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BOXES beyond borders

Category: Abstract

MY Life AND MY Lesson

Artist from Canada

This is La Benida Hui’s box, broken into pieces representing her “Life’s Lesson” by a hanging mobile. The Center is her art table and art tools, hanging from this space is the root of all things; Love.

On one end is the Ocean, made into a cross-like form; standing for the sacrifice of our home planet and our health at our own hands through climate change and pollution.

On the opposite end is The Green where nature items are bound together intertwined with Indigenous patterns. Symbols of whales and butterflies represent Life, Beauty and Rebirth.

Six Interconnecting Planes Of Carbon – One Diamond

I wanted to eradicate the borders of the box and create an open field, so I took the lid and four sides off and placed them flat. I then reconnected each rectangle to the other from the back by using black velvet for hinges. Once I had this field of interconnecting planes, I thought about how over time, the possibility lies the hope for the future. I then burned the field of interconnecting planes, turning the wood to carbon. Within the central rectangle (that had been the bottom of the inside of the box). I inlaid a diamond to demonstrate the reality of evolution. The piece is to be either hung or placed flat, IN THE HORIZONTAL CONFIGURATION AND NOT vertically. This is quite intentional to allow for a broader reading than a figurative (totem) placement would permit and is, I believe, visually more consistent with the concept.

Emily’s Ideas

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Emily Harrison, ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER, CITY OF PALO ALTO and Renee Winick, ARTIST.

A government building is the architecture that delineates space and frames conversations.

In the confines of that structure, Emily Harrison devotes her time and boundless energy to developing new ideas and innovations.

For her, this process becomes an explosion of joy and excitement as if sparks were shooting out in an array of twists and turns, spiraling outward, and beyond.

Heroines

I am personally concerned with spiritual and creative identity through the abstract form. I find that creating many layers in my paintings builds a foundation or history of the statement I am trying to make. I want to obliterate as much traditional form as I can, yet still evoke images through layers of paint, glazed, and stains.

Painting, for me, can be a very lonely and difficult process. It is also exhilarating. In my personal experience I find that painting is the most powerful expression of my life and a most satisfying way to express my own humanity.

Following Examples: An Exhibition

Because I am a curator and not an artist, I decided to organize a miniature show for Women Beyond Borders. The 10 featured artists were given a dimension of 1-1/4 x 2-3/4 inches and told to make something flat. The visual artists I invited are people whose work, lives and friendships have inspired and informed my life in a meaningful way.  This is an extremely personal project and I wish I could have included something by all the others whose creative lives have proven to be exceptional examples to follow.

Barbara Berk
Angie Bray
Karen Brown
Jacqueline Cooper
Eileen Cowin
Kim Cridler
Kathy Haddad
Danielle Imperiale
Sari Roden
Liza Ryan

Energy of Thought, Word and Deed

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Rita Ryder, PRESIDENT OF STRATEGIC INITIATIVES, YWCA

Our sculpture represents the day-to-day work of the YWCA, providing hope and opportunity to women and families. Our ceramic hands represent our entire, diverse community joining together to help women and families overcome critical issues that undermine their lives: homelessness, poverty, domestic violence and unemployment.

Working together, we move women and families forward—breaking the cycle of poverty and hopelessness, and improving the quality of their lives.

Intimate Fragility

We are born into an intimate relationship of close bodily contact with our mothers. Touch is so basic, the mother of all senses that we tend to take it for granted. Without our noticing it, we have gradually become less and less tactile, more and more distant and physical untouchability has been accompanied by emotional remoteness.

The most tactile receptor on our body is the skin, and with force can be torn to shreds like our emotions. The symbol and carrier of life is the egg, characteristically feminine and fragile. The shell of an egg appears hard, tough skinned, breading through to the secondary layer its protective skin, we find it thin and fragile.

Material alone can define work, if perception is directed first to the material, the ideas in the work are often undervalued and the message becomes secondary to the medium. Hemming in the box in fabricated egg I have reinforced my ideals.

Bridge Between

I have been working with the image of the moon for the past two years, which on many levels has associations with women and the universal.

As my work is largely abstract, incorporating the specificity of the form and object of “the box” was a challenge.  The association with Pandora’s box set my mind back to the beginning of humanity, the myth of creation, the fall of man, loss of innocence, knowledge, and in particular, how woman is perceived. I began wanting to turn the box into a bridge, using it as a metaphor for women’s ability to access a more open-oriented position (meaning).  A bridge gives access between two lands, worlds, positions; over what seems impassable.

The material and color of the box dictated the other components of the work.  (There is a fleshiness to cedar and clay.)  The two ceramic circles which I used, connect the bridge, continuing and expanding the human sensation into abstraction.  The work relates to lack and possibility, of balance.

Missing Piece

To me, a basic unchanging form is the most beautiful, no matter what period of art you are examining. For any material or event there exists a basic framework. Within this basic frame, there exists a core which comes through the work of art above all else.

I use many materials, but I especially like to use materials with soul in them. I then strive to create a work in which the essence of the materials shows through. I would like to create artwork with a central form of happiness, pain, or sadness.

