Category: Mixed Media

25 at 25 at SOFA NY Countdown: Sue Lawty

April 5, 2012 0 Comment

CALCULUS Detail, Sue Lawty

At SOFA NY 2012, browngrotta arts will exhibit stone drawings and weavings of lead and linen by UK artist Sue Lawty. Lawty’s constructed pieces and drawings in two and three dimensions explore repetition and interval in raffia, hemp, linen, lead, stone or shadow.

While an artist in residence at the the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2005, Lawty collaborated on a project “Concealed-Discovered-Revealed” with the theme of structure and landscape. Lawty used the opportunity to explore and extend her textile vocabulary by creating a large site-specific stone drawing Order, that moved beyond the constraints of a frame. The 6-meter linear pieced drawing of fine stones wavered along the wall’s surface, like a woven structure. Eventually, Origin was removed to The Haymarket Hotel in London.

15sl CALCULUS, Sue Lawty, natural stones on gesso, 78.75″ x 118″, 2010

At SOFA NY, browngrotta arts will exhibit a more recent stone drawing by Lawty, Calculus. At first glance, Calculus appears simple — like a painting of many dots of many sizes.  On closer inspection, you realize that the 2 meter by 3 meter surface actually contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny stones, each smoothed by the sea and hand sorted to create what Emma Crichton-Miller has called a “beautifully choreographed march past the ignored.” Calculus is the Latin word for small stone as well as the name of a branch of mathematics based, like Lawty’s work, on the sum of infinitesimal differences. Lawty’s work  has appeared in numerous exhibitions in the UK and abroad, including the International Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland; the Bankfield Gallery and Museum in Halifax, UK; the Victorian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne, Australia and the Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum in Spokane, Washington.  On Friday, April 20th from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Lawty will present a lecture at SOFA NY, Rock – Linen – Lead,  about her work and her engagement with remote landscape, geology and the passage of time.

 

 

 

 

Who Said What: Josef Albers

July 24, 2011 0 Comment

Josef Jose“If one says Red—the name of color—and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.”

—Josef Albers

Sneak Peek: Artpalmbeach, January 14th -19th

January 10, 2010 1 Comment

Palm-Beach-Ad.jpgWe’re leaving the ice and snow (sigh) for sunnier climes next week, where browngrotta arts will join more than 50 other galleries exhibiting at the Palm Beach County Convention Center at Artpalmbeach, art + photography + design. The fair opens on January 15th and lasts through the 19th. A theme of this year’s Artpalmbeach,  art + photography + design is “going global.” As always, browngrotta arts will do its part; we are exhibiting the work of artists from 15 countries. Our installation in Booth 204 will include some of the highlights of this fall’s 10th Wave III exhibitions as well as new works by several artists including a significant wall sculpture by Ritzi Jacobi; pieces made of fish scales by Marian Bijlenga and new works of repurposed encyclopedias by Wendy Wahl. We’ll present the work of two artists in Palm Beach for the first time: We’ll present the work of two artists in Palm Beach for the first time: Jennifer Falck Linssen of the US and Carolina Yrarrázaval of Chile. US Artist Norma Minkowitz will be at the booth on Monday, January 18th from 2-4 p.m. to discuss her work; Dawn MacNutt of Nova Scotia will be at the booth to discuss her work on Tuesday, January 19th, from 2-4 p.m.

10th Wave III: Online– The next best thing to being there

October 23, 2009 0 Comment
Jazzy-10th-wave.jpg

Our first online exhibit, the10th Wave III: Online, opens today. The exhibit is a carefully curated selection of works presented in installation shots, images of individual works and detail photos. Approximating the in-person experience, viewers can “walk” through 26 images of the exhibit installed; click to view each of the 125 works in the show more closely, focus in on images of dozen of details and click to read more about each of the artists in the exhibition. “Images of individual works of art online are commonplace,” says Tom Grotta, president of browngrotta arts. “We have tried, instead, to give viewers a sense of the work in space, combined with the option of looking more closely at the pieces that interest them, just as they would have if they were visiting the exhibit in person.”

The artists in the 10th Wave III are experimenting with forms and techniques in novel and surprising ways, exploring new relationships among structure, design, color, and pattern.” They work in a wide range of materials from silk, stainless steel and rubber to recycled raincoats and linen to tree bark, safety pins and telephone books. Among the artists in the online exhibition are Lewis Knauss, Lia Cook, Gyöngy Laky from the US, Sue Lawty from the UK, Ritzi Jacobi from Germany, Jin-Sook So from Sweden, Carolina Yrarrázaval from Chile and Hisako Sekijima and Jiro Yonezawa from Japan.

The 10th Wave III: Online runs through December 20, 2009.

In Process: Randy Walker

September 7, 2009 0 Comment

To accommodate the tensile nature of fiber, Randy Walker seeks out frameworks that can act as looms, or creates his own, like this corncrib in Kalamazoo. “I scour my environment for suitable materials, like a spider trying to locate a site to build its web,” he explains. “These frameworks can be found objects like saw blades or window screens, or they can be architectural spaces, but they must be satisfactory structurally and sculpturally. I am, therefore, intensely engaged with the materials I use, studying them for cues as to how I might handle them. These armatures eventually define a working method for a particular piece.”

This installation, Woven Corncrib, is part of the Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo) Sculpture Tour. National and international artists are commissioned to create and install work on the campus for two years. It was originally installed in Falcon Heights, Minnesota from 2004-9, using remnants of marine rope of various types. At WMU it was completely rewoven with a flat braid of 100% solution-dyed acrylic. The weaving process took two weeks of solid work. Although the installation will be up for two years, the braid material is expected to last much longer in terms of both color-fastness and material degradation.

“For quite some time I have been interested in how fiber might be used in public artwork on large scales in a world where public art is predominantly seen by commissioning agencies as ‘permanent,’ ‘no-maintenance,’ etc. In other words: concrete, stone, steel,” Randy says. “While these more traditional materials are more permanent, even they need maintenance. Because there is often no funding or planning associated with maintenance of these “permanent” pieces, there are many around the country in states of decay. With the technological advances being made in fiber, and a fundamental shift in thought of what a work of public art could, I believe that it is possible to create art that has a planned maintenance, or regenerative potential. The Woven Corncrib is an example. It is re-woven, and a new piece is born from the old.”

Woven Corncrib, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, photos courtesy of Randy Walker.