Frozen juice concentrated containers are a convenient staple for many households, but often pose a…
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Articles from August 2024
Recycling Mystery: Brick
The Three Little Pigs will be the first to tell you that brick is a…
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A New Book Branches Out Across 3,500 Years to Explore Our Enchantment with Trees
Spanning 3,500 years of art, science, culture, and history, Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World surveys the awe-inspiring beauty and romance of trees.
Forthcoming from Phaidon, the volume includes more than 300 illustrations ranging from ancient wall paintings and botanical illustrations to captivating photography and multimedia work by today’s leading artists.
Tree takes an expansive approach to the topic, introducing scientific and historical inquiry alongside artistic expression and documentation of the planet’s wide variety of species. From a meticulous diorama of an overgrown library by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber and patinated metalwork by Shota Suzuki to ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and stunning dragon blood trees photographed by Beth Moon, the book celebrates the myriad ways we are interconnected with trees.
Grab your copy in the Colossal Shop.
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Recycling Mystery: Metal Credit Cards
Metal credit cards have become popular due to their durability, premium feel, and design. While…
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Mevlana Lipp’s Sculptural Paintings on Velvet Glimpse Otherworldly Alternate Realities
“Velvet paintings” may evoke visions of midcentury kitsch, thanks to artists like Edgar Leetig (1904-1953) and a demand for mass-produced decor. But that phenomenon is only a fraction of the history of painting on velvet, a tradition that is believed to have emerged in Kashmir, where the fabric was first produced. The silky material’s fine pile absorbs light, providing a unique substrate for paintings on which pigments appear to float on a contrasting, deep black background.
Mevlana Lipp redefines the genre by meticulously rendering otherworldly botanicals that writhe and spread amid ornamental elements. Acrylic paint, sand, and ink are applied to meticulously cut wooden panels, which are then laid over the top of velvet. Fantastical and glowing as if viewed under a black light or synthesized, the blooms and vines suggest an alternate reality in which plants take on suspiciously human behaviors or features, like hands or eyes.
“My work always has to do with longing for this other place, where things are still connected on a deeper level, where thoughts don’t occur and instincts take over,” Lipp tells Colossal. Interested in the relationship between order and chaos, he often uses symmetry or repetition as a foil to the organic curves of his subjects. In his most recent work, the artist has been experimenting with the theme of a grid or gate.
When Lipp visited Venice earlier this year to see the inaugural exhibition of Capsule Shanghai new location, where he will be presenting a solo show next month, he was fascinated by the burglarproof metal bars affixed to residential windows. “They oftentimes are highly artistic, sometimes floral or more architectural in shape,” he says. “I like the idea that they are like a barrier, separating the inside and outside—these two worlds—and making a transition between these two difficult.”
Conceptually, the grid transforms into what Lipp describes as “a net of responsibilities and social contracts” we all agree to, affording glimpses of what lies beyond yet physically barring entry. In his work, the barriers function as metaphysical gateways between our known realm, our primordial origins, and our ability to comprehend our own evolution. “The place on the other side might be too wild for homo sapiens, but it is still tempting to take a look between the bars from time to time, peaking through a window into our distant, feral past.”
Lipp will also have work soon in the group exhibition TICK TACK at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany, which opens on August 24. Find more on the artist’s website, and follow Instagram for updates.
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Embraced by Wildflowers, Black Figures Emerge Defiantly Resilient in Yashua Klos’s Collaged Portraits
Early in the morning of July 23, 1967, police raided an after-hours, unlicensed bar known colloquially as a “blind pig”—a speakeasy—on the Near West Side of Detroit. Law enforcement expected only a few customers inside, but to their surprise, more than 80 people were in attendance for a party celebrating GIs returning from the Vietnam War. The police decided to arrest everyone, and by the time they were through, a sizable and angry crowd had gathered outside to witness the raid.
A doorman named William Walter Scott III, whose father ran the blind pig, later detailed in a memoir that by throwing a bottle at a police officer, he incited what came next: the most violent riot in the country since 1863. The clash emerged as the bloodiest of a series of more than 150 race riots that erupted in cities around the nation during the long, hot summer of 1967. Spurred by racial segregation, recent police reforms and policing inequity, an economic crisis, inadequate housing projects, a practice known as redlining—financial services discriminatorily withheld from neighborhoods with significant populations of racial and ethnic minorities—and many other factors, tensions finally erupted.
Yashua Klos’s family in Detroit was profoundly impacted by the strain and chaos of the riots. Raised in Chicago and now based in the Bronx, the artist (previously) is researching the history of riots for Black justice in the U.S., from Newark to Los Angeles. “In New York, during the uprisings around George Floyd’s murder, I saw a lot of media blaming riot violence on the same vulnerable populations being killed by law enforcement,” he tells Colossal. “I’m also thinking about how Black populations rebuild and carry on afterward—how the wildflowers keep sprawling after the smoke dies down.”
