Artists on the Cutting Edge
Written by Addison Fach, December 01, 2017
Kumi Yamashita: Shadow Art
This artist uses light and shadow as a medium for her stunning artwork. Born in Japan and currently living in New York City, Kumi Yamashita studied fine arts in Seattle and Glasgow and has won several awards for her work. Yamashita brilliantly pieces together everyday objects and aligns perfectly with a light source to create images with shadows. Her work explores light and shadow in an entirely new dimension, bringing life to otherwise dull objects. The simplicity of the medium of light is perhaps the most intriguing thing about this kind of art, the light and dark compliment each other to create something; in the darkness, there is no art. The extraordinary way this artist manipulates light and seems to literally sculpt shadows out of the air puts her at the top of our list for cutting edge artists.
Guy Laramee: Carved Book Landscapes
This unprecedented art form takes books and transforms them into intricately detailed landscape carvings. Artist Guy Laramee is one of the pioneers of the art form know as ‘altered books’ in which the pages of a book are manipulated to change the appearance of the book. Altered book art can make a powerful statement. Using books as a medium gives the artwork a deeper contextual meaning, as if to take the words themselves and shape them into something new, changing their very meaning. One of Guy Laramee’s more notable works uses an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica, carved into a beautiful and incredibly real looking landscape (see the video above).
Ai Wei Wei
Contemporary artist and political activist Ai Wei Wei has been in the news lately for a number of controversial art displays. One of his more recent displays is a collection of fourteen thousand lifejackets from refugees who crossed the Mediterranean from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos. Ai Wei Wei’s work is often attributed to political activism. One of his most famous exhibitions which has been featured at London’s Tate Modern Museum consists of one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, each of which was painstakingly handcrafted and painted by workers from a village in China. This piece focuses on the ‘made in China’ phenomenon and the sheer volume of exports China has produced in the wake of the new era of globalization. This style of art belongs to a movement known as Excessivism, which uses mass quantity and repetition to examine ideas such as capitalism, materialism, and politics.
Felice Varini: Anamorphic Illusions
The purpose of art, as many artists would argue, is to help us see the world in new ways and unique perspectives. Felice Varini’s real life optical illusions certainly help us to see things from a different view. Varini’s work challenges our perceptions by placing hidden, two-dimensional images in three-dimensional space which can only be seen from one specific point of view. These images take ordinary spaces, a city block, a train station, etc, and turns them into a jaw-dropping display that forces us to question our own senses.
