Artist Talk: Diana Al-Hadid


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 costumes her mother made for her out of the paper plates. She was interested in the surprising strength and membrane-like quality they had as a material.

In Grad school, she started to create works that literally sprang from the idea of architectural blue prints. She described starting with a sort of blue print- a pattern of paint created by dancing in one case, the labyrinth design from the floor of a gothic cathedral in another- and "extruding" the form of her sculpture out from that. A lot of her work deals with this idea of starting from something flat and inventing the three dimensional form, whether this is architecture, pattern, or plans from "The Book of Knowledge and Ingenious Mechanical Devices". One of my favorites she discussed, called "Reverse Collider" combined the form of Bruegel's Tower of Babel with that of the Large Hadron Collider (The machine that discovered "the God particle"; she mused over how both were, in a sense, trying to find God.

She discussed how at one point in her work,  the connection between art and magic started to interest her when she had conversations with her magician friend. It was the idea of sleight of hand- performing tricks or illusions in her art to pull off something that looks impossible. This came out in the way her works relate to the ground and go against gravity, but first showed up when she started to experiment with the figure in her work and ended up creating what looked like a 3-dimensional form but was actually forced onto a diagonal plane.

Something I found really interesting that she alluded to throughout her talk was her interest in working with the unique traits of the space she presents her art in. In one piece, a gallery light hitting a certain area kept bothering her, so she decided to put a detached limb there. In another gallery space, the walls didn't touch the ceiling, so she envisioned sludge pouring from the space between. She also started incorporating pedestals into her art, bringing them beyond their  simple purpose of display and making them part of the art. I can't help but think of the artist Allan McCollum whose work explored the ideas of traditional presentation of artwork and made the presentation the art. In Al-Hadid's case, she's merging the means of presentation with her art.

Another thing I really appreciated was her overall attention to the process of creating. She spoke of how she tends to begin, often working from a sort of blueprint and sometimes working with specific rules she set for herself. In talking about her work, her flexibility despite these initial plans was clear. She mentioned how her works sometimes turn out far different than she could have predicted, and offered the advice that it's fine to let go of things and cover them up. It's very good and practical advice for all the control-freaks out there, and also suggests that quality of the magic of the art-making process. 

Whether you believe in artistic magic or not, there is something undeniable about the wonder of Diana Al-Hadid's work. I only hope some day I get to see them in person! In the mean time, a lot of her work is up on her website: http://www.dianaalhadid.com/work/c/sculptures




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ryan M Reynolds

Image
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...
Read more

Neighbors In Sacramento and Time: Two Contemporary Artists on Display at the Tim Collom and B. Sakata Garo

Image
In downtown Sacramento, two wonderful shows of contemporary artists are being held in nearby galleries of the B. Sakata Garo and the Tim Collum galleries. While both artists work in differing media, style and purpose, they both offer great examples of the character of contemporary art. The first show I visited was titled Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Meditations on the Heart Sutra, featuring the work of William Ishmael at the Tim Collom gallery. Ishmael, an artist local to California, creates work with a range of materials from paint to plexiglass that explores and attempts to understand Buddhist philosophies. This show, as suggested by the title, explores a concept he found in the Heart Sutra- that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The work tended to have an earthy, weathered appearance, with rough texture and earth-tones, and this went well with the rustic bricks of the gallery. There were, however, smoother, cleaner looking works, which were generally allow...
Read more

Artist Talk: Christine Sun Kim

Image
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...
Read more