post
Posted in Essays, Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Interview with Irving Sandler

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Caitlin Haskell

Kim MacConnel: Red Corner, 1978, Painted and sewn cloth strips, 36 1/2" x 52 1/2"

The 1970s is a period that seems capable of sustaining multiple rediscoveries. The spirit of liveliness, broad experimentation, and eclecticism that characterizes the art of this moment resulted in the production of works of pleasing impurity, and the recovery of this messy decade is as alluring today for those who make art as for those who make art history. From a distance of more than thirty years, the escape routes artists found by moving past creative limitations continue to surprise. The transcendence of media restrictions, combined with the ability to make art affect new Continue reading →

Email This Post Email This Post
Posted in Conversations, Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment