Nick Van Woert

Nick Van Woert is a sculptor living in Brooklyn. He builds on existing forms to create a new and unusual remix. Van Woert works with metal, glues, resins, and foil tape among other things. His studio resembles a good humored science lab mixed with an impractical, architectural model shop. Van Woert recently graduated from Parsons MFA program, previously having completed a degree in architecture.

Charles Clary

Charles Clary layers colored paper to build up variegated textures and sinewy shapes into large scale installations. His constructions appear ever-expanding, overwhelming exhibition spaces like replicating viruses or reverberating sound waves. The pieces may look like they’re highly orchestrated precision-cut sculptures, but Clary favors a more organic creative philosophy: “It’s all intuitive. It’s just one layer playing off another, playing off another,” he says. “But I do try to make the viewer wonder whether they’re handmade or if industrial equipment is used, so I have to be very clean with my cuts.”

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is a contemporary artist known for his alteration of preexisting media — such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes — to create new, transformed works of visual fine art. Dettmer was influenced heavily by working in a sign shop where his work transformed to explore the relationship between text, images, language, and codes, including paintings based on braille, Morse Code, and American Sign Language. He began to make work by pasting newspapers and book pages to canvas and tearing off pieces. In 2000, Dettmer started to experiment by gluing and cutting into books. He selectively removes portions to reveal what's inside, though never inserts or moves the contents.

     

Alyson Shotz

New York City artist Alyson Shotz replicates nature as many of us experience it—interfaced with technology and filtered through culture; tamed, trimmed, and patented. Working in a variety of media, from large-scale installations to digital photography and painting, Shotz is intrigued by the notion of nature as “purely a human construction.” Some of her artworks are artificial versions of living things like trees, plants, and flowers. In one of her installations, bamboo reeds are made of wrapped cotton swabs, pools and droplets of water are suggested by mirrors, insects and flowers merge in suspended swarms of glossy petal and wing shapes, and house plants are equipped with their own rubber feeding tubes and wheels for easy transport.

Emily Barletta

Emily Barletta's artwork explores ideas of emotional and physical memory and survival. For most of her life, she has been in physical pain due to a spinal deformity. Making art started out as a way to express this and filter the pain’s affects out, but it has evolved into much more than just that. Each object is a physical container that counts and records the passage of time in her life while it was being made. The thoughts, emotions, and experiences she had during this time are funneled through her preoccupation with inventing imaginary forms of flesh, blood, muscles, cells, organs, molds, diseases, plants, and topography.

ABCD3D by Marion Bataille

Marion Bataille’s simple in concept, yet cleverly designed book, ABCD3D, is an engaging, exciting and modern piece of 3D art. Pushing the notion of the simple pop-up book, it impresses from the moment you are grabbed by its lenticular cover. Marion Bataille lives and works in France. She is widely published there and this was her first book to be published in the UK.

Kim Chun Hwan

Kim Chun Hwan uses a collage technique to layer advertising prints and letters from his personal mailbox into multi-dimensional wall art. Each paper is pasted one by one, creating movement out of a sea of junk mail. He then cuts the surface, showing inside and outside, both surface and depth on the same picture plane, blurring the boundary between them and creating waves of severed folds. Advertising prints and magazines are the objects which represent the aspect of daily life vividly more than anything else. He sees his collages as neither mere exemplifications of ideas nor projections of feelings, but a way of perceiving reality at different times in everyday life and finding the identity of oneself in society.

Jim Coverley

Jim Coverley makes extraordinary works out of pillowcases and nails, which, like the work of a careful surgeon, are transformed with stitches, cuts and folds into sculptures which have both an emotional and symbolic resonance. The body is central to Coverley's art as he abstracts manages to extract the essence of pain or emotional states of being, and recreate them in troubling, three-dimensional forms. His work initially looks extremely delicate and decorative but on closer inspection it becomes increasingly disturbing, deliberately putting the viewer in an uncomfortable position. In previous works he has rendered a child's pillowcase the site of trauma and nightmares by modifying it with strange, disconcerting forms. Coverley hangs the sculptures directly onto the walls using nails, pinning the works as if the artist were performing some kind of 'rudimentary surgery'. These works play on the dualities between pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion.

Geoff Mcfetridge

Geoff McFetridge is a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles, California. He exhibits his work in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London, the Netherlands and Japan. Instinctively ignoring creative boundaries McFetridge is an all round visual auteur. From poetry to animation, from graphics to 3D work, from textile and wallpaper to paintings, McFetridge has complete control over these widely divergent disciplines. His work graces magazines, posters, t-shirts, textiles, motion graphics, and advertising.

Understatement is central to the impact of his work, inviting participation. It gets through the filters by offering the viewer an opportunity to play with a puzzle for a moment, a puzzle that doesn't have one simple answer. His work is full of hands and teeth, objects and animals, hands and heads.

'Mushrooms Ate My Furniture' by Shinwei Rhoda Yen

'Mushrooms Ate My Furniture' by designer Shinwei Rhoda Yen is a piece of garden furniture made with natural wood and embedded with mushrooms' spawn. After a time of exposure to the weather, mushrooms will grow live on the furniture. As the nutritional material from the wood is eaten by the mushrooms, the furniture will start to break down, eventually decomposing.

Peter Callesen

Peter Callesen transforms simple single sheets of white paper into meticulous sculptures. They form a playful or grotesque narrative, often without the use of color.


Snowballs, 2005
Acid free A4 80 gsm paper and glue


Eismeer (detail), 2006
Acid free A4 80 gsm paper and glue


Down the River, 2005
Acid free A4 80 gsm paper and glue


18,2 cm Tall Tower of Babel, 2005
Acid free A4 80 gsm paper and glue

Tara Donovan

For over a decade, American sculptor Tara Donovan has transformed huge volumes of everyday items into stunning works of phenomenal impact. Layered, piled, or clustered with an almost viral repetition, these products assume forms that both evoke natural systems and seem to defy the laws of nature.

Nebulous, appearing like a mist over the floor, is made of nothing more than strips of Scotch® tape. Bluffs, nearly five-foot-high forms that suggest mountain peaks or stalagmites, are actually teetering stacks of plastic buttons.


"Untitled (Styrofoam Cups)", 2003


"Untitled (Styrofoam Cups)", (detail) 2003


"Untitled (Paper Plates)," 2003


"Untitled (Paper Plates)," (detail) 2003

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Her work is on display at the Boston ICA until January 4.