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Cameron Bishop
uses the quintessential form of Barbie’s legs to explore
sex as economy and the exploitation of the female
identity. Her installation of waxed legs covers the
walls like a coral reef. Her porcelain ceramic eggs are
fragile and their hollow mass production speaks volumes
about reproduction and female forms. |
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Michael Braida’s kinetic sculptures re-invent biological
creatures using robotics and technology. His work reflects on
the frivolous industrial exploitation that wreaks havoc on the
natural environment. His kinetic sharks simulate a swimming
motion. They are mesmerizing and technologically poignant in
today’s society of genetic manipulation. |
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Cynthia Kuhn’s “Strange Fruit” is a comical and inventive
science-lab-run-amok installation of genetically engineered art.
Her delightful flora? fauna? permutations are both alien and
abstractly familiar, reminiscent of minute creatures that scurry
for safety in the tide pools along the coast. |
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Shelley Monahan’s phrenology installation appropriates
the language of scientific display in a visually incisive look
at the sometime laughable lengths that pseudo-sciences go to
create the illusion of empirical knowledge. Her tongue-in-cheek
and very phallic test tube forms penetrate the barrier between
science and art. Her sensual materials, fur, latex, skin, hair,
invite more than just a cursory scientific probing. |
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Alexandra Ostroff is relentless in pushing her materials
and process to their malleable limits. Working intensely on a
tightrope between the strength of steel and its hot fragility,
she burns, excoriates, and pushes the material to its breaking
point. The results are poetic juxtapositions with molten wax
marking the exact time that the artist placed the sculpture in
position. Her installations encapsulate a series of moments,
each of the seconds spent in the studio manipulating the
materials into their textural completion. |
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Chrystal Powell’s sexy and playful installations made
with lipstick and hair, fetishize and celebrate feminist and
feminine accoutrements. Her humorous and itchy installation of
red-light-district-fishnet-stockings spiked with hair is both
humorous and mildly repulsive. Her glamorous installation of
hosiery oozing lipstick is so luscious it is visual seduction in
the flesh. |
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Ed Reilly’s steel wire sculptural forms are the
manifestations of an intense physical struggle with the
materials. Ed uses the exact width of his arm span and height to
measure hundreds of yards of wire before beginning an almost
overwhelming battle to shape the wire into a graceful and
organic structure. His process is a personal and conceptual
performance in which the artist’s own body is the tool through
which the sculpture is formed. The lightness and grace of his
wall sculptures with their airy negative spaces and rich
shadows, are remarkable considering the gritty process that goes
into their construction. |
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Dan Rojales is an island boy at heart. His love of the
ocean and the depths of its wonders are evident in his amber
fossil-like sculptures that preserve aquatic creatures in resin.
Floating through the resin are Dan’s sensuous letters to and
from his girlfriend in Hawaii. The decaying and hooked fish
express mysterious and complex emotions that fall away into the
darkness of the sea. |
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Dax Santi uses humor as a pundit, creating satirical
commentaries on socially ridiculous situations. His “Deep Sea
Diver Doug” shows the idealized nuclear family man, father,
husband, in a little over his head… |
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Michael Steinmetz’s parasites infiltrate and transform
their surrounding environments into a jungle of biological
forms. Intestinal strands wrap around and affix themselves. The
surface textures are richly layered with translucent growths and
pods that may contain embryonic Darwinist evolutions. |
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Jennifer Surprise experiments with fiber technologies
that re-use societal waste, transforming banana peels into silk
and coconuts and kiwis into beautiful fabrics. Like
Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold, or those using
recycled soda bottles to make polar fleece outer wear,
Jennifer’s experiments have the potential to change the fiber
industry. |
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David Swanson creates elegant clay installations that
explore archetypal textures and forms reflecting a natural cycle
of growth and decay. His work resonates with an ancient and
powerful presence that is both resilient and fragile, reflecting
on our own cycles of life, death and the sensitive ability to
recognize the beauty of it all. |
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Sydney Brown Tarman’s work is a complex look at the fine
lines between empathy and co-dependency using domestic materials
that evoke the emotional minefields of relationships. Crushed
eggs, pills, blood, baby food, and placenta are embedded into
her hearts, the way an infant absorbs the chemically stimulated
emotions from her mother while still in the womb. |
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