BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Haruki Ogawa

Japanese painter and mixed media artist Haruki Ogawa embeds paint and industrial materials in crystal-clear acrylic resin, creating arresting little cubes of texture.

Top to bottom: Conceptual Sculpture; Object #1; Object #5; Semi Object #2 (detail); Semi Object #2; Three Dimensional Drawing #1; Three Dimensional #2

Haruki Ogawa at Frantic Gallery:
http://www.frantic.jp/en/artist/artist-ogawa.html

BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Clare Finin

Clare Finin evokes Victorian Hair Art and Victorian mourning jewelry by embellishing, embroidering, or repairing heirlooms or keepsakes with her own hair.

Top to bottom: Place Setting #1; Place Setting #2; Fractures; Fractures detail; Cocktail Napkin; Things I Never Said; Truth Statements

http://clarefinin.com/

BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Klari Reis

Klari Reis' work looks like standard fare at an average science lab, but she uses a new media plastic called epoxy polymer to create these "cultures" in actual petri dishes for her current project, "Hypochondria." The epoxy polymers interact and collide with one another creating unpredictable reactions and designs that resemble microscopic cellular structures or bacteria. In fact, Reis uses organic cellular imagery from biotech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area as a model for her work. She is creating a petri dish every day of this year. See all of them at her blog, The Daily Dish, linked below.

http://www.klariart.com/
http://klarireis.blogspot.com/

BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Hank Huang

From painter and multi media artist Hank Huang's website:
"I enjoy arts_ability to questi0n_ how_ we_ pe3rc3iv3 theworld∆roundus. Mm/yy work mostly engages in this conversation_I maketh1ngs to investigate our (/contemporary) views 00n nature+technology."

I really love the framed "star shirt," and the Ana_Log OS piece is fascinating (second image down...click to see it larger).

Top to bottom: Arrived; Ana_Log OS; The Distant Star; History/ Repeating; The Weather/ Electronic

http://www.hankhuang.com/

BEAUTY: Soft Sculpture--Karl Erickson

Multi-media and performance artist Karl Erickson created s series of pillows based on close-up photos of eyes, done in latch hook rug material. My mom used to make latch hook rugs in the 70s and I never imagined that this method could be employed to make a fine-art object. But it works, precisely because of the 70s craft associations! Whimsical but also infused with meaning... And as decorative objects, theya re quite beautiful!

http://www.karlhugoerickson.com/

BEAUTY: Mixed Media--David R. Harper

David R. Harper's artist statement says it all:

I am drawn to the form and idea of memorials, those markers that formalize links between memory and present experience. My main fascination is for the ways in which people bring facets of these ritual systems and objects into domestic spaces in order to amplify their personal identification with them, or perhaps with the cultures that support them.

There is intense empathy in the will to memorialize, to lay down a particular meaning on an object that is not inherent to it—life as remembered in the ripe fig of an ancient Xenia painting, or death anticipated in a skull. In my work I am taking account of these empathic tendencies, both in the sense of identification with and understanding of an ‘other’, and in the sense of joining one’s own feelings to an object.

To frame these elements of my work, I refer to certain periods, modes of craft, and domestic embellishment that articulate peculiar links to an ‘ordered’ natural world – the presentation of taxidermy in the home or museum setting, for example. The pleasure of asserting control over what is uncontrollably “wild,” satisfying an urge to have the animal form present in our controlled spaces, reminds us of what we no longer have and no longer are. These eccentric fusions of nature and culture are the uneasy disguises of pathos and pride that allow us to recognize and even celebrate an animal’s mortality while deferring our own.

The figurative connection between nature and mortality is evident in both historical and contemporary environments; the "memento mori" surrounds us in myriad forms at all times. In my lifetime, however, its presence has been more or less sanitized, the natural world euphemized, along with its suggestion of the inevitable. Rather than experiencing our link to mortality, we celebrate our disconnect with the things of which we have no control over.

By creating elaborate objects and situations that combine common and unusual materials and historical techniques, I hope to amplify an ephemeral natural world with enduring monumentalization. I am attempting to engage the viewer in a dialogue on the metaphoric weight that the objects present both historically and emotionally. I have always tried to create work that addresses collective truths while retaining intimacy and reflection; so that the viewer can connect with the objects, and delve into my relationship with them.

As I negotiate my relationship with things like cloth, ceramics, animal hides within the precision of sculptural practices, I am aware that they carry their mix of material histories and social conditions with them. I point to these from my own present position, exalting and commemorating their origins even as I reshape and reposition the same materials to carry specific emotion or meaning. My main work is to narrativize the two, and to not have one story obscure the other.

Above: The Young Lovers

Above: Noblesse Oblige

Above: Biblio I - VI

Above: Better The Devil You Know

http://www.davidrharper.com/

BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Vadis Turner

I love soft sculpture, and the work of New York artist Vadis Turner not only explores the medium it is made of but explores the larger meaning and cultural context of the fabric itself. Fashioned from items (ribbons, antique quilts, vintage clothing and lingerie, vintage bedsheets, handkerchiefs, and vintage gloves) that have connections to femininity, cultural and physical womanhood, dowries, betrothal, marriage, and the commodification of a woman's sex, her work speaks to how ideas and expected behaviors have been imposed on women from, yes I will say it, the patriarchy.

Her abstract wall pieces made from satin ribbons and antique quilts function on their own.

But the aforementioned artist commentary on femininity and feminism is quite apparent in her installation work. Just take a look at her wedding cakes made from lingerie or tampons, a woman's pelvis made from throw-away costume jewelry, and her piece entitled Vanity (My Beautiful Education) in which she cuts up MFA and BFA diplomas to make fake eyelashes, jewelry, and press-on nails.

Top to bottom: Forest Fire; Primrose Path Engulfed In Smoke; Red Mold Melt; Ripe Dirt/ Fresh Burial; Scorch; Best In Show; Bridal Lingerie Cake; Burial Feast (at the Brooklyn Museum Artist's Ball); Pelvis; Tampon Cake; Vanity (My Beautiful Education); Vanity (My Beautiful Education) detail

http://www.vadisturner.com/