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On Our Radar
On Our Radar
Kate Cusack gets some of her best creative inspiration at supermarkets, 99-cent stores, or wherever products are displayed in bulk. Seeing household items stacked together makes her visualize them afresh, out of context, as something other than what they are, or do.
"Whenever I see anything in multiples, it's exciting," says the 30-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist, who divides her work between jewelry, sculpture and costumes for theatrical productions. "What's interesting to me is the use and transformation of materials."
In Cusack's hands, plastic food wrap magically morphs into a series of towering, luminous Marie Antoinette-style wigs for a window display
at Tiffany's Fifth ...
On Our Radar
Stephanie DeArmond’s sculptural letterforms are not easily defined by art-school limitations of sculpture, vessel and design. Her work humorously appropriates text from American subculture and abstracts it into aesthetic form, as in Cross-stitch T. DeArmond’s sculpture evokes the preciousness and innocence of your grandmother’s china cabinet, yet a closer reading reveals unexpected phrases, like that in Best/Beast. The artist often cites lyrics taken directly from American pop-cultural forces like hip-hop and indie rock. “I use rap lyrics because I am interested in connecting that kind of culture to fine china,” she says. “I love the idea of rappers with gold ...
On Our Radar
Chris Antemann’s figural porcelain vignettes, such as her 2007 piece Gather, are naughty, full of quasi-18th-century harlots and housemaids cavorting with naked suitors.
It’s funny, selling her work,” says Leslie Ferrin, one of her dealers. “Viewers approach it thinking it’s some sort of [innocuous] figurine. They end up tongue-tied.” No wonder people who buy one often tuck it away in a private spot in the master bedroom or bath.
An homage to traditional European and Asian figurines (think Staffordshire, Meissen, Delft), Antemann’s exquisitely detailed little domestic mise-en-scènes are really about relationships—particularly between women, as sisters or rivals— hence the erotic ...
On Our Radar
Spray foam insulation is a DIY homeowner's BFF, its puffy goo a quick fix for gappy doors and windows that make for big heating bills.
But when Jillian Moore grabs a can of the synthetic spray, it's not to thwart energy leaks. Instead, the Iowa City, Iowa, artist transforms the foam into alien-like sculptural pieces that her fans find wonderfully odd and, somehow, oddly alive.
"I had a lot of comments at my MFA show (University of Iowa, 2008) that people imagined [my creations] moving around on their own when the building was closed," says Moore. "I really liked that." She liked that ...
On Our Radar
One might say that a passion for the handmade is in Molly Hatch’s blood: her family’s connection to functional art goes back generations. “My maternal ancestors were merchants importing goods, mostly from Europe,” says the ceramist. “They always brought back porcelain and French faience as ballast in their ships. I grew up using a lot of the objects inherited from my grandmother in my home.” Surrounded by these opulent pieces, Hatch, whose family's wealth had slowly dwindled decades before she was born, romanticized her prosperous Bostonian ancestors. “I was really fascinated by the wealth those objects represented, such as the ...
On Our Radar
The Washington D.C.-based artist Elizabeth Lundberg Morisette never planned to become a weaver. In 1991 she was studying to be a graphic designer at North Carolina State University College of Design and found herself walking past the weaving room regularly. Finally, after wondering what it was all about, she got up the courage to ask Professor Barbara Schulman to teach her how to weave and Schulman obliged. She gave her a piece of paper that showed her basic techniques and, Morisette laughs, “I stayed up all night working and the next day the professor showed up and was shocked at ...
On Our Radar
Throughout her long career as a weaver, Ethel Stein has enjoyed a quiet but stellar reputation among the textile cognoscenti. She has never achieved wider fame, mainly because she never sought it. Now, still active as ever at the age of 91, she may finally be getting the recognition she deserves.
“I can’t think of anyone who qualifies more as ‘under the radar,’” says Tom Grotta of browngrotta arts, which represents Stein and recently published a monograph on her life and work. Jack Lenor Larsen wrote the introduction, in which he credits her for cultivating the technical mastery to realize her ...
On Our Radar
The ebb and flow of human experience-above all, our natural yearning to rise above limitations and achieve a dream—inspires the intricate and ambitious flameworked glass sculptures of Eun-Suh Choi.
“We all desire something better for ourselves. This interest came from the new perspective I had on myself when I came to the u.s.,” says the 32-year-old, who moved from her native Korea to upstate New York in 2004 to get her master’s degree in glass at the Rochester Institute of Technology. At first alone and sometimes lonely in a new culture, Choi immersed herself in the studio, delving deep within to ...
On Our Radar
In 2004 Hisano Takei was pursuing an M.F.A. in metals and jewelry at the State University of New York at New Paltz when she was assigned her first graduate school project—to make 10 related objects in 10 days. Takei panicked. She knew it was impossible to complete 10 pieces of jewelry out of metal in that time frame. So she turned to wool, and 10 days later she completed the project.
A native of Japan who moved to Los Angeles with her family in 1984, Takei first began making jewelry as a child. She loved to draw and paint but ...
On Our Radar
In the 1950s and '60s, Harvey Comics featured a character called Little Dot, a strangely obsessive little girl with a compulsion to decorate everything with polka dots.
