Kenneth Price

Kenneth Price

            Kenneth Price was a well-rounded artist from America, but he was most widely known for his ceramics and printmaking.  Price created abstract shapes out of clay, and then fired it.  Instead of glazing the pieces, he painted them with bright acrylics, and then sanded them down.  Kenneth Price was extremely influenced by artist Peter Voulkos during his visit to the Otis Art Institute.  Voulkos’s influence enticed Price to commit himself to clay as his primary medium.  However, Price did not limit himself completely to clay, and has prints, drawings, and sculptures in his portfolio as well.   

            I was interested to learn that he was influenced by Mexican pottery, and that he made an effort to go visit local stores just to look at the different types of pottery.  I also learned that even though Peter Voulkos had such a strong influence over Kenneth Price, Price eventually looked for a new University to work with to try and develop his own style.  I like his ceramic sculptures that seem almost like molten lava, and I am influenced by the different method he had of coloring these ceramics.  I also really like his acrylic and ink drawings of abstract figures on a landscape scene. 

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

            Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger is known for her black and white photography.  These photographs have text overlaid on top, most often white text with a red background for emphasis.  Kruger worked with magazine design at Mademoiselle Magazine, House and Garden, and others.  This magazine style can be seen in many of her photographs.  Kruger takes existing photos and adds text overtop of them.  The phrases on her photos are meant to provoke emotion in the viewer, and are often feminist in nature.  Among some of her famous slogans are “I shop therefore I am” and “We don’t need another hero”. 

            I like Barbara Kruger’s style of transforming existing photographs into new artworks just by simply putting phrases overtop of them.  I admire how easily recognizable her artwork is.  Also, I am inspired how she has turned words and phrases into its own type of artwork.  The photos she uses are sometimes juxtaposed with the words that are overlaid onto them, and I enjoy Kruger’s themes of feminism and commercialism.  One work she did was a bus covered with phrases to promote the instruction of art.  I like that her art is so reflective of raising public awareness, whether it is through billboards, magazine art, or public commissions. 

Jacek Tylicki

Jacek Tylicki

            Jacek Tylicki works within a wide range of art, including installation and land art.  His early works involved blank canvas paper that Tylicki left outside exposed to the natural elements.  Tylicki is also known for “Chicken Art”, which is an installation in the Now Gallery.  In this installation, live chickens were housed in the gallery, and looked at paintings of chickens that hung on the walls.  His statement about this piece was “For the chicken the most beautiful is chicken”.   The “Chicken Art” project was viewed as a statement about the overexploitation of the human form.  As an environmental artist, Tylicki’s art often questions the relationship between society and pollution.

            My favorite piece of Jacek Tylicki’s is Give If You Can-Take If You Have To.  I like his ideas about public interaction and cooperation.  This piece is also an environmental statement about human consumption, and how money is spent wastefully, therefore contributing to pollution.  His early projects involving the canvas exposed to nature also inspired me.  It is an interesting idea to experiment with blank canvas and nature, especially since Tylicki placed the canvasses in different types of environments and left them there for different amounts of time. 

Jean Wells

Jean Wells

            Jean Wells creates large-scale mosaic sculptures.  Often the subjects of these mosaics are colorful food items, such as candy, ice cream, and hot dogs.  To create these sculptures, Wells has colored glass custom made for her, and then she hand cuts each piece.  The tiny scrap fragments of glass are then used to fill in details.  The frameworks she uses to support the glass are found objects, or Wells carves armatures out of foam.  Jean Wells is often connected with Pop Art, for her six-foot-tall ice cream cones and sports cars made of glass mosaic.  Urban Fruit Tree is a particularly large sculpture in the shape of a tree which is adorned with mosaic sculptures similar to her larger iconic works. 

            Jean Wells’s art at first glance is beautiful to look at, but I like that she has a deeper meaning behind the sculptures of food.  She is interested in junk food and candy as a statement about body image, and this is reflected in her Beach Babes sculpture as well, which features larger women who are confident about their bodies wearing bathing suits.  I also like the fragmented figures that Wells has created, such as Mixed Messages, which have other objects mixed in with the glass medium.

Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel

            Andrea Zittel is a sculptor and installation artist.  Her main focus in her artworks is the relationships between the basic necessities to survive.  Zittel creates “Living Units”, which incorporate spaces for eating, sleeping, bathing, and other human needs into one compact structure.  These “Living Units” have bloomed into a successful business, called “A-Z Administrative Services”, which provide these simple products available to consumers.  Andrea Zittel was also commissioned by Denmark to create a floating island made of concrete, upon which Zittel lived for one month.  She has also been known to wear one outfit every day during a season, which reflects her themes about the simple necessities. 

            I am inspired by Andrea Zittel because of the simplified “Living Units” she creates.  I especially like that she uses these spaces herself within her own home.  I also like how successfully marketable these Units have become.  I am interested in the exploration Zittel’s work has between basic human needs and domestic environments.  I also like the connections her work makes between social needs versus isolation.  The thing about Andrea Zittel that inspires me the most is her willingness to make herself a part of her art, by wearing the same outfit for months, living on a concrete island alone, or remodeling her living spaces on a regular basis.    

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread

            Sculpture artist Rachel Whiteread is the first woman to have won the Turner Prize in 1993.  Her sculptures are often in the form of casts.  These casts are of ordinary objects.  Often, she will take casts of the negative space inside an object, such as the inside of a house.  One of her most famous casts is House, which is a cast she took of the inside of a Victorian style house.  Whiteread’s series Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) is a series of resin casts featuring the space underneath furniture.  Rachel Whiteread uses plaster, rubber, and resin in her casting process.  Other objects she has casted include bookshelves, furniture, cardboard boxes, and many others.    

            I think Rachel Whiteread’s casts of objects are interesting, especially the negative space casts.  I like the idea of turning negative space into positive space.  I also like that she thinks of this process as solidifying the residue of the years of use the object has seen, such as the furniture resin casts.  These minimalist sculptures really make the viewer think about these places that exist in everyday life, but are rarely noticed.  I am also inspired by her works that are displayed outside, because many of these works are the cast of the “inside” of something, yet they are being displayed outdoors.  I like the concept of her bringing the “inside” to the “outside”.

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley

            Antony Gormley is a famous sculptor from Britain.  He is famous for his use of the human body within his works.  He has even used his own body to make metal casts for his projects.  Gormley’s use of the human body attempts to create works that viewers can identify with because the body is a reference point that we all have in common.  Many of his human figure sculptures are created out of cast iron, fiberglass, and even clay.  He also uses geometric shapes in a more abstract depiction of the body, but even these are still recognizably human in nature.   Gormley also creates drawings using a wide range of mediums, from the traditional inks and charcoals, to linseed oil, coffee, and bodily fluids as drawing utensils.    

            I am inspired by Antony Gormley’s theory about looking and finding.  Many of his sculptures, especially in his Event Horizon project, have been placed on the tops of buildings, which disrupts the skyline.  Gormley says that this disruption of the skyline makes people more aware of their surroundings, and once they begin actively looking they will find his artworks.  I also enjoy looking through Gormley’s portfolio of drawings, because of his experimentation with nontraditional drawing materials.  He always stays true to his theme of the human body as a subject of his artwork.