Matchstick Art

Check out these awesome sculptures by David Mach, made entirely out of matchsticks!



Apparently he sometimes sets them on fire.

Gwon Osang

Check out this guy.
He makes sculptures by photographing his subjects hundreds of times and putting the photos together into hauntingly off-kilter 3D objects.

Subodh Gupta

Very interesting artist...makes sculpture out of pots and pans:


As well as more traditional materials:

Of this bronze take on Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., Gupta says he is an "idol thief." "Art language is the same all over the world," he claims, "which allows me to be anywhere." An interesting sentiment.

San Jose Art Museum

Went for the first time today...
They have an exhibit up on Andy Warhol that I wanted to check out. The actual selection of pieces was blah--a couple rooms of screen prints that I've seen a million times before. But there was an interesting blurb about his "fascination with fame" on one wall and an informative documentary playing in one corner. The best part, though, was the little craft table in the middle of one gallery where you could combine Warhol's images (soup cans, a self portrait, and flowers) printed in black on clear plastic with your own compositions of colord paper cutouts and crayon drawings. It was neat.
Upstairs they had an exhibition called "Process as Paradigm" with works from the permanent collection and it was a great smattering of things, including Tony Oursler's Slip (2003), seen above. It's an S-shaped fiberglass sculpture with a video of a woman's mouth and lips projected onto it. Her skin looks green and there's a soundtrack of various phrases, some more intelligible than others, all emphasizing the 'sss' sound. It was both creepy and alluring; I really liked it.
There was also an exhibition of works by female printmakers, where these two aquatints:

by Pat Steir (whose work I just realized I also saw at Crown Point Press last year) really reminded me of my own work:


Other standouts:

Edward Corbett Untitled (Black Painting), 1950
(part of an exhibition on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism)


A detailed Franklin Williams 1972 thread and fabric canvas kind of like the one above.

Greek Drapery

Inspired by metope 27 on the Parthenon (above), I attempted to create a free-standing sculpture of the drapery worn by the Lapith at left. The fabric stiffening methods I tried didn't work, so I ended up draping the sheet I was using over some string I tacked to the wall:

Later it was pointed out to me that it resembled the back of Praxiteles' sculpture of Eirene and Pluto:

Beautiful, isn't she? Wish my "sculpture" had turned out better. Maybe I'll try it again sometime.

Leo Villareal's Multiverse

I took this video at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's not the best quality but you get the idea. It was really cool to walk through, especially emerging into I.M. Pei's East Wing Building, with a basement full of contemporary art, on the other side.

Yuichi Higashionna Fluorescent Chandeliers

This Japanese artist is currently having his first one-man show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in NYC.

Expanding

This morning I finally managed to remember to stop by Stanford's own Thomas Welton Art Gallery on my way home from class to see the current exhibit there, "Expanding." The show consists of pieces by eleven Bay Area artists that, in the words of the curators, "pulls you out of a routine and plants you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by offering a fenestration on the unfamiliar and a new context to the familiar. When contemplating expansion one might think of the expanding universe, the expansion of landscape, or expanding one's mind..."
The piece pictured above is Shims: Thousands of Uses-Use #17 by Christine Lee. It's a number of wooden slats jammed together in a constrained space to create intriguing fluctuating patterns. The installation "alludes to the composition of geological equivalents of sediment transformed by wind...[and] melds the architecture and natural environment seamlessly."
I was also particularly taken with Katie Lewis' Parallel Evidence, another site-specific installation of thousands of pins pushed into the wall in patterns reflecting bodily sensations, with a mirror image of pin holes and numbered markings directly opposite.
I also loved Jesse Houlding's Ferrous Wheel, an intricate piece of machinery that drags a magnet in a perfect circle across the back of a sheet of paper, thus also dragging rusty iron filings across its front that leave a reddish brown trail behind them. Next to the working machinery hangs a roll of paper with a completed circle on it, and it seems to raise up from the paper and even slightly pulse.
I took these pictures with my cameraphone, so they're not the best quality!
Ferrous Wheel, with extra rolls of paper to the side:

Close-up of the filings on their endless journey across the paper:

The finished circle (note the places where falling filings left traces down the bottom of the sheet):

All in all, a very interesting show.