©2009-2010 Cristina Córdova

I began this post a year ago and never published it because I continue to feel that there is still some yet unexpressed aspect of Córdova’s work that I had not adequately described. Her ceramic images evoke in me the Phaedrus, in which Plato described the fall of the soul. They also evoke the River Styx, which for the Greeks formed the barrier between Earth and the Underworld. Her forms arise from that same psycho-emotional space from which our mythologies emanate. A space where only metaphors have meaning and geometric forms arouse our proto-memories to something distant and yet familiar.

©2009-2010 Cristina Córdova

Others have described her work as “Primitive Latin American” and perhaps it is.  However, it is my opinion that her work is not specifically Latin; in my estimation its true power, much like all of the Great Myths, is in it’s universality. Her figures appear much as we may at times perceive ourselves; disconnected, disheartened and distracted by the weight of all that binds our souls.

©2009-2010 Cristina Córdova

©2009-2010 Cristina Córdova

Córdova was a dancer for 15 years and has expressed the impact of dance on her work. She effectively brings a sense of physicality to the presentation of  her art, utilizing geometry, motion and body language to enable a kind of sign language of the soul that speaks without words.

Cristina Córdovais a studio artist living in Penland,NC. Originally from Puerto Rico, she received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez and went to earn her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. In 2005 she concluded a three year residency at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She was the recipient of an American Craft Council Emerging Artist Grant as well as a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award. She has taught workshops in Puerto Rico and the US.

More:
CristinaCordova.com

The ocean is mysterious in the truest sense. We only know its edges, not its center. We know its shallow bits fairly well, but its depths are still fairly unexplored. We have been to the moon more than we have been to the deepest parts of the ocean. I think we relate to the ocean because in some ways, we humans are similarly mysterious. I find the art of Jason deCaires Taylor to be capturing a hint of that mystery.

Taylor has gained international recognition for creating the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies. His work is not only beautiful and unique; it also champions a message of ecologic hope and recovery.

Jason deCaires Taylor at work (click to enlarge):

More:
UnderwaterSculpture.com
YouTube Preview of the new underwater sculptures in Cancun, Mexico
Interview with Miranda Krestovnikoff
Jason deCaires Taylor on Twitter
Jason deCaires Taylor on FaceBook

Matt Woodward’s artwork is reminiscent of a daydream or of recapturing only a part of a memory; you know it is there, and yet it is never quite within your grasp. You sense it, yet can not see it. I was touched by it from the first impression.  Woodward is a Chicago based artist whose work is inspired by the “memories of grandeur” implicit in the decay he experiences in the architecture and environment around him.

I had a chance to ask him about his work, the following are excerpts from that conversation:

“It is tough to get into all that (when asked what inspires his creativity)… but I think so much about making art is that brilliant digression. I think a lot of the work is simply about being in a city, about looking directly at the understated parts of a city and being right there with every little change in it. Like a gate or a cage; you are watching it and there it goes, changing on again, constructing and reconstructing. That faithful issue of conflict between there being a finite presence and an infinite absence.

I have been looking at Clyfford Still, Antonio Garcia Lopez and Louis Sullivan’s drawings. You start thinking about it so much and it goes away, look directly and its not there and your on to something else.

You look right at [my drawings] and they, too, are rather eluding, almost transparent, they are manipulated deliberately that way and I think that is because of the experience of space that [without] specific context for them there is prompted a separate context anew.

I have a fussy patience with looking at architecture, more so with the process of encountering it, confronting it. Its a metaphor for everything.”

© Sara Schneckloth

The work of Sara Schneckloth strives to embody moments of remembering. The emotions and memories from our past experiences leave their mark on more than our minds, they affect the function of our organs, our bodies, today.  This thought informs Schneckloth’s work as she seeks to channel her painful memories into emotive lines of charcoal on paper.

© Sara Schneckloth 2005

The following are excerpts from an interview with Leslie Hinton:

I like to have a sense of a loose structure in which I can invent and explore the themes that are most relevant, but it is rarely a pre-determined event. Drawing lends itself to this kind of immediacy, in terms of both materials and how they are handled, and there is always the sense for me that I’m witnessing a thought evolve as I work. The initial phases of the process are much more visceral/intuitive than pre-conceived and intellectualized, but there is a moment in which I do come at the work from a more analytic bent.

