Dawn Tan

Hi! I'm Dawn. I live in Melbourne. I spend a lot of my time eating and cooking. I love food so much, it makes me make art out of it.

I create drawings and soft sculptures out of fabrics, choosing packaging I'm drawn to. But ultimately, the reason for creating food related art, comes from my intrigue with how packaged food is taking over natural, organic food. The idea of consumption becoming obsessive, how traditional made-from-scratch meals are now replaced often by instant colourful packaged food, serves as a basis for much of the work I create

Rachel Denny

Rachel Denny's work is an exploration of the seductive beauty of our natural world and the imprint that human intervention has made on its flora and fauna. Denny is attracted by the exuberance of nature in urban and unexpected places. “A deer in an urban backyard, a family of Peregrine falcons at my neighborhood park, a coyote skirting a parking lot,” she says, “These all become a moment of wonder as they shake us out of our daily routines." Denny works in a variety of materials—wood, plaster, resin, wool, found objects—to name a few. She is interested in the potential of her materials and how they can be manipulated in unexpected ways. “I am inspired by the elegant forms found in the natural world and the time honored action of trying to depict these forms in a relevant and interesting way that is an homage to this beauty and wonder." Denny is best known for her “Domestic Trophies” work—deer heads covered in cozy cashmere cable knit woolens and the like. She has shown in galleries nationwide for over 10 years, and her work will be shown at The Ohio Museum of Craft and the Winston-Wachter gallery in Seattle in the coming year..

Amy Boone McCreesh

http://amyboonemccreesh.com/


Amy Boone-McCreesh currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD

Taking inspiration from celebratory and funerary displays in various cultures, Amy aims to explore decoration and human relationships.

Amanda Browder

http://www.amandabrowder.com/amandabrowder/amandabrowder.com/Home/Home.html 

Brooklyn, New York, USA

 
Artist Statement

I  describe my work as "a state of betweenness - 'twixt soft sculpture /'tween orchestrated 

public object installation with a studio affinity for abstraction and minimalism". I am in love 

with the transformative nature of materials, and how the combination of the familiar creates 

abstract relationships about place. This relational objectivity generates an open-ended 
 
narrative, ambiguous situations defined by the choice of materials and work ethic. Central to 

the psychedelic experience, I am drawn to reinventing Pop-Art colors by exploring shifts in 

scale and sculptural perceptions.

Joana Vasconcelos

 

http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/ 

Born in Paris in 1971.  Lives and works in Lisbon.  

Artist Statement

The site-specific interventions in the public art domain assume special relevance in the artist's work.  Some of Joana Vasconcelos' most important public art interventions are: La Theiere, Le Royal Monceau, Paris (2010); Sr.Vinho, Mercado Municipal de Torres Vedras, Torres Vedras (2010); Jardim Bordallo Pinheiro, Jadim do Museu da Cidade, Lisbon (2008); Vitrine, Rua do Alecrim, no. 12, Lisbon (2008); Varina, Ponte D. Luis I, Porto (2008); The Jewel of the Tagus, Tower of Belem, Lisbon (2008); Donzela, Castelo de Santa Maria da Feira, Santa Maria da Feira (2007); Cactus, Forum Almada, Almada (2002).

The nature of Joana Vasconcelos' creative process is based on the appropriation, decontectualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities.  Sculptures and installations, which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, as well as the recourse to performances and video or photographic records, all combine in the materialization of concepts which challenge the pre-arranged routines of the quotidian.  Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the Ready-Made and the grammars of Nouveau Realisme and Pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity.  From this process there derives a speech which is attentive to comtemporary idiosyncrasies, where the usual dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristics of contemporaneity.

Guerra de la Paz

http://www.guerradelapaz.com/

Guerra de la Paz is the composite name that represents the creative team efforts of Cuban born artists, Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz- who live and work in Miami, Florida - and have been consistantly producing collaboratively since 1996. 

Artist Statement

Our work is based on a combination of traditional disciplines and experimentation with dimension and the use of unconventional materials.  It is inspired by an essential familiarity with the ready made and the archeological qualities that found objects possess.  Encapsulating an energy that reveals underlying meanings and depicts the significance of mass produced refuse on our society.

Through a common aesthetic, we create work with a universal message.  Using recycled objects as our medium and the guidance of the unrelenting amounts of information that fuels todays mass consciousness and it's subversive parallels.  Allowing us ways to reinvent historic themes and classic icons while still commenting on contemporary culture.

Our close proximity to the Pepe businesses that once thrived in Little Haiti has been a major source of inspiration.  Gaining access to an overubundance of discarded clothing - relics that once helped define an individual's personality and communally speak of environmental issues, mass consumption and disposability - opened the doors for us to working with garments as a material.  We often see ourselves as vehicles guided by their essence and silent histories.

Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor

http://www.elisabethhigginsoconnor.com/index.html

Sandra Norrbin

http://artnews.org/sandranorrbin/?s=2

Artist statement

I work with sculptural installation that emerges in relation to the architecture of a place. I want to challenge physical space. The way that material and surroundings meet is important. It’s about a dynamic collaboration between the room, the material and myself.

A material’s physical expression and its history are the starting point for the installations. I often use industrial materials that have an inherent capacity that we usually are oblivious to. In a warehouse for construction materials we see only a product’s function. I want to see the materials from another point of view—in this way we can see that the materials have their own expression.

In the materials’ own history there manifests the fact that everything is part of an enormous cycle. Nothing disappears, it just takes a different form: the isolation mats, for example, in the installation "Triumph and Disaster" that consist of used clothes and textile industry surplus. Clothes have followed people’s lives literally very closely—with all that this implies. All of history adds further layers to the work, allows it to be seen in a continuing context.

I do not tie myself to a fixed plan—place and material guide me. That is why the process is clearly visible in the finished piece. I want to achieve an immediate and vital expression. The work can appear to be a moment frozen in time in a process that may at any instant continue.

I work with contrasts: the open-and-closed, building-up-and-knocking-down, place-no-place. The installations are a kind of landscape filled with elements that seek coherence.

Most often a catastrophe is not final but rather a definitive turning point. The place where one falls becomes fertile ground, upon which one can build something new and by which one can go forward. The balance between the destructive and the constructive is just as important in my working process as in life as a whole.