Marcelino Vicente

In the rural Mexican state of Michoacán, devils, mermaids, saints, sun gods, and drunks can all be found mixing it up and having a great time. Each of these characters, and many more, inhabit the strange universe depicted in sculptures produced in the tiny town of Ocumicho.

These bizarre pottery tableaux feature hybrid scenes from everyday life, religious allegories, and native folklore, all borne from the mind of a unique young man named Marcelino Vicente. Resembling Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish landscapes from the 1500s, but with a Catholic-folk art twist, these ceramic fantasies are found nowhere else. Yet during the 1960s, Vicente’s eccentric lifestyle was perceived as a threat to the town’s social hierarchy, which ultimately destroyed him for being different.

Don Lewis, an artist and collector of Mexican folk art, says the strangeness of Ocumicho pottery first caught his eye in a Santa Fe antiques shop nearly 20 years ago. “Just the life in it, the colors, the craziness of it,” says Lewis. Before he knew it, Lewis was purchasing Ocumicho pieces to decorate his home.

“The first one I ever bought was very simple, nothing too weird about it. It was just two people—a woman and a man—out in an agave field, picking agave to make tequila. The second one was like a man in the moon, but it’s more of a sun face with really sharp teeth. Then another one came along, and I started noticing the devils.” These miniature devil figures, or diablitos, are a particularly striking element of Ocumicho sculptures.

 

Related articles

The Curious Tale of Mexico's Most Peculiar Pottery

Edgar "Saner" Flores

Edgar "Saner" Flores is an urban artist, muralist, professor, illustrator & graphic designer.  Raised by his parents in Mexico City and surrounded by rich color and tradition, Saner developed an interest in drawing and Mexican Muralism early on.  "I visited Oaxaca a lot when I was growing up because my mother is from there, and certain traditions which they carried out there really caught my attention."  He began expressing himself on paper and through graffiti art, later going on to earn a degree in graphic design from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.

 

His lively & humorous images of masked characters on public walls, found objects and other canvases are influenced by Mexican custom and folklore, color, mysticism, masks, and skulls.  A mix of these lifelong interests and passions has led him to become the artist he is today.  "The masks that I use are traditional masks from Mexico."  The jaguars, coyotes, skulls, and other recurrent characters appear in my work because that parallel world is the real self, the real face. "

 

Saner's work has been featured in galleries in Mexico, the United States, London, Berlin and Barcelona.  Recent projects & exhibitions include "Kidnap Express," Mid-City Arts Los Angeles, "Nose Job," Eric Firestone Gallery East Hamptons NY, "The Bone yard Project," Tucson Arizona, "The Bone yard: Return Trip," Pima Space & Air Museum, "The Wynwood Walls," Miami/Art Basel.  He has collaborated with Kidrobot, Vans, G-Shock, HQTR Canada, Pineda Covalin, Persigna Store, Bacardi, Adidas Mexico, Televisa, and many others.

 

MEXICO CITY'S SANER - CATHARSIS - ART EXHIBIT TRAILER - OPENING SATURDAY OCTOBER 27, 2012 - NEW IMAGE ART from THE CINEMA on Vimeo.

Gavin Worth

Gavin Worth, is a self-taught sculptor from San Francisco, CA now living in Cairo, Egypt. He makes sculptures out of steel wire by bending them into what are essentially freestanding line drawings.  They are fluid, engaging and often emblematic.

Images of the work are located here: http://www.gavinworth.com/herback.html  In 2012, he made his first large scale work in the same vein as the wire sculptures in a town near Cognac, France. Here is a short video showing his process and the final product:

 

Petros Chrisostomou

Petros Chrisostomou and his art are multi faceted. Petros is a Cypriot, raised in London and currently living and working in New York. His art is essentially photography, which would not exist without his work in sculptural model making.

According to Tina Pandi, Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, "Petros Chrisostomou photographs small-scale, ordinary, ephemeral objects in architectural models that he constructs himself, and then dramatically arranges, often employing lighting and staging conventions of the theatre. With the alteration of scale and reversal of the relation between object and environment, between imaginary and real space, his photographs challenge the viewer's visual certainties. The illusionary effect he achieves highlights the artist's playful approach, which fluctuates between mimicry of the real world and construction of a surreallistic reality.

