Monica Cook’s Volley features a full cast of blemished bedazzled half-human, half-monkey sculptures. When I asked one viewer what he thought his response was, “It’s pretty dark, I mean, this ain’t no Winnie the Pooh you know …”
Sarah Walko
Sarah Walko was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. She is a multimedia sculptor, installation artist and writer. She is currently the executive director of Triangle Arts Association, and is art director with the independent film collective Santasombra which shows at International Film Festivals around the world. She is currently working on new sculpture, writing and web/film collaborations and has just completed several exhibitions in New York. You can find out more at her website: www.sarahwalko.com.
All articles by Sarah Walko
Sarah Walko
The Skybridge Art & Sound Space inside the Eugene Lang College currently has an installation on view until January 31, 2012. Artifix Mori, by John Ensor Parker and Jason Krugman, both visiting artists in the visual arts program at Eugene Lang, is paradoxically whimsical and ominous in its collision of science, nature, art and technology.
In October I had the opportunity to go to the opening of Tour and Trance, Matt Blackwell’s exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery. It’s a strange animated narrative that contains a whole cast of characters experiencing events and simultaneously forming and disintegrating in one moment. That evening we had some conversations on his life and thoughts and the stories that came out felt like some of the missing puzzle pieces. So, we began a conversation. I realized, I didn’t want to ask him the details behind specific pieces or anything detailed in general. I wanted to ask him vague open questions with a lot of room for rambling so we could meander around in his thought process the way his paintings meander around this weird world.
Perhaps from embarrassment or hitting a deep seated pain. A sensitive nerve that doesn’t like to be touched or exposed. Whatever the particular cause, its effect is a shutter that runs down the spine. A quivering sensation starting at the nape of the neck and rolling like a barbed ball of wire down each vertebrate, prickling until it strikes the tailbone and exits the body. The shoulders shift a bit at the beginning to reorient their position, and the back wiggles at the release of each tingle. There is an old adage that instructs ‘shake it off’ when something upsetting occurs. This advice incited our inquiry.
“Occupy Wall Street and the Right to Protest: What’s Next?” was a conversation which took place yesterday on the heels of The New School’s Teach-in on October 22. The event highlighted the perspectives of critical theorists, historians, lawyers and sociologists and presented their predictions for the future of public protests.
When director Victor Ruano was a teenager, he wanted to make a movie that could reflect in time, sound and images what that still painting said to him. In his mind, it stood as a description of certain aspects of his society and the country of El Salvador. He would dare to say, that in a sense El Cadáver Exquisito is that painting at 24 frames per second. This image is superimposed onto a billboard in the beginning of the film and serves as a kind of table of contents of what is to come. It stands as a form of dialogue in time, between generations, and through conflicts.
Sarah makes small matchbook sculptures that are designed to be left in public spaces. They are intimate art works that are part of the ritual of her practice. She believes in the words of Margaret Meade, who said, “When justice is lost, we have ritual. We need more ritual in our daily lives.”
