The Photography and Sculptures of Mari Katayama
Mari Katayama’s photography uses her own body as one of her materials. Born with a rare congenital disorder, the artist had her legs amputated as a child, and at times, her sculptural work emulates the features of her body that the condition caused. The resulting work explores identity, anxiety, and other topics.
“Her belief is that tracing herself connects with other people and her everyday life can be also connected with the society and the world, just like the patchwork made with threads and a needle by stitching borders,” a statement says. “In addition to her art creation, Katayama leads ‘High heel project’ in which she wore customized high-heeled shoes specially made for prosthesis to perform on stage as a singer, model, or keynote speaker. The motto of this project is to take advantage of any means including art and disabled body if it helps to expand the ‘freedom of choice’ for those in desperate need.”
Inspired in part by the Land Art movement of the late 1960s, Javier Riera’s “luminance interventions” — geometric patterns projected directly on natural landscapes — are there one moment and gone the next with the flip of a switch.
Diane Meyer emulates pixels and digital imaging with cross-stitched embroidery, sewn into her photos. Whether it’s a series of travel captures or her own, personal family snaps, Meyer explores both intersecting eras of photography and the concept of memory itself. The result is something that both distorts and celebrates the longevity of these experiences.
Jonathan Owen's interdisciplinary work toys with the definition of authorship in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp. His sculptures and works on paper start out as other, found artworks, which he alters through a process of subtraction. To create his surreal 3D pieces, he carves directly into 19th-century marble statues and busts. These sculptures were created as imitations of Classical works from the Renaissance, which themselves were inspired by Ancient Greek art and mythology. Owen adds yet another layer of appropriation, carving into the pristine bodies of David and Mercury to dissolve them into abstract, geometric shapes. He mixes Baroque and Minimalist aesthetics in a way that would make purists cringe.
Barcelona, Spain based artist David Moreno has found a unique approach to translating his drawings into the third dimension. His series titled "Drawing in Space" features sculptures made of steel wires that emulate the fast and energetic style of drawing in a rather wild and sometimes uncontrolled way. Though they are built using a stiff material, Moreno's sculptures of surreal floating cabins, chairs, and figures exhibit a certain delicacy and tenderness. Using a similar technique to cross-hatching, he is able to create tonal or shading effects of carefully placed lines that are viewed from a specific vantage point.