In his photographs, the exuberant assemblage of objects in luxurious interiors - resembling wreckage from some disaster -create paradoxical still lifes that parody the traditional memento mori style of the genre. In his works Rococo bluff I and Rococo bluff 2, the objects he creates out of balloons, chewing gum, fabric and glasses are freed of their ordinary use and become dynamic protagonists. Similarly, the details of the rococo set consist of everyday objects, functioning as contemporary cultural signifiers. Christosomou's photographs become the field for mixing the high- and the low-brow, mass culture and genre painting, the luxurious and the expendable, as indications of social class distinctions. At the same time, the relations between the real and the imaginary in his oeuvre are a commentary on the mediated images of contemporary mass media that distort the natural and immediate dimension of our relation to reality, determining, among other things, the conditions for viewing and receiving art."

The artist himself describes his mission in the following video:

Jayanthi Moorthy

 Jayanthi Moorthy is an artist whose work contains deep spiritual elements with a well of vibrant colors and energies.

She explains,  "I try to depict the material and the metaphysical aspects of life. For the material aspect, I use subjects from nature, as I perceive their organic forms, texture, lines and colors. For the metaphysical aspects, I draw inspiration from the inner spirituality that manifests in the everyday lives of Asian women. I enjoy depicting their social, cultural and spiritual conflicts. They display a mixture of beauty, strength and weakness.

Each canvas is a message, composed from calligraphy, acrylics, oil pastels, ink and paper collages, and made with non-artist tools (like a comb, the broom, a stub, bare hands etc.). The heavy textures and vibrant colors are probably narrative of my responsiveness to the varying cultures of the east and west. My canvases are longish, un-stretched pieces of cloth and paper that can be rolled away like a scroll that is carrying a message."

Jayanthi talks about her art in this short video:

 

Shawn Michael and Rachel Eva

Shawn Michael and Rachel Eva are Work of My Hands, an artist team in San Diego. Their new work explores lighting as an artistic element in sculpture, designed to highlight organic textures and industrial elements. Working with lighting adds so many dimensions to a piece of art, and with these sculptures, they love giving a great big kick in the pants to traditional lighting, and providing pieces of interest and fascination that intrigue the viewer. 

They have a video related to a Kickstarter project launched in 2012, that demonstrates some of their work.  You can see it here: Electricity in Art: Sculptural Lighting

Susan MacWilliam

Susan MacWilliam is an extraordinary video artist whose work was just selected to represent Northern Ireland with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. I love her subject matter.

MacWilliam’s method involves the investigation of individual cases particularly those relating to the paranormal, the supernatural and to perceptual phenomena. Using video, photography and installation MacWilliam has made work about materialisation mediums, table tilters, optograms, trance, dermo optical perception and x-ray vision. MacWilliam works extensively with archives and direct first hand contact with research bodies and figures significant to the narratives. The use of interview and documentary processes as portraiture is explored. The works provide a historical visual record and interpretation of particular cases within the history of parapsychology and psychical research.

In 2008 MacWilliam completed a residency in Winnipeg where she researched the Thomas Glendenning Hamilton Spirit Photograph Collection housed at the University of Manitoba Archives. MacWilliam has worked with the Parapsychology Foundation, New York since 2006 and was artist in residence in 2007. She has made a number of video works based on the Irish medium and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation, Eileen J Garrett. These works have been exhibited alongside archival photographs of mediums from the collection of the psychical researcher Harry Price in 'Seeing is Believing' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, as a solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils Gallery, London and at the Harland and Wolff Drawing Offices, Belfast.

In October 2008 MacWilliam attended Utrecht II, Charting the Future, a conference co-organised by the Parapsychology Foundation. In her role as Parapsychology Foundation Film Archivist MacWilliam recorded this conference for the Foundation’s archives. In 2007 she attended the Parapsychological Association Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she met many leading researchers including Stanley Krippner, Rex Stanford, Bill Roll and Erlendur Haroldsson.

Visit Susan MacWilliam's website for more information and a sampling of her work.