To mark the Mexican holiday of Día de Muertos, artist Raymundo Medina of the Jaén Cartonería family collective dreamed up enormous skeletons that appear to be emerging from the pavement. The massive cardboard works can be found in Santa Cecilia Tláhuac, Mexico. The artist often works with Yaocalli Indians in erecting these creations, Miguel Angel Luna says. The annual holiday runs through tomorrow.
To mark the Mexican holiday of Día de Muertos, artist Raymundo Medina of the Jaén Cartonería family collective dreamed up enormous skeletons that appear to be emerging from the pavement. The massive cardboard works can be found in Santa Cecilia Tláhuac, Mexico. The artist often works with Yaocalli Indians in erecting these creations, Miguel Angel Luna says. The annual holiday runs through tomorrow.
Find more of the collective’s work on their Facebook page.
American artist Joel Morrison creates contemporary composite sculptures by transforming ordinary objects into shiny, new pieces of art. The artist encases shopping carts, balloons, anvils, clothing, bullets, and other items in stainless steel, giving them new life in their smooth and highly polished forms. His creations, which the artist describes as "a collage of scenarios", exist somewhere between the realms of pop, surrealism and classicism, playing with different visual tropes of art history and engaging in conversation with a range of artists and genres within the Western art canon.
With his sculptures of multitudes of identical, disaffected, middle-aged men, Isaac Cordal critiques modern society's emphasis on work and productivity. In our contemporary capitalist system, everything is thought of as a potential way to make profit — like public universities, which are becoming increasingly privatized and unaffordable here in the United States and in countries all over the world. This is the subject of Cordal's latest piece, "The School," where he imagines a university as a nightmarish factory with a skeletal overlord shouting instructions from a watchtower.
While Kris Kuksi's baroque assemblages (first covered in HF Vol. 19) have an ornate aesthetic suited for marble or gilded bronze, his work is composed of carefully-chosen collections of commonplace, throwaway objects. Kuksi assembles dolls, jewelry, model parts and various consumerist debris into monumental dioramas. Within them, his characters are embroiled in a chaotic drama of violence and sex, which Kuksi carefully contains into symmetrical, harmonious compositions that appear deceptively decorative at a first glance. The Kansas-based artist will be showing his new body of work for his solo show, "Antiquity in the Faux," opening at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles on November 15.
If we continue spewing pollution into the atmosphere, our climate will only continue to change, and the oceans will be very different than they are today. Ocean temperatures will rise, and with that, rising PH levels will make the water more acidic. It's simple chemistry and a sad fact. So how do we solve this problem? Artist and ocean advocate Courtney Mattison has made it the mission of her ceramic sculptures to remind us of the ocean's beauty and inspire preservation. Her "Changing Seas " series, previously featured on our blog, is Mattison's first major work towards this goal.
