Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Casey Curran

Casey Curran is a sculptor who creates kinetic pieces that move with a manual crank. His older works of art consist of kinetic pieces that are mantled onto books. Most if not all of his works consist of wires and levers that when cranked moves the entire piece. His artwork style blends the hard mechanical feel of metal with the soft and organic feel of nature since most of his works are resemblances of nature. What inspired me about his work is that the complexity of it all and how everything moves together by one lever. You can see the dedication and time put into his work and he makes us look as artist books in a different way for a medium. It makes me want to try making kinetic pieces after watching videos of his work in action.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Katherine Westerhout

Katerine Westerhout is an artist that has collective works dealing with urban decay. Her photos most commonly consist of old abandoned buildings. What makes her work unique is the attention to detail and the dreamlike lighting that she captures in her photographs. Her work has been used to benefit the preservation of some of the old buildings and gives the public a different perspective on aesthetics. She gives new meaning to beauty by capturing it through places that people would normally overlook. Her work is inspiring because it's untraditional and let's us know that anything can be a good subject for a photograph.

Edward Burtynsky part 1

In this video, it showed works from an artist named Edward Burtynsky. His work focused on photographic documents about recycling and waste and the people that have to live and work under these conditions. The recycled goods that come from America are shipped to China to be sifted through by hand. All the things we buy and throw away affect people that are on the other side of the world directly. Not only does it affect that certain individual and the place that they live in but as well as the surrounding habitats that have to deal with the chemical run off from the recycling towns in China. In India, natives have to disassemble oil tankers that were used to ship oil over to our country. They are paid low wages for working under dangerous conditions. His documentary made me more aware of how consumerism in America can negatively affect third world countries and the environment around it. His work is beautiful yet eerie and leaves the audience with a better understanding about what goes on in the world.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010