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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Barnaby Barford’s “ME WANT NOW,” staged at David Gill Gallery in London, features a line-up of life-size, ceramic animal sculptures, but its implications are decidedly human. As they await the unknown, the gallery says the pieces represent a “a visual allegory of human existence.” The exhibit comes a year after his 20-foot-high "Tour of Babel" installation, comprised of 3,000 miniature buildings, inhabiting the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Barford was first featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 8 and is part of the “Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose” at Virginia MOCA. “ME WANT NOW” runs through Dec. 21.
The skin-toned, sporadically hairy ceramic sculptures crafted by Jason Briggs can be both unsettling and entice one to touch. The artist says he aspires to create things he’s “never quite seen before.” And as for compelling viewers for closer inspection, that’s part of his charge, too: “Though my objects contain strong visual references, I am more interested in the implied tactile ones; the things that stir in me a compulsion to touch,” his statement says. “Beyond other external inspiration lies this basic, primal impulse. I recognize – and act upon – a profound desire to push, poke, squeeze, stroke, caress, and pinch. I intend for my pieces to invoke a similar sort of temptation.”