Artist Jan Huling is similarly afflicted, though her fetish is beads. Inside Huling's brownstone in Hoboken, New Jersey, tabletops, shoes, dinnerware, dolls, even musical instruments are covered in dazzling colored beads. Only their fur has saved Huling's two cats, apparently.
Huling began beading about nine years ago, after her sister, a jewelry designer, showed her a Pez dispenser she'd adorned; Huling's first effort was a kazoo. Initially she applied beads the size of poppy seeds by ...
On Our Radar
If there’s one thing that can be said about Jed Morfit (shown with Bullheaded) it’s that he’s never boxed himself in. The 35-year-old’s career spans sculpture, illustration, fabrication, printmaking and teaching. This defining factor has allowed him to explore and break down many barriers in the art world. Something not all artists have been able (or even want) to do.
“In the beginning, I tried to keep everything compartmentalized,” Morfit says. “Fine and commercial art communities often don’t have a lot of respect for each other and I didn’t want my work in one to negatively impact the other.” While in ...
On Our Radar
When Joseph Walsh was eight years old he fell in love with wood. Four years later, after leaving school for what was meant to be a temporary break, he turned to furniture making full-time and never looked back. Now, at age 29, Walsh runs his own studio in the countryside near Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, with nine people working for him. He has established himself as a designer/craftsman in Ireland, well-known not just for his furniture, but increasingly for his art installations as well. And word is spreading overseas, with his work being shown in Paris and at SOFA ...
On Our Radar
Having started making things at the Eli Whitney Museum, in Hamden, CT, when she was six years old, Sylvie Rosenthal has followed her heart and her head to an enviable point for a young maker. She has a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Crafts, formal training augmented by visiting artist residencies—at San Diego State University, Anderson Ranch Arts Center and Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan, among others. She has also been an active participant in the Penland, NC, community, building artisan houses and honing her woodworking skills, collaborating with retired rit professor ...
On Our Radar
Every day, in the small, picturesque village of Essex, Connecticut, the glass artists Marc Petrovic and Kari Russell-Pool send their two daughters off to school, enter their nondescript 1,700-square-foot studio and work side by side until the children return at 3:00 p.m. The husband and wife, who first met in 1987 at the Cleveland Institute of Art, have worked closely for years, while at the same time maintaining a certain independence that allows them to distinguish one person’s work from the other’s. Russell-Pool’s pieces are predominantly flame-worked, while Petrovic’s are primarily blown and combined with wood, metal or found elements. ...
On Our Radar
In his office, Marques Marzan, a tall, slender man in an island-design shirt, wears his own carved-ivory pendant with plaited suspension cord around his neck. He says thoughtfully, “I hope to be a bridge between Hawaii’s past and present, to honor the cultural traditions of those before us and blend them with the innovations of today.” He reflects on his dual career as fiber artist and as a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and resource specialist at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, adding that he wants “to show respect for what I know and to share that with dignity.”
Born on the island of ...
On Our Radar
Matthias Pliessnig talks fast, as if to keep up with a rapid flow of ideas. Movement interests him, whether it’s flight, the way a boat cuts through water or the physics of how a seat responds to its sitter.
Recently the 29-year-old sat still long enough for a conversation by the shore of Lake Mendota (“I come here all the time,” he says. “I just got bitten by a duck”) near the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he’s pursuing a graduate degree in furniture design/sculpture. He spoke about his life and work so far, which “definitely includes movement.”
Pliessnig was born in New ...
On Our Radar
Diem Chau might be described as a memory keeper. From her carved crayons, such as Girl in Green, that reflect on lost innocence, much like a broken crayon, to her embroidered partial figures on stretched cloth that covers discarded dishes, a renewal of an object’s previous life, the past is ever-present in her art.
Her own past has undeniably been a major influence. Chau, who was born to a Vietnamese mother and Chinese father, immigrated to the United States in 1986. It was an arrival long overdue. In 1978 Chau’s parents attempted to get out of war-ravaged Vietnam. However, they were ...
On Our Radar
Cuong Ta's ceramics would look right at home on the set of Mad Men. With their playful, abstract surface designs, these primitive-modern forms exude retro cool, yet appear fresh and contemporary.
While Ta does like mid-century style, his work isn't consciously an homage to an era. His own aesthetic is more Peter Parker than Don Draper. "As a kid I always sketched. I loved comic books, Marvel super-heroes," says the California artist. "In some ways, I feel the graphic nature of the work I do now goes back to that."
In true superhero fashion, Ta has something of a dual identity. By ...
On Our Radar
A few years ago, Sungsoo Kim happened upon some chunks of Styrofoam that had encased a new MacBook laptop and did a double take. He found himself entranced by the shapes, at once ancient and futuristic. “They were really beautiful,” recalls the Korean-born glass artist, who now lives in Cleveland, OH. “I just said, Wow!”
That epiphany has led to a rich, evolving series of kiln-cast glass sculptures entitled Rediscovery, in which Kim explores, challenges and redefines notions of art, beauty and value. To make his molds, he uses discarded Styrofoam packaging, an industrial material whose express purpose is to protect ...
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