Saturday, August 05, 2006

Nature/ Culture at Society For Contemporary Craft

Stacy Levy
Fran Reed
Willie Cole

Here are some images I took friday night at the new show at the Society For Contemporary Craft. The show is great and I hope to upgrade this post a bit. Once again I have to try to capture a show with a pretty poor camera because there are almost no images put online. From what I can see on thier website there is not even a link to a press release or a list of artists in the show. Anyway the show seems great and actually has a fancy catalog to buy.

Here is a tiny blurb from the website- "This exhibition compares works by contemporary artists who identify with culture and the byproducts of an urban society with artists who respond to nature and the natural environment."

Basically, the common thread is artists who use the most mundane materials in thier work. Drinking Straws, Fish Skin, Orange Peals, Shoes, Pens etc... The show is Awsome on a lot of visual and conceptual levels but does raise some rather interesting questions. A few of the artists like Willie Cole are known members of the contemporary art world, while others come from the Contemporary Craft scene. Putting them in one space in a show like this shows just how strange and arbritrary the line is between the two worlds. The easiest way to tell which label the artist wore was to look at the prices on the work. I will try to get back to that issue when I get my head around it.

Of course there were other openings in other areas of the city on the same night and I got to a few on Penn Ave in Garfield.


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