Nov 232023
 

ALIVE! by artist Jeffrey Gibson was created for the first edition of the biennial Desert X in 2017, and is on view in the sculpture garden of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

It was recently announced that Gibson was selected by the U.S. State Department to represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, and will be the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the event.

The artist’s statement about the work from the Desert X site-

ALIVE! is a found object ready made sculpture altered with paint and text that reads: I am alive! You are alive! They are alive! We are living!

I chose to work with a wind turbine blade because of how it alters one’s perceptions when they look out across the desert landscape. They are enormous and when viewing one up close you get a sense of the expansiveness of the desert landscape that they occupy. They are also really beautiful in form and their shape reminds me of something like a wing, a fin, or a bone from a massive whale. The text references the people who live in Palm Springs and the original indigenous people who occupied this land and their belief that the landscape is living.

Nov 112022
 

Bosco Sodi’s outdoor sculpture installation, Perfect Bodies, presented by Pioneer Works, was on view in Redhook, Brooklyn from October 2020 until December 2020.

From Pioneer Works’ press release-

Sited on a once teeming commercial concrete parking lot two blocks south of Pioneer Works, Perfect Bodies speaks to, in artist Bosco Sodi’s words, “silence, contemplation and the passing of time—the small things in life and our relationship with the earth.” The installation consists of large-scale clay spheres and cubes made from local clay fired in the artist’s studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, which made the long journey by road across the Mexico-US border to Red Hook. A longtime resident of the neighborhood—itself named after the tone of its own clay soil—Sodi is known for his use of raw and organic materials to create textured paintings and objects.

Sodi’s ongoing dialogue with nature and landscape, shaped by his interests in Japanese aesthetics and Abstract Expression, puts himself in the lineage of both Arte Povera and Land Art—two post-war movements which emphasized, respectively, radically simple materials and an integral relationship between art and earth. As Spanish author Juan Manuel Bonet remarked in the artist’s 2020 eponymous monograph, his three dimensional works reconcile an interest in minimalism with the practices of Mexican heritage. On this topic, curator Dakin Hart further writes: “At his place in Oaxaca, Sodi hand forms large geometric sculptures from clay and fires them in a makeshift kiln on the beach. Cuboids in different formats recall the scale and how-did-they-do-that-craft of cyclopean architecture across the ancient world. While spheroids, each formed by eye in a landscape of unbelievable things, might be the petrified remnants—or organic vanguard—of a Jurassic invasion. The past seeding itself into the present, a starting point for nature’s revenge.”

Currently, as part of Art Biennale 2022, Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro is showing What Goes Around Comes Around at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, in Venice, Italy, until November 27th, 2022.  The art installation will include his paintings as well as recent sculptures.