Claire's Contemporary

This past Thursday I attended an artist talk at the Manetti Shrem in Davis by   sculpture artist Diana Al-Hadid. Al-Hadid got her BFA in Sculpture and BA in Art History at Kent State University and her MFA in Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University. The art she makes tends to be highly detailed large scale installations that resemble complex architecture and landscape that seem to defy gravity in their use of negative space. Her presentation chronicled her work from the beginning of her education to her current projects and offered insight into her inspirations and thought processes behind her art. One of her earliest influences was visiting a cave in Lebanon. The experience of being in an enclosed space made by nature as opposed to people stayed with her. The drippy, earthy aesthetic of cave walls and the idea of space shows up a lot in a lot her work. One of her first installations as an undergrad was a cave of paper plates that also took influence from the Halloween ...

From February 12-16, the R.W. Witt Gallery at Sacramento state hosted In The Pink, a show of sculptural works from my fellow Sacramento State student, Tiffany Boddeker. Boddeker creates sculptures that are both delightful and disturbing. The works playfully combine soft materials like string and pantyhose with rougher materials like planks of wood and metal strips or wire. The result is often strange, presenting uncomfortable forms, with bulging tumor-like shapes, fleshy colors and strange textures that sometimes resemble insects or bodily growths. The first thing I saw walking into the show was the little bug-like creatures that scattered to my left. Resembling little globs of mud that sprouted spindly wire legs, they had an animated feeling to them In their poses; one was even caught in the act of what appeared to be climbing the wall. They were creepy, like an infestation of spiders, yet strangely adorable. Continuing into the gallery, I was faced with...

Last Saturday, February 10th, I had the chance to get out to the B. Sakata Garo gallery in downtown Sacramento. There I was introduced to a collection of recent paintings and drawings by artist Ryan M. Reynolds. The majority of his works could be divided into three categories- freeways, yards, and scenes of people in nature. In the freeway scenes, cars, signs and buildings travel into the canvas.  The cars are painted with rough, patchy strokes, alternating in direction and size. The effect is something like a vibration, a sense that these cars, though not  tightly rendered to capture the curvature and smooth surface one might think of a car having, have a visual truth to them. The road is painted with the same feeling. They both rumble, like a freeway would. The world around the cars and the road is painted far more simply in broad strokes of color. The signs are indistinct, the buildings even more so. Again, it captures the very real but not literal quality of how...

January 22 through February 9th, The Else Gallery held the show All Exaltations: Meditations in Sculpture, featuring the works of Sacramento State's sculpture professor, Andrew Connelly. More than a simple display of sculptural work, this show was an interactive experience. It was dark inside the room, but full of illumination. Shadows cast by the elevated bells move up and down the walls along with the colorful glowing symbols that shine atop them. It felt like stepping into an artist's silhouette drawing of a city at night. Each bell sits atop a metal frame work, shaped to evoke the image of significant buildings that create the cityscapes of the United States. Weaving around the buildings of the little city presents you with an invitation to interact- a simple wood and cloth mallet hangs from each tower, each a little moment of tenderness in an exhibit of mostly heavy metals and bright lights. Still uncertain, I asked if I was supposed to hit the bell. It w...

Christine Sun Kim Pictured: Christine Sun Kim on left, myself on the right. Christine Sun Kim is an artist who works in drawings, installation and conceptual pieces that often use sound or ideas of sound from her perspective as a deaf person, as well as ideas related to ASL and deaf culture. This past Thursday, I  attended her talk at the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California. Her work, as she introduced it, deals with sound, communication, and space in society. A lot of the way she approaches sound in her work deals with how it can be understood without the ears- she listed things like time, things and experiences as being a type of sound. I was perplexed at first, but as she shared her works, her ideas became clear. One of the pieces she described involved shipping a sound recorder across a large distance- resulting in 24 hours of sound as the package was shipped. She played  a sound clip and signed along with it. The idea seemed to me that the sound was...