I believe memory informs so much of how we move, how we hold ourselves, how we inscribe a surface – by consciously channeling this ‘ritual remembering’ I am hoping to give past experience an imaged present.

It’s along these lines that I started thinking – if I occupy a certain memory, actively grieving, what happens to my body. When you remember times of embarrassment, your face flushes, if you remember excitement or danger or fear your body responds – with adrenaline or muscle tension or a stomach clench. I realized that as I was making these drawings, as I was immersed in the act of seeing and drawing, of remembering and drawing, my body was going through a whole set of reactions and making marks that came out of those physical places of memory. My stomach would hurt, my shoulders would tighten, I would clench my teeth.

Reliquaries are vessels for holding remnants, or relics, of the dead – they show up in many cultural and religious traditions – in Catholicism – saints have reliquaries that preserve remnants of clothing or possessions or even fragments of bones…

My reliquaries are done in mixed media – oil, charcoal and pastel on paper – many on toned brown paper. To make them, I occupied the mental space of grief, of loss, of anger and sadness, and tried to draw from the gut – starting with a gesture that carried some of the emotion related to the memory I was feeling – then I consciously built it into a form of a container – adding features that I pulled from the work I did with the inherited objects – adding handles, spouts, mouths, lids, turning them into vessels, literal containers…

I had been reading a lot about reliquary figures in West Africa – small carved statues that sat on top of reliquary drums that contained human skulls and bones – the figures functioned as intermediaries between the living and the dead, serving as a site for ceremonial offerings and talking to the deceased. I was attracted to this idea of the intermediary object – something that could translate between the states of life and death, inside and outside, and serve as a point of focus or meditation. In a way, that’s what I felt like I was doing with my drawings. They stood in between me and the memory of my family, and it felt like by doing them, I was coming to grips with that separation.

At the time of this article,

Sara Schneckloth is Assistant Professor – Drawing,

University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.

She has been teaching since 1996

Images are property of Sara Schneckloth

More:
Full interview with Leslie Hinton
SaraSchneckloth.com

Graphic designers Pierre & Damien of PleaseLetMeDesign.com recruited belgian racer Stef van Campenhoudt to create a font by tracking the movements of a car with custom software designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman of OpenFrameworks.cc and the results are quite entertaining to watch!

Try this yourself! Your neighbors will love it:

Download IQ Font (From Toyota)

It begins with a curious fact that most citizens have never noticed: the White House was constructed to sit at the base of a mile wide pentagram, bounded by a pentagon positioned at the center of a 100 sq mile diamond. Three points of the pentagram are traffic circles surrounding small parks, one point is the Historical Society and the Southernmost point is the White House itself.

Below I have assembled screen shots from Google Earth which show, from above, the layout of the streets of our Capital City.

Click for the White House Placemark in Google Earth: white-house.kmz
(requires Google Earth to open)

Before assuming nefarious intentions, it’s instructive to understand that the pentagram did not take on its modern satanic symbolism until the advent of horror films. Surprising to many moderns is the notion that the pentagram was also once understood by some to be a Christian symbol of Liberation and by ancients, a symbol of Intelligence and Liberty.

George Washington and Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French city planner hired to design the capital city, were both Freemasons.  Freemasonry has a rich history of preserving ancient symbology. So an inquiry into one of the crafts oft quoted texts may provide some illumination into the possible meaning behind our capital’s geometry.

The pentagram is explained in two ways in “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” (published in 1871):

In one instance it claims that the biblical Magi (or “three kings”) were astrologer-priests of the Zoroastrian religion and were following the path of the “Blazing Star” which was the planet Venus. The pentagram, or 5 pointed star is the symbol of the planet Venus because of the astronomical observation that Venus draws a pentagram path across the night sky every eight years. So, in this regard, the Magi followed Venus, along the the path of the “blazing star” which led them to the Christ child, in a manger in Bethlehem. Their path was one of spiritual liberation.

“Morals and Dogma” is an imposing and controversial tome which takes its reader (presumably a new initiate) on long, deep treks through history, connecting the dots of the divergent religious traditions in an effort to show them all to be varied appearances of a similar path. Another passage explains that in the ancient Hermetic tradition of the “Minerva Mundi”, the pentagram is the symbol which enables Mankind to attain independence, and through Intelligence, to separate Liberty from necessity.

