three artists
Elvira M. Dayel
Sharon Kyle Kuhn
Victoria Welling
Elemental, broken up and reassembled, cut up further and fragmented to make a new whole; invented and re-imagined is the nature of the urban environment of today. As urbanites we are surrounded by the man-made hardscaped surfaces. It is an ever changing eye candy or open blight. New and aging urban landscapes become a metaphor for searching. Artists are searching for the new meaning through deconstructing and re-imagining, locating known pieces into suggested created new environments of their own work. Artists are drawing new connections, while re-drawing existing boundaries, abstracting shapes, combining disparate elements, suggesting and assigning them new meanings all the while inventing their own version of the landscape. Consumption in habitation results in the broken systems where as a result new systems must arise. Modern notion of the landscape where it became to be viewed as an absolute construct of the human activity, shifts and morphs, taking newer and further more elegant definitions. Vision of this new “habitat”, where the process of making art is the new landscape, allows for more of new artwork to “move-in” and “inhabit” the specific environment. Sometimes inspired by the small details of the street, a creative spirit of an urban nomad, or the philosophical dilemmas of the day feed artwork to become a scape for experimentation.
Sharon Kyle Kuhn investigates chaos and overlooked beauty of daily life through the use of irregular pieces of wood and industrial materials. She puts fragmented pieces of construction debris into an orderly composition that is tightly held together by structure; she explores the small details of urban life that most people describe as ugly and often overlook. Victoria Welling utilizes familiar organic & inorganic materials yet she re-contextualizes them in surprising ways. Many a time materiality of her sculpture stimulates sensory response. The artist invites the viewer to experience her sculpture & engage in the dialogue of what’s beautiful or repulsive. Elvira Dayel works in series of large abstract works of drawings, her work may be described as conceptually surreal influenced by modern architecture, spatial organization and various aspects of human in-habitation. While she sees herself as a minimalist in that each pieces uses only as much as needed to convey an idea, she does not shy away from the use of strong carefully considered color and bold geometric form.
Each work, each landscape exploration creates a parallel reality & carries its own vision. Together these three artists investigate the need for balance while exploring the unavoidable conflicts in our life.