Curator’s Statement: Art Spaces
Art serves many purposes in our society as well as enriching our personal lives. Living with art can be both challenging and deeply satisfying. With the boundaries of art, craft and design blurred, paintings, one-of-a-kind furniture and sculptural objects potentially inform and ultimately create a unique home environment. Whether functional or purely decorative, the artists presented in Art Spaces offer work in a wide range of media that speak to the idea of form and function in the living environment.
Cosme Herrera, through a vibrant graphic style utilizing patterned vinyl contact paper, aims to create a universal language using a system of logos, signs and symbols that manifest the use of metaphors and parables. His narratives explore life and death through the various relationships the characters and objects share ecologically, industrially, and spiritually. “I am very interested in the landscape. New technologies and contemporary materials have broadened our ideas of utility for our lands, virtually and physically, blending artifice with nature to create a neovista.” He resides and works in Brooklyn, New York.
David Hick's accumulated sculptural forms are informed, in part, by his attraction to agricultural environments, machinery, structures and natural vegetation. The mystery of his objects, lie in part, in the interpretive possibilities of associating his sculptures to objects hanging from trees, buried in the dirt or rusting in an abandoned shed. The understandings of organic and manmade mechanical forms explain the natural processes of agricultural and seasonal cycles; growth and decay.
Jo Milic, an artist/designer, incorporates his architectural training to design and construct dynamic, functional custom furnishings. He takes pleasure in the nuanced textures and colors of wood grains along with manmade materials such as stainless steel and glass. He has an inherent sense of unifying a home environment with the furniture he fabricates specific to the space.
A vivid glaze palette coupled with a sensuous design/pop sensibility is the hallmark of Raymond Gonzalez's art. He explores the interrelation of childhood and adult play coupled with desire. This interaction reflects the importance-and intrigue-of male and female relationships.
The Collectibles series confronts ideas of beauty in the surfaces and ornamentation of the art object. The concept behind Collectibles is an approach to making toys that reference the obsessive desire to collect. The lush surfaces transcend their use as playthings. The objects provide a sense of escapism, allowing the viewer to drift back to an earlier time.
The artists featured in Art Spaces create work that is visually exciting as well as unified through form, surface and texture. Each object is physically arresting in beauty as well as providing narrative content to stimulate ones imagination.