“Form of Light”
Keepsake Gallery
Sept 14-28
Curated by Alva CalyMayor & Braden Macdonald
This exhibit features sculptures exploring light, with donations from Artshack members and guest artists supporting Artshack’s Annual Fundraiser.
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The work:
Stoneware, alabaster, honeycomb calcite, lamp wiring Drawing from science fiction film practical effects, the artist developed forms that evoke a layered read of anatomical parts, with the overall shape referencing an eye, pregnant body, and a face, all at once. The clay bulk of the piece is cut with “windows” for alabaster and calcite elements, stones which are among the artist’s usual working materials, and which glow from within when the piece is activated. In this case, the artist was inspired by ancient use of stones as light-filtering components in Byzantine architecture, as in the Mausoleo di Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy.
Dimensions:
11" x 10" x 4"
The artist:
Angela Conant is an artist, curator, and educator in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice encompasses curatorial and artist-run projects. Conant’s experiences of childbirth, loss, neurodivergence, and medicalization, have deepened her sense of the body as fluid and unknowable outside of the mind’s eye. She presents alternate imaginings of internal bodily structures to undo, transition and reclaim human physicality in the name of bodily autonomy. Her paintings and drawings reorient the viewer to look out from inside the body. Hand-carved stone elements seep and poke through orifices, interrupting a pictorial space of trompe-l’œil tubes and arteries. In her stone sculpture, rock is rendered illusorily soft, and penetrated by latex tubing or draped over medical grab bars to reference flesh and its relationship to assistive objects. These works approach the human experience of being in a body with humility, curiosity and imagination, in sardonic contrast with the paternalistic western tendency to shelter and control.