Neil is once again in for a win with the article he sent me on his recent trip back to America, to Rochester – Memorial Art Gallery has a phenomenal show up it appears, Extreme Materials 2, and many of the artists included in the show are using techniques and materials I’m digging. Once of those artists is New York artist, Nick Kozak.
Nick uses ordinary materials, mass-produced ones, to create his artwork – and he has a great tale of how he came to these forms. He moved to Taiwan a place he associated with toys from his childhood, which were discarded as he aged, after he graduated from college. From there he decided to make the “extraordinary from the ordinary.”
He seems to find solace in the repetitive patterns that emerge in his works – in the above cases, Chinese soup spoons, which are a consistent material for him it appears. As he notes in his artist statement, “there is power in numbers” and the synchronized stacks he gets lost in at the grocery store are representative of the mass of objects, all the same, out there in the world.
I love what people can come up with out of everyday objects – these could be great, urchin-like lamps and wall panels even.
The sculptures he creates out of these spoons are very neat – this one looks like a cobra to me. It’s cool how this teardrop shape fits so snuggly into itself.
This is masking tape – similar to the beehive of Pia I looked at a few weeks ago – colored masking tape I guess in this case, made into rings. I’m not entirely sure how it was created.
The above piece is from Nick’s Inflatables series, it’s nylons, over latex balloons, inflated. The variation of sizes in the balloons is pretty cool – it created a neat visual.
The spoons are also turned into wall art installations by Nick – I think I may like these better than the sculptures above but I’d love to see a whole room covered in them (ceiling too) – I feel like this could be more intense!
This piece, Houglasses, reminds me to much of Ernesto Neto’s work its crazy – though I don’t believe sand comes through Ernesto’s work – the gravity, nylon pulling appearance is really similar but on a smaller scale.
This is another set of latex balloons inside nylons, inflated. I think of all the pieces of Nick’s this is my favorite – so very cool and I love the color.
Tags: ordinary materials, recycling, repetitive, sculpture