If the Addams' family's Thing multiplied and mutated, it would resemble something like Alessandro Boezio's sculptures. The artist works in clay and fiber glass to create creepy-crawly anatomical forms that remix the human body. Boezio is particularly fascinated with hands and feet, often mingling digits and limbs in unholy ways. Though there's nothing particularly explicit about his work, seeing severed hands standing up by themselves without a body attached is enough to make our skin crawl.
If the Addams’ family’s Thing multiplied and mutated, it would resemble something like Alessandro Boezio’s sculptures. The artist works in clay and fiber glass to create creepy-crawly anatomical forms that remix the human body. Boezio is particularly fascinated with hands and feet, often mingling digits and limbs in unholy ways. Though there’s nothing particularly explicit about his work, seeing severed hands standing up by themselves without a body attached is enough to make our skin crawl.
London based sculptor Rachel Kneebone is well known for her complex porcelain pieces that contain writhing groupings of human figures. Her work has been described as depicting an "erotic state of flux" and "celebrating forms of transgression, beauty and seduction," influenced by ancient Greek and Roman myths and also the modern human experience- you can find aspects of change, death, growth, renewal, and lust dissolved together in her individual pieces.
Portland illustrator Song Kang blends architecture and natural structures in both her intensely detailed drawings and her absorbing sculptures. The latter even uses the inherent forms of the animal kingdom as foundations for her designs. The "Vernacular" series has works created from wood, paper mache, plaster, fiber, recyclables, and other materials.
Netherlands-based artist Pim Palsgraaf created both 2D and 3D work that tackles urbanization and the effect “development” has on the world around us. His "Multiscape" series, in particular, is informed partially by the artist living in the industrial part of Rotterdam. The series highlights the “outgrowths of urban architecture.”
Courtney Mattison’s ceramics are clearly inspired and motivated by the ocean — that immense, powerful and precious resource whose details are still largely hidden from us. Self-identifying as both an artist and “ocean advocate," Mattison has created massive installations, “Our Changing Seas, I-III,” that cover a bio-diverse selection of coral reef forms. Displayed in a gallery, the pieces appear to grow out of the wall, as if miraculously alive in the dry, alien atmosphere. The ceramic medium allows for remarkable ranges in color, spanning the spectrum of actual living coral to the bone-dry, matte whiteness of its dead state. Both versions are present in Mattison’s pieces, reminding us that these entities are desperately in need of preservation. "Our Changing Seas III" is currently on view at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.
