Things Come Alive: The Art of Olga Lah
By Essay Issue 80
OLGA LAH DID NOT start out wanting to wrap buildings in electrician’s tape, fill huge spaces with billows of crumpled paper, or line galleries with great swathes of plastic bottle caps. She did not set out to be an artist at all—let alone one catching the attention of the art world in Los Angeles and even…
Read MoreFrom Specimen to Spectacle: The Unruly Art of Dayton Castleman
By Essay Issue 80
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation takes place…. —Marcel Duchamp BACK WHEN MY KIDS were very young and I rarely had a moment to myself, I once managed…
Read MoreCarnal Beauties: The Art of Allison Luce
By Essay Issue 80
CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…
Read More