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Summer 2007
Recycled Remnants
Aliza Lelah (born 1982) is a painter and photographer who has exhibited her work across the US and Europe. Despite her comfort and accomplishments in these media, she opted to create a series of 33 collage portraits of her relatives in a new medium, fabric collage, for her M.F.A. thesis in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007. Originally planning to develop the series in paint, she discovered that it "wasn't achieving what I needed it to achieve," she said. "I believe that the medium one chooses should guide the concept." Using her family as her source of inspiration, she said, "The fabric provided the tactile, familiar understanding of a material I was looking for. The cloth itself is nostalgic and reminiscent of memories." Titled "Remnants," the collection recreates scenes from family snapshots and depicts relatives--most of whom she never met. Her father's family emigrated from Iraq to Singapore and her mother's family moved from Russia and Latvia before they all came to the United States. In the series she uses bits of cloth like brush strokes -- handstitching 1/4" wide strips of recycled material from her own collection, consisting of scraps from quilts and other gifts she has made, and old clothing from people in her life. She creates depth and value on her figures by sewing pieces of cloth on top of one another. The medium is time consuming. While in graduate school she spent about 10 hours a day working on this body of work. At the moment she feels as though she has not completely exhausted the medium and will continue to grow and develop new ways to use recycled fabric. While focusing on the family photographs, Lelah rediscovered her personal relationship to them while creating a visual and stylized family tree. Visit http://www.alizalelah.com for more information.
Photographer Chris Jordan's Big Images Explore Big IssuesThe statistics are one thing - 106,000 aluminum cans consumed every 30 seconds in the United States, 60,000 plastic bags used every five seconds, 426,000 cell phones retired every day. But what do those numbers look like? That's the question photographer Chris Jordan set out to answer in his new series of images, Running the Numbers. If one picture is worth a thousand words, one of these intricately detailed large-scale prints is worth the thousands of smaller images Jordan assembles in his Seattle studio to make a statement on contemporary American culture. "It takes about a month of obsessive Photoshop work to create each image," Jordan said. "The moments of creativity are almost instantaneous, followed by painstaking, tedious detail work that feels very unartistic." Each enormous image - most prints are five feet tall and over six feet wide, and some are presented with multiple panels filling a wall - starts with some painstaking research, too. Jordan collects statistics and vets them for accuracy, then he finds a representative image and goes to work.
Jordan's previous series, Intolerable Beauty, explored mass consumption through in-situ portraits of things - a mountain of sawdust, a hoard of discarded circuit boards. He used the same journalistic method to tell the story of the devastation of New Orleans in the 2006 book, In Katrina's Wake, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster. Jordan's striking photos of things - accompany essays and poetry about the environmental consequences of the disaster. He is donating all proceeds from the nonprofit publication to Gulf Coast hurricane relief charities. The book is available for sale through our book store. An exhibit of the Katrina images at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena runs through September. To see more of Christ Jordan's work and a list of upcoming exhibits, go to www.chrisjordan.com. Temporary Art
We usually think of sculpture as art for the ages, magnificent marble cunningly crafted. But every summer, beaches across the country bloom with the most temporary of art forms - sand castles. From little kids with buckets and shovels to internationally renowned professionals, everybody can build shapes out of wet sand, which inevitably returns to the sea. Larry Nelson, who started sand sculpting just to see if he could create a structurally sound arch out of nothing more than sand and water, wrote on his website, sandhands.com, "Each sculpture is a snapshot of a moment balanced between engineering, desire, skill and many smaller influences. Unless someone knocks it over, the sculpture will stand until the next high tide. Typically, that's about twelve hours." Lucinda Wierenga who works as Sandy Feet, a professional sand sculptor and instructor on Texas' South Padre Island, says on her website, sandcastlecentral.com, "Watching sand get organized into something it didn't mean to be and won't stay as for long: sand sculpture's temporary nature may be the biggest part of its charm." While people have been digging, piling, dripping and patting sand from time immemorial, the popularity of sand sculpting as an art has flourished since the 1970s. Annual festivals and competitions are held on beaches from Maine to San Diego, Miami to Vancouver, B.C. - even the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado, thousands of miles from the nearest ocean - to give amateurs and professionals alike the chance to let their creativity loose. Materials can be limited to the sand within a certain area or a pile of a given height, or can range over hundreds of yards, containing hundreds of tons of sand. A world record attempt is currently underway at Point Sebago Resort in Casco, Maine - the goal is to build a 35-foot tall sand castle by Sept. 1. Sandcastlecentral.com offers a list of sandcastle contests all around North America by month; South Padre Island's Sand Castle Days is a fall festival at the end of October.Web CitingsSpectacular Specs
In 2003 Scott Urban, who has worn eyeglasses since he was 2 years old, rebelled against the similarity of mass-produced frames and decided to make his own. Familiar with woodworking - his mother had carved Santas and he had made furniture for his parents during high school - he made his first frames from scraps he picked up at a supply store. Over time, Urban expanded his materials to driftwood, vinyl records, beer bottles (called beer goggles), bicycle parts and aluminum. After other people saw him wearing his unique frames - and liked them - he began making some for friends and then, for their friends. Urban opened a web store for custom frames in 2005 and business is growing rapidly - he made 15 pairs between January and July 2007. He fits people who live in his home city, Chicago, in person, and can use measurements and photographs to create frames for online customers. Prices range from $500-$2,500 for frames with complex carvings.
Driftwood HorsesWe have not been able to contact the following artist but her work speaks for itself. Heather Jansch, who lives in Britain, creates lifesize horses from driftwood.
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