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If I were to mention two important moments in my formation as an artist, those would be the time I spent in Bilbao on a stipend studying video and performance, and the Jaan Toomik exhibition in Bucharest I saw shortly after coming back to Romania. They were both significant in the sense that they underlined my breakup with what I had been studying in sculpture at the university. They weren’t shocking or strongly revealing but they encouraged me to continue making art in a direction that was realizing more and more for me at the time. I haven’t and still do not consider myself a performance artist. However, I did start off by making short videos, or taking photographs, documenting short performances.

When Less Replaces Mess

If ever there was a middle-of-the-road exhibition, (read Sandra Bullock minus the Jesse James scandal), this Whitney Biennial is it. In an effort to pull off an “Obama Change” and ostensibly please everybody, traditional, nattering, nabob art critics included, guest curator, Francesco Bonami, and Whitney senior curatorial assistant, Gary Carrion-Murayari, with a few standout exceptions, turned what is usually a messy and colorful cacophony of coloratura voices all fighting to be heard, into a relatively tame, and well-ordered blue-haired lady, one that lacks color, speaks mostly in low hushed tones, and prefers dressed-down matinees rather than paparazzo-fueled red carpet openings.

Re-inventing Renaissance

Putting Renaissance sculptures at the forefront of her paintings, Stefania Mainardi’s work turns these ancient characters into the paintings’ primary subject matter, making them the focal points in each piece. Painted in such an attentive, detailed way these painted statues possess a vitality that makes them appear closer to life. Finding those warm tones in the ordinarily cold marble sometimes gives the viewer a way to find a slight flush in that silent stone, and maybe even imagine a pulse underneath that still surface. The color palette Mainardi uses for these aged statues is quite unique. Though describing something existing as a single color, Mainardi finds an array of tones and colors that generate an entire spectrum of shades.

Flesh and Forest

I am a visual artist who primarily works with photography, although I have tiptoed in video and performance art as well. I have been engaged in public service through the work that I have done with at-risk youth through the juvenile correctional system at the California Youth Authority, among others. I like the idea of tip-toeing in my discipline; it suggests that I am willing to explore different themes, approaches, and ideas. Since 1985 I have been exhibiting my photographic artwork locally, nationally, and now, internationally. My journey as an artist is both personal and political. I highlight the sociological by showing a world composed of individuals (including myself) who are varied, assertive, and intimate. I have concentrated on identity, culture, and outsider status.

Heroes

My work mainly comes from my own personal experience. When people look at my work, I hope they will first be moved, and then they are forced to think. If my work compels them to do that, I consider it a success. I came back to China in 2008, and this is the first group of people who interested me. They are teenage migrants who work in typical urban professions. They live in dormitories provided by their employers. With very low wages, life is tough. Yet they are open and filled with dreams of their own. I wanted to depict this group, but a simple documentary isn’t enough for me, so I looked for solutions between documentary and surrealism. The entire series took over half a year to complete.

Surfacing Subconscious

I feel that my art is an uninhibited territory for me. It’s kind of like pulling the dinner table cloth from under expensive porcelain, and watching a big colorful mess taking place, playing with the velocity of time and watching the different stages of a creative disarray. While on a still frame, all stages look almost neat and coherent, it’s that brute result by innocently curious means and forces, that drives me to explore different visual directions. Drawing, to me, maintains that type of primal expression, the direct contact and modulation of the duct of the line that it allows me to have, and at the same time it’s always new, always now, and always extremely versatile. Drawing is always there, even if it’s somewhere underneath, or never even materialized.

Tips & Picks - Artist Reviews

Pedro Yaba

Colorful, lively works that captivate the viewer in an energetic dance of movement and rhythm, these are Pedro Yaba’s paintings, dynamic and enthralling, he pulls the viewer into his imaginative world.

Philip Loersch

Philip Loersch's intricate drawings and cutouts create a unique vocabulary of lines and shapes used to create complex, filigree structures that float freely in space.

Christine Gray

In my work I look at the cultural mythologies that misrepresent nature and our relationship to it.

Phyllis Galembo

Since the mid-1980s, Phyllis Galembo has produced an impressive body of photographs documenting the physical character, costumery and rituals of African religious practices ...

Mia Pearlman

I make site-specific cut paper installations, ephemeral drawings in both two and three dimensions that blur the line between actual, illusionistic and imagined space.

Derick Melander

I create large geometric configurations from carefully folded and stacked second-hand clothing.

Gary Schneider

Gary Schneider's work allows us to explore so many themes resonating in photography today.

Aleksandra Rdest

Aleksandra Rdest uses a language drawn from weather patterns; inspired by sound waves, particles and cells on a microscopic level.

Nick Cave

African ceremonial costumes are a self-evident starting point. So is the wild playfulness and showy elaboration of Mardi Gras and carnival, not to mention everything from glittery Haitian flags to chunky Southeast Asian embroidery.

Justin Lee Williams

Justin Lee Williams is currently one of the most sought-after young artists in Australia – his highly detailed and skewed visions can often on the surface portray a darker reflection...

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Summer 2010 Editorial Preview