Click to enlarge: Path of Venus or page images from “Morals and Dogma”:

As you may have noticed in the Washington DC  images above, the star is incomplete. It lacks one leg. Perhaps this was intended as well:

Benjamin Banneker was the self-educated, son of an African slave. He was an African American astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac author and farmer and was appointed to attend Pierre Charles L’Enfant in surveying the capital. Banneker had become known for his intelligence when at 21 he constructed the first clock ever built on American soil.  What’s more, he accomplished this with no tools other than a his knife and without any formal knowledge of clock making.

When L’Enfant was dismissed from the Capital project for budgetary reasons, he returned to France, taking all of his city plans with him. Banneker then recreated the entire plan for the Capital City from memory and was hailed as the “Man who saved Washington”.

Banneker had also been friends with Thomas Jefferson. He had become deeply disturbed by Jefferson’s purchase of slaves. The following excerpt is from a letter written to Jefferson by Benjamin Banneker in 1791:

“…Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.”

Jefferson responded later the same year:

“Nobody wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

Less than a year later, Andrew Ellicott was appointed surveyor in order to complete L’Enfant work on the Capital City. Ellicott relied upon Benjamin Banneker to reconstruct our Capital City, block by block,  from the plans faithfully recorded in his amazing mind.  I can’t help but wonder if  perhaps it was Banneker who removed one leg from that “blazing star”, that ancient symbol of Liberty and Intelligence. Perhaps he felt that a land of illusive liberties was better betokened by a broken star.

More:
Watch the path of Venus on YouTube
Benjamin Banneker on About.com
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Firekites – AUTUMN STORY – chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

More:
Collection of Inspired Vimeo Videos on Mashable.com
Firekites on Myspace

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

If you liked this, check out Milky Way Galaxy Over Death Valley.

Joshua Allen Harris is a NY street artist who is just doing as any native folk artist does; using the materials of his environment to create something special. The native environment of NYC consists of discarded trash and underground air vents. The result: Lifelike trash monsters who come to life as the vents release air, and then fall again, melting like a wicked witch. What a lift that must be to the unsuspecting passerby!

If you liked this, you might like: Dirty Car Artist – Scott Wade

Part scientist, part mathematician, part programmer, part sculptor; Bathsheba Grossman creates once impossible works of geometric beauty.

To hear Bathsheba describe her work, one might suspect that she spent her personal hours in the math or comp-sci labs while attending art school. She is a delightful techno-geek whose discourse and description are technically precise and scientific in nature.  Her creations are inspired by mathematics and brought forth into the world in their complete forms.  No, not from the brow of Zeus, but rather through the combination of two modern technologies, namely three dimensional computer modeling and three dimensional metal printing.

Though she is now a dedicated full time artist, her past employment has included work as a programmer, college professor, tech writer, typist, and web designer.

Her design concepts often come from her work with clay models, though she sometimes begins with known mathematical shapes.  Still other times, she conceives of an idea in her head and reproduces her vision directly via coded computer scripts which she imports into her 3D modeling software.

Bathsheba compared her use of 3D metal printing to the use of 3D plastic printing which has been in common industrial use for several years: “using some of the same processes [as 3D plastic printing] but with a little metal sintering added on at the end it is possible to do similar operations with metal powder.  Thereby resulting in fully dense metal objects which have the strength, durability and archival nature of steel. But, can also take forms which are impossible to cast, fabricate or really make by any other means at all. So, here I am, working with objects that are impossible to make. If you show these to people who work in metal, they simply fall on the floor, because there is no way to make these things, it’s impossible! …that’s what I consider to be the most interesting new technology in metal, practically since casting was invented.”

Incidentally, I had the opportunity to test this statement. I showed this series of photographs to a local metal machinist. Bathsheba was right, his jaw dropped as he exclaimed the impossibility of creating these shapes in one continuous piece.

“They’re visions of order in the universe; my peaceful places.  I feel calm and hopeful in making them.” says Grossman.

And I have the same experience in viewing them.

Bathsheba also works with glass utilizing sub-surface laser damage to produce 3-dimensional images in glass.

If you find this story interesting, you might also like: Theo Jansen, Kinetic Sculptor

More:
Bathsheba Grossman’s website
MakeMagazine
Ex One 3D Printing