Our Blog Has Moved

Hello friends! We have created a new website and moved our emerging art blog over there www.fillintheblankgallery.com/emerging-art-blog. We hope you will continue to visit us and comment on your favorite artists! We have also included a lot of other fun stuff so make sure to look around the whole website.

Joshua Hershman

I ran across this  today while looking up some other glass artists and was totally blown away by Josh Hershman’s work! Hershman creates cast glass replicas of many types of cameras and embeds photographic images in some of them by sandblasting the images onto the object and then applying enamels into the recessed areas. He then adds more layers of glass and then refires the entire form. The cast cameras are then perched atop tripods and in some instances the image that is in the camera has been printed and hung on the wall behind the piece.

Jersey Glass Art has a great write up of his work and I think they say it best:

“By taking photographs and joining them together with glass, he is able to link two diverse vocabularies into a unique sculptural vernacular. As these ideas and images connect, the natural play of light and optics inherently found in glass imitates the actual process of taking pictures and exposing negatives. Using the camera as a starting point for his creative process, he attempts to emphasize the beauty of its design and function by focusing on how images shape our memories, dreams and consciousness.”

As a glass worker myself who is interested in the interplay of using glass and photography together I think this is an amazing execution on the marriage of the two ideas. He is currently showing at PISMO Gallery in Denver Colorado and the images shown below are from his current show, Day Residue.  It runs from November 6-25th 2009 and I encourage you to check it out if your in the Denver area!

More of Hershman’s work and experience can be found on his website, http://www.hershmanglass.com/

Gitte Jungersen

Gitte Jungersen is an artist from Denmark that is very active in the Danish experimental ceramic scene. She creates other-worldly landscapes with crater-like surfaces. The objects placed in these landscapes are often animal figurines taken from children’s bedrooms or found in second-hand shops. Much of her work deals with hallucinatory imagery, the psyche, and an invitation into a dream world where logic no longer exists and anything is possible.

Rikke Rosenberg, curator at The Danish Museum of Art and Design writes: “Gitte Jungersen is a player on the younger ceramists’ scene who has consciously chosen to challenge ceramics’ traditions, both before and after modernism, with new techniques and artistic strategies. Her pieces are polysemantic conceptual works – which carry references to primeval history, fairytales, fables, pop, surrealism and science fiction. High culture and popular culture enter in on an equal footing in Jungersen’s works. In doing so, her pieces lay down a gauntlet before the trappings of “good taste”. In a singularly wonderful way, Jungersen is linking up galaxies, dream scenes, everyday life and metamorphoses in her ceramic landscape sceneries. With a special signature admixture of childlike innocence, grotesque dreams, crack-brained weirdness and cosmic hallucinations, she is transforming the ceramic object into the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Gretchen Huffman

Hello all! Sorry for the lag in blogging, after Kristen’s amazing wedding last week we are all finally settling back down into the normal routine of things again!

Gretchen Huffman is a printmaker whose work reflects on the idea of stories, imagination and interpretation.

“I love stories, I am continuously fascinated with the strange and humorous occurrences that happen in my everyday life. Stories grow out of these events and, far from being a didactic re-telling of the factual events, good stories are “delivered” replete with embellishment, nuance and theatricality that serve to communicate the emotional states that accompany the story. Awe, curiosity, disgust, disbelief and especially humor are the emotional reactions that tell me a story is a good one. As an artist of course my interest is in the visual detail contained in these narratives. As I recount events in my head they exists in acute detail with all the vivid splendor of that detail. My work spins out of that narrative detail, not to illustrate a verbal story, but to visually portray my exaggerated imagination and interpretation of events.”

-Gretchen Huffman

www.gretchenhuffman.com

(The artist featured today is actually having a show opening Nov.6th at our gallery in Lincoln Square, so if you like her work you should definitely come check it out in person too!)

Georgia Russell

Sorry we’ve been so absent from posting lately! I (Kristen) am getting married this Saturday and its been keeping all of us pretty busy. For the exciting things that are happening over at {fill in the blank} check out our website: www.fillintheblankgallery.com.