Wildflowers play a crucial role in his mixed-media pieces, which combine woodblock prints, paper, paint, colored pencil, and wood into multifaceted portraits. He incorporates blooms native to Michigan to illustrate the “defiant resilience” of his family. “In the work, I’m thinking about the ways my aunts make space for our family affairs,” he says. “The women in my family organize and cook for parties, funerals, and reunions, all while raising children and working jobs. The hands I depict are their hands—resisting work and taking a moment with the wildflowers for self-care.”
Klos is interested in broader questions around Black Americans’ relationship with self-care within the context of the country’s economy, interrogating the “assumption that the Black body is designed for labor,” he says. “I also see pressures on Black women to prioritize space-making for family over their own health.” He surrounds the figures’ faces with decorative and geometric details as if growing beyond limitations or constraints. Vines and flowers wind around hands and cheeks, tender yet insistent reminders of resourcefulness and determination. “Wildflowers are about a kind of ‘space-taking’ or sprawling,” Klos says. “They grow and bloom without permission.”
Klos currently has work in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which continues through September 22, and Double ID at The Wright in Detroit, which remains on view through October 20. The artist is also working toward his first solo exhibition with Vielmetter Los Angeles, slated for spring 2025. Find more on his website, and follow Instagram for updates.
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Relics of Today’s World Feed an Uncanny Future in Max Hooper Schneider’s ‘Carnival of Gestation’
Within a fictional world where organisms adapt to strange circumstances and highly processed foods form the foundation for new life, Max Hooper Schneider’s uncanny sculptures (previously) address ever-evolving ecosystems. He explores relationships between comfort and uneasiness, growth and decay, the natural and synthetic, and toxicity and nourishment through a concept he calls the “Trans-Habitat.” Within this world, he illuminates an eerie, alternative future where living beings and human-made objects have melded through a continuous cycle of destruction, transformation, and re-creation.
Hooper Schneider’s first institutional solo show in China, Carnival of Gestation, opened last month at UCCA Dune in Beidaihe. Throughout the museum’s distinctively curving, organic architecture, the artist has suspended pill-like vitrines filled with plant specimens, encased crystallized microscopes inside glass domes, and installed luminous dioramas that cast plants in artificial light and vivid colors.
The exhibition features nearly 30 sculptures made during the past decade, including six new large-scale pieces commissioned by UCCA. Challenging an anthropocentric perspective of both the world and the act of making art, the artist merges seemingly conflicting species, objects, and ways of being in the world in an exhibition that is part wunderkammer and part parallel universe.
Hooper Schneider invites visitors into environments and ecosystems devoid of people yet inextricable from human influence. In “Like Father Like Son,” for example, microscopes encrusted in minerals are housed like artifacts of a bygone era, and in “Master’s Temple,” hanging vessels containing plants suggest a way of life for organisms may no longer be able to survive otherwise.
Carnival of Gestation continues through October 13. Explore more on the artist’s Instagram.
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How to Dispose of EpiPens and Single-Use Injectable Medication Devices
In the ongoing battle to reduce waste and promote sustainability, single-use injectable medication devices, such…
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What Happens to E-waste When It Gets Recycled?
Worldwide, electronic waste makes up more than 5% of all municipal solid waste. Commonly called…
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Ceramic Houseplants by Ariana Heinzman Revel in the Absurdity of Domestication
Over the centuries, humanity’s relationship with wilderness has becoming increasingly fraught, as we continue to diminish natural green spaces in favor of roads, buildings, and manicured lawns. For Vashon Island-based artist Ariana Heinzman, our connection—or disconnection—to nature plays a central role in her vibrant ceramics practice.
For her current solo exhibition, Habitat for a Fake Plant at J. Rinehart Gallery, Heinzman (previously) conceived of a collection of quirky stoneware houseplants that sit on stools, irregularly shaped large-scale paintings, and decapitated-looking cuttings installed on the wall. These pieces interrogate the absurdity of bringing nature into human-made environments, examining how we have trained plants to acclimate to interior life.
“In this world, plant-like sculptures are wrapped in patterns reminiscent of tablecloths and wallpaper,” the artist says in a statement for the show, emphasizing their domestic role. The specimens sprout leaves that are flattened to adhere better to flat surfaces, and the foliage assumes anthropomorphic poses, “lounging in this new environment where their purpose is decoration.”
If you’re in Seattle, you can stop by Habitat for a Fake Plant through August 28. Explore more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Ceramic Houseplants by Ariana Heinzman Revel in the Absurdity of Domestication appeared first on Colossal.