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.
French artist Frederique Morrel (Vol 28) breathes new life into old taxidermy. She calls it the animals' revenge, under appreciated as a stuffed head on a wall and reborn as something to be admired. Simultaneously, the dying art of embroidery is made new and contemporary. To Morrel, her sculptures symbolize a reimagining of oppulence, bringing to mind artists Olek and Karley Feaver. Morrel's concept may sound simple: repurposing vintage tapestry that she collects from second-hand shops and covering animals with it, but it's not.
Oakland, California based artist Crystal Morey feels a special connection to nature that stems from her childhood years spent in the Sierra Nevada foothills. When she moved to the city, her entire perspective changed. "I once saw humans as being under the umbrella of “nature,” subservient to natural happening. I now realize humans are the largest variable in the changing of our planet’s ecological and environmental outcome," she says. This is the driving motivation behind her sculptures of totem-like creatures inspired by various cultures; human characters wrapped in the skins of eagles, bears, deer, rabbits and other animals.
Keiichi Tanaami’s wild sculptures and mixed-media works currently inhabit Jeffrey Deitch's New York location, as an extension of its "Tokyo Pop Underground" group show. The Hi-Fructose Vol. 38 cover artist is featured at the space until Nov. 2. We last mentioned Tanaami on our site here, in a story on his collaboration with artist Oliver Payne.
Cleon Peterson’s stark, graphical reflections on our current political and social climate, rendered in acrylics on canvas and sculptures, are part of a show currently running at Over the Influence in Los Angeles. "Blood and Soil” collects his latest tableaux, confronting race, power, and religion. The show runs through Aug. 5 at the gallery. Peterson was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