For my wedding I’ve been making dozens of what I like to call book lanterns. The idea was taken from the resale shop Haystack, and we later found out they adopted it from Anthropologie, which always has FANTASTIC recycled paper art on display. They’re really easy to make, just take an old book and remove the cover. Start folding each individual page in whatever pattern you would like. It works best if you fold into the spine. As you fold the spine will start to curl around and by the time you get to the end you’ll have a fantastic sculpture!

Because I’ve spent so much time on these I’m totally crazy about recycled book art right now. I did a search and found a fantastic artist from Scotland named Georgia Russell. She “slashes, cuts, and dissects printed matter, which she then manipulates and re-constructs into extravagant, ornamental, sculptural paper-works” according to England & Co, a gallery in London that represents both emerging and established artists. “The decorative qualities and inherent potential of her found ephemera are fully exploited as she transforms books, music scores, prints, newspapers, maps or photographs – sometimes with flamboyants colour and wild cutting, or with discreet play on the subject or title of her printed matter. Her works over between object and image.”

photo credit England & Co.

photo credit England & Co.

photo credit England & Co.

photo credit England & Co.

photo credit England & Co.

photo credit England & Co.

New Artist Interview :: Mara Baker

“In my Installations I purposefully choose to use fragile materials and form tenuous relationships between them. These relationships often have the outcome of perceived failure. The water can’t fight the twenty feet of gravity; the tubing system can’t sustain the pressure and leaks, or the sponges are unable to absorb enough moisture. Yet in this failure, I am forced to accept the ambiguity of an unknown outcome and revel in the complexity which foretells this assured failure.”

-Mara Baker

Read the Interview >>>

Ana Lopez

Lopez is a graphic designer and illustrator from Colombia. Her style is playful yet mature, in both style and subject matter. Although many of her works could be viewed as children’s illustrations from a distance, a closer look shows the subtle juxtaposition of soft and hard that give an unexpected—adult—humor to her works.

Ana’s illustrations were featured in a book called The Garden of Eye Candy from Gingko Press, a book that “introduces us to immaculate illustrations that enshroud the viewer’s perception and give flight to the imagination with each adventure and every character presented.” The book is available for purchase through the Gingko Press website.

To see more of her work visit her website: www.cabizbaja.com

Ian Carpenter

Ian Carpenter is a painter from Brooklyn, NY who works mostly in colorful abstractions of dream-like landscapes. His works are playful with simple brushstrokes that create unexpected complexity and wonderment in the final product. He lists his influences as Paul Klee and Nicolas De Stael, art collectives like the Fauves and The Society of Six, and various outsider artists like Joseph Yoakum and Anna Zemankova.

Follow the artist’s blog for new paintings or buy a print from 20×200.

Girl With a Hook Sculptural Crochet

Heather Lightbody (Girl With a Hook) is completely and totally obsessed with yarn. She loves all the textures and colors…sometimes she finds herself thinking about yarn all day long. She is also obsessed with handspun yarn. All of her creations are made with handspun yarn, much of which she spins herself.

Heather has been crocheting hats for 7 years now.  She also crochets headbands, shrugs and scarves. “It’s become my life and my art. My ideas start as one thing and always seem to morph into something else by the time the end is near. That’s just how i work…the yarn and my mood show me where the hat should go,” she says.

To check out more of her amazing creations, you can go to her etsy page or to see even more examples of her work check out her flickr.

Chiho Aoshima

In the past 10 years Chiho Aoshima has made quite a splash in the world of Japanese pop art.  Her large scale fantasyscapes frequently depict surreal nature scenes incorporating images of young women and otherworldly beings.  She has no formal art training, but is a master of her computerized techniques.  Her technologically dependent style of image making falls directly inline with the Japanese pop art aesthetic, and her complex layering of color, culture, and cuteness combine to create truly enchanting and twisted views of the world.

Chiho Aoshima is a member of the Kaikai Kiki Collective of artists.  Check out their site for more of her images and links to a bunch of other super cool “Superflat” art!