Enrico Dini and 3-D Printing

Paper Reefs

Some artists use materials related to the subjects they paint when creating art pieces, but artist Amy Eisenfeld Genser doesn’t pick up found object at her local beach when she creates her reef pieces. She takes pieces of coloured paper, rolls them up, and positions them in a way that the final outcome looks like a natural formation of barnacles or sea sponge.

Her pieces are visually mesmerizing, with a hint of something magical! It is like entering into a new world when you look at her work. The mosaic of shapes and colours created by the rolled paper, juxtaposed onto an already painted canvas, stimulates the senses. The artist herself claims her work is both irregular and ordered, using texture to mimic natural motifs.

It is amazing how paper, a material traditionally made from trees, can be manipulated to recreate the basic structures of a reef, which to some, may be considered a tree of the sea. Nature once again creates a connection within itself through art practices.

-Anna Paluch

Kyle Bean for Men’s Health

Check out the most recent work by UK artist and designer Kyle Bean commissioned for Men’s Health Magazine. In his characteristically simple style, Bean poetically illustrates the mind-matter relationship by combining a common image and unconventional materials. At once visually pleasing and thematically meaningful, Bean’s work is able to incite big questions with only a little reworking of everyday images.

Follow Bean’s work at his website here.

- Erin Saunders

Connections: The Tree of Life and Death

Connections are everywhere, be they symbolic or literal. Every connection has its purpose, from the tiny fibers of an adult human fibroblast cell, which connects (or adheres) to extracellular matrixes, to trees, with their deep roots, connecting themselves to the ground. See, even these two seemingly different objects, with their own unique connections, can also find a way to be connected to each other. A photograph of a network of adult human fibroblast cells looks oddly similar to that of a pink tree (taken by Heather Champ) found in San Francisco, but, where the cells actually help produce more cells, more life, the pink tree is in fact, dead. It can no longer grow or blossom, like the cells in their own way. That does not mean this tree cannot still be admired aesthetically in some way.

An unknown artist, upon hearing of the death of the tree, decided to give it new life by transforming it into a small but significant urban art piece. Though it was taken down not long after, it shows that even when dead, natural objects such as trees can still be used to make beautiful art.

So artists go one step further, and create art long after a tree has been cut down and transformed into a new object; a piece of paper. Artist Emma Taylor creates a series of work called “From Within A Book” where she takes pages of a book and sculpts various scenes, such as a stork carrying a baby or a person reading a book. One work that particularly stands out is that of a large tree, coming out from between two pages. It reminded me of the pink tree, and even of the fibroblast cells.  Like the pink tree, the tree used to make the pages is long dead, but the artist has taken the pages, connecting them together like cells, to create a new tree.

Though not truly living, it is an echo of its former self, and yet, still as beautiful. The tree seems to be one of few natural objects that can be beautiful and inspiring in both life and death.

-Anna Paluch

Interconnectivity of Ranjani Shettar’s Just a bit more, 2005-2006

At my first meeting with Shettar’s expansive and delicate hanging sculpture, the art historian in me made the immediate connection to Eva Hesse’s similar hanging pieces created in the 1960’s. But then I thought, let’s move past just a simple theoretical comparative discussion of the two works and examine Just a bit more singularly. What I was surprised to discover was my own train of thought and the significance of my internal connections being made mirrored in the interconnectivity of the delicate coloured beeswax balls linked together by the fine tea-stained thread. As you read this article, you are making your own connections—perhaps also to Hesse’s work since I brought attention to it, or perhaps another artwork, or even the complexity of all the connections of the piece akin to DNA or our network of synaps in the brain. Also, there can be an argument made for the work’s representation of technology and its ability to be a vehicle to connect people around the world; not only in terms of social media and its ability to transmit and spread information quickly, but at a more basic level of pure communication from one to another. As Shettar is from Bangalore, India, an epicentre of technological education and innovation, it is interesting to also view this piece as a representation of the impact of technology on society and our incessant obsession to stay connected to each other. 

It is this process of making our own connections and building an infinite train of thought as we experience the piece that I find rather poignant to the work. All of these connections work quite beautifully as our own unique thought processes are visually represented in the work we are pondering and experiencing. What is particularly interesting to note is how the artist leaves it up to the viewer to take away what they will from her piece rather than thrust upon the audience a set meaning or significance of the work. Rather than being concerned about deconstructing the piece by  unravelling high level theory or peeling back the layers to get at the essence of the piece, Shettar allows the viewer to simply experience the piece and take what they will from their own unique journey and relation to the work. We can find similar theory in the modern untitled abstracted paintings that leave the viewer to find their own conclusions…but that is just a bit more contemplative connection to continue the train of thought…

-Katlin Rogers

You can find more information on Ranjani Shettar here on the MoMA library resources website.