As our culture relocates into digital realms, numerous artists have returned to a studio practice grounded in “doing” and “making.” New Image Sculpture unites the work of artists who freely borrow from the worlds of ethnographic and material culture, folk art, fashion, hobby crafts, DIY and the shelves of Home Depot.
Featured image is Yardsale (2008) by Jade Townsend, reproduced from New Image Sculpture.
"In seventeenth-century Holland, realism merged with metaphor to create a remarkable subset of still-life panting: the vanitas, in which exactingly observed objects served as carriers of moral lessons or spiritual meaning… In the modern area, the vanitas painting, along with the once popular still-life tradition, has fallen out of fashion. Symbolic use of everyday objects, however, lives on in countless sculptures and installations in which artists painstakingly reproduce ordinary manufactured items that surround us every day. This tendency, considered here under the rubric New Image Sculpture, shares both the fidelity to vision and the metaphoric approach to the everyday world that animated the Dutch vanitas. While new image sculptors are not as narrowly focused on issues of mortality and guilt as their seventeenth-century ancestors, they do reveal that mass-produced objects are important elements in today’s artistic vocabulary… By shinning a spotlight on the world's objects, so often hidden in plain sight, and remaking them out of unexpected material, the artists evoke a world of desire, dread, nostalgia, and comedy that envelops us all the time."
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 9.5 in. / 128 pgs / 190 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $47.5 GBP £30.00 ISBN: 9780916677558 PUBLISHER: McNay Art Museum AVAILABLE: 3/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by McNay Art Museum. Text by Eleanor Heartney, Rene Paul Barilleaux.
As our culture relocates into digital realms, numerous artists have returned to a studio practice grounded in “doing” and “making.” New Image Sculpture unites the work of artists who freely borrow from the worlds of ethnographic and material culture, folk art, fashion, hobby crafts, DIY and the shelves of Home Depot.
