Written by TheNark admin on July 16th, 2010 | 0 Comments
Approaching the subject of Shanghai’s rapid urban development with a political lampoon Zhang Huan’s Donkey is a kinetic sculpture featuring a farm animal humping the famous Jin Mao tower, which until recently was the tallest building in China. Emblematic of the monotonous impersonal high-rises that dominate the city’s skyline, Zhang’s shrunken landmark pokes fun at the masculine connotations of skyscrapers: as monumental phallic symbols, visual symbols of power and wealth. Mounted by and bending under the force of a stuffed donkey, Zhang’s icon of modernisation gets a literal shafting from the beast of burden ‘proletariat’; in China, the word “donkey” is used to call someone an “ass”.
For more donkey photos visit Zhang Huan.
Written by TheNark admin on April 24th, 2010 | 1 Comment
We all know what was two days ago. It was day of the earth. We have a lot problems with plastic bottles, but also with plastic closures, but luckily our kids know how to do right thing to get attention of media and older people.
Our cute kids made Earth sculpture of plastic closures and once again said to us how ecology is important. This project was done on famous Croatian island, Korcula.
Written by TheNark admin on April 19th, 2010 | 0 Comments
Kate MccGwire’s work asks questions about the very nature of beauty. She’s intrigued by the possibility of envisaging beauty as something more complex than merely what delights the senses: beauty can be about a problem; it can be something that repels you or makes you question the status quo. The idea that it is a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to argument through the creative process, fascinates her.
Much of Kate’s work references Freud’s ‘Unheimliche’ (the uncanny, or, literally, the ‘unhomely’); the idea, to quote Freud, of ‘a place where the familiar can somehow excite fear’. It also embraces artistic notions of the Abject.
She will take an everyday thing or idea that is intrinsically discomfiting and, by re-framing it, entice the viewer into re-examining their preconceptions and prejudices – cultural, historical, personal – about the everyday. The viewer’s response is visceral, the impact immediate, the ideas triggered resonating in their mind somewhere beyond rational interpretation.
Organic patterns, forms and materials have an instinctive draw; work may look determinedly abstract to the naked eye, but by using a spiral or circle, or a familiar material, the viewer’s gaze is lured inward, as if into a ‘field of attraction’, only to be repulsed or even menaced by the associations that unfold once ‘inside’. At the same time the scale and delicacy of the work reinforce the potential for awe and beauty in the unconventional.
Intrinsic to her method is the collecting and sorting of materials from hundreds of different sources over a period of months, even years. In turn, pieces evolve intuitively as if out of the subconscious, the language evocative rather than purely illustrative. As the work takes shape, a new, playful reality emerges, so that the object itself becomes a sort of prism, refracting the layers of meaning and cultural associations buried within, the quantity of materials used sometimes deliberately overwhelming, as if charged with a power and ambition beyond the reach they possess when seen in isolation.
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