Friday, February 15, 2019

Matrixing by Bonnie Collura



Bonnie Collura, a distinctive American artist, who is currently working on biomorphic sculptures and installations among the mainstream of contemporary arts. She is an installation artist who frequently expressed rebellious natural instincts and providing feminist’s perspectives in her work. The exhibition ‘Prince’ at Smack Mellon impressed me a lot. The title ‘Prince’ firstly shows the male-dominated narratives while it conveys a sense of nobility.By designing form and allocating material, she challenged male icons in nowadays society that provides female outlook for a male figure. It intangibly transferred our common concept for a man from fierce, strong, solid to mild, slim, fluid. To generally view her works, most of them delivering a sense of contradicting and alternating on our common thinking on gender. Much like paintings, the exhibition expressed the multiple labels and icon on each art work. The emotion and minds were overlapping and interlocking in a single work.By varying loose fabric and high chroma colors, the art works present a matrix of 2-dimensional tint and 3-dimensional texture. Also, the high-ceiling gallery space itself becomes to part of exhibiting that provide large pendant lighting and large French widow for grabbing natural light which also can be regarded as 4-dimensional element that controlled temperature and atmosphere. In this way, the installations are becoming dynamic and flexible when these elements of the circumstance are changing.

2 comments:

  1. I also do think the Prince exhibition was very interesting. I agree with how you think the variation of fabrics and colors gives us the 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional impacts. All of the sculptures are very contradicting. For example, some of the sculptures are made with solid materials, like wood and steel, and they are sitting on the floor. While some of them are made with fabric and threads and they are hanging from the ceiling. Like you said, I think this is why the exhibition looked more dynamic and elastic because of the contradictions.

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  2. I found the exhibition fascinating as well. I agree that her use of the space, with its high ceilings, open air and lighting also becomes part of the show. Imagining for a moment that her and Solano’s spaces were switched would give a very different feeling to everything. I think that her use of hanging sculptural objects as opposed to everything standing was also powerful, especially when some of the form was human. The white cloth businessman gave pause as a hanging figure has many deep rooted connotations. I also liked her varied color schemes in combination with single color pieces.

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