1001 Words: 10.02.09 Posted on October 2, 2009 by Stephanie Syjuco
*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…
Posts Tagged ‘Sculpture’
Interview: Rosana Castrillo Díaz & Janet Bishop Posted on June 8, 2009 by Suzanne
The new bridge to the rooftop garden, and Rosana Castrillo Díaz's mural. Untitled , 2009. Photo: Don Ross
For the opening of SFMOMA’s new Rooftop Garden, Bay Area artist Rosana Castrillo Díaz was commissioned to create a mural painting on the bridge leading to the new outdoor space. Rosana was a recipient of the 2004 SECA Art Award &, if you’re a local reader, you might remember the wall drawing she created on the museum’s third-floor landing: it was made entirely of cellophane tape. The new bridge mural is painted in shades of white, using reflective mica paint to take advantage of the light flooding into the glass-walled bridge. While Rosana was here working on the installation back in April, we asked her to take some time out to sit down and talk with painting and sculpture curator Janet Bishop, who worked with the artist on both the SECA show and the new commission, about her work.
JANET BISHOP: Thank you for coming in, and taking time away from the mural to talk a little bit about it now. When you and I last worked together, about four years ago, you were one of the SECA Art Award winners, and you made an extraordinarily beautiful large wall relief, a very subtle cloud made of looped Scotch tape. One of the remarkable things I remember about that was, because it was not only the opening of the SECA Art Award exhibition, but also SFMOMA’s tenth anniversary in this building, Mario Botta, our architect, was here. He said that your tape drawing was the most sympathetic piece he’d ever seen in this building.
Since that time, you’ve continued to make works on paper in a very intimate scale, and also some very large-scale pieces, including a project at UCSF. I wonder if you can start by telling us a little bit about some of the works that led to the work you’re doing on the commission at SFMOMA now.
Rosana Castrillo Diaz, Tape Drawing (detail). 2004
ROSANA CASTRILLO DÍAZ: In the white-on-white drawings, and the tape piece, my interest is in quiet, in simplicity, and in the kind of space that is in the periphery and is not quite there, or you don’t know whether it’s there or not.
JB: I remember you said about the tape piece that it wasn’t even so important to you whether people even saw it. I think that most people probably did see it, but it required careful looking, a slow experience of the piece.
RCD: Right. Or for example, I did a show at Mills College, where they have a big skylight on top of the building. It was kind of like the bridge here. The light was intense and very diffuse, and you approached the piece frontally, so many people just missed it. Which is fine. I like that. I think the piece did what it needed to do, which was to surprise you in passing.
The UCSF project [in the Legoretta building on the Mission Bay campus] which you mentioned is in a long dark hallway. The hallway ends with a window, however, and I was very attracted to the light from that window. I thought I could use reflectivity to bring some of that light in, and use the length of the passageway so people might see the light changing. At the same time, at the studio, I was playing with mica. I was fascinated with it as a material. (more…)
Filed under:
Desiree Holman’s Alien Resurrection Posted on May 6, 2009 by Anuradha Vikram
Visitors to the 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition will remember The Magic Window, a suite of drawings and video from 2007 in which Desiree Holman invokes the enticing numbness of sitcom family fantasies from her 1980s childhood. In her latest body of work, on view at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco through May 30, she digs deeper into the complexities of familial psychology, tackling the thorny territory of motherhood. Holman’s practice originates in sculpture, with costumes and props that actors then bring to life in her psychedelic video epics. Her interest is in the mediation of deeply personal ideas, such as the relationship between parent and child, through the lens of popular American culture. The genesis of this project, which she titled Reborn, was Holman’s discovery of a movement among middle-aged American housewives to create lifelike baby dolls, complete with breathing mechanisms and individually-rooted eyelashes.
Desiree Holman, Insecure, 2009
Holman spent more than two years researching the Reborning movement. She learned that many Reborners have already had grown children, and that many of them are devoutly religious. She found that they take their hobby very seriously, and that they have developed a strong online presence despite representing a demographic that has been slow to embrace the Internet. The process of Reborning is laborious, involving specialized tools and paints, and tremendous technical skill. Holman ultimately produced eight dolls as the starting point for this body of work. (more…)