Num-Num

There is the inside, the outside and all around, there is life, there is death and other lives, there is oneself, none and all the others, there is light, dark and dusk, there is laughter, there is brightness, transparency and it can be opaque.

There is but, maybe and also, a little, nothing, and all the colors, all the fantasies, all the eyes, all the souls, all the sounds, all the noises…

…there is everything in and under every form.

 

Untitled

Irony rescues the idea from remaining in an abstract area so it can transform itself into fact, mobility, into continuous experience.  This is the basic idea behind my work.

Taking apart the governmental apparatus in which the situation of the woman is always in the background; the critical observation of the external is accompanied by the capacity of my own recognition.  Then the work surges from a free montage of connections of images and thoughts.

Abject Expressionism

The workings of a patriarchal symbolic system have long associated culture and mind with the masculine (esteemed), and nature and body with the feminine (constantly devalued).  This work attempts to reevaluate that which is defined as inferior by deliberately using a body part that refused to fit into any particular definition. Hair– a symbol of sexual prowess (or lack of for the Western nudes)– also acts as a “momento mori”, marking lack. It is a significant abject material, highlighting the slippage between opposites, the living and the dead, the sensual and the repulsive. Because it stands at the borderline separating the inside and the outside of the body, it holds simultaneous powers of fascination and horror. The weaving and braiding of hair in this work act as a metaphor for the bonding and networking amongst women.

 

Bound – Unbound

“The child’s foot doesn’t know yet that it’s a foot,
And wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

But then stones and pieces of glass,
Streets, ladders
And the paths of the hard earth
Go on teaching the foot that it can’t fly,
That it can’t be a round fruit on a branch.
The child’s foot then was overcome, it fell
In the battle,
was a prisoner,
condemned to live in a shoe.”

From To the Foot from Its Child

By Pablo Neruda

Iamthereflectionofyoubutdoyouseetheconfusioninsideofme?

Culver City High School. Grade 11.

Inside of me there is a thin line between depression and happiness. Sometimes I dangle between the two, as if I am suspended on a wire and tied up by my own thoughts. Outside I am the reflection of everyone around me. You look at me and see yourself, see who and what you want to see. Although you look at me forever, you will forever see your own reflection and never penetrate to the inside where I am forever suspended between the two poles of my mind.

I-Eye

I/Eye is one destination of a journey, the result of dialogues with a group of close friends and family. It is a fluid look-see at the emotional, intellectual and artistic issues of life; equally, a way of looking at my art and myself. I saw the box as very personal, as the baggage or the tools, both good and bad, given to me, with which to live this life. I have set this box within a fence that is open and yet enclosed, transparent, yet opaque. It marks personal boundaries. On this fence are the eyes of friends and family sketched as we talked. Their presence is about seeing eye-to-eye, or not, having them to look out for me, helping me to look at myself with creative eyes. The box was always meant to be the most transmutable part of my project, it did change, move and let itself be affected by this interactive process. Its final form, then, is one that signifies growth – a sort of literal ‘breaking out of the box’ to explore one’s potential, whatever that may be, wherever that may lead.

 

Life Beyond the Box

A heart that is closed within myself…
Fostered by the many changes of my life
What is Life Beyond the Box?
Nothing but a complicated colorful world.

The wooden box has been left to its original color to represent the simple me. The colorful nylon lines are communication lines between my community and me. The intensity of the lines on each side of the box symbolizes the importance of the communication level. Phrases have been inscribed onto the acrylic panels to reflect the views of Life.

Emerging Woman

don’t judge me on how I look
don’t assess my usefulness with inverse proportionality to the size of my waist
you will not measure my true worth in inches
don’t use my breasts to see a product that has no connections to my body
if my thighs are large
it’s because I use them to support myself
if my stomach is rounded
it’s because it is full and fertile
my face–my eyes, my smile are not important
I am a woman and therefore beautiful.

 

Tentacles

Different lengths of ultra thin fishing wires with little wax-ends springing out from a pot of wax and resin, invite views to touch, shift, bend, change direction or distort. This work exemplifies the notion of interference, and seeks to actively engage the viewers to participate with the artwork to draw their own unique experiences from it. This activity will allow the development of patterns of collective creativity that does not merely privilege any one person’s experience.

Close to the Edge

This collaborative project focuses on the network of relationships which support the mother as she experiences changes in Self identity within the frame of Motherhood. The changing perceptions of Self, whilst universal in Motherhood, differs significantly from person to person. This project involves each member of my personal support group of expatriate mothers in Singapore, expressing their experiences of motherhood in a “foreign” environment. Through the box, I sought to express my personal experience on a theoretical basis, placed in the context of my support network. Thereby the work seeks to reveal the differing experiences and changes in the perception of self, as well as the importance of a transient support network.

Creation

This piece of art represents a woman with a steadfast and proud posture. She sits and carries in her lap the continuity of life: her own children. Her face reads of dignity. She carries on her head a pot with a dove: the symbol of love and peace. She creates and conveys life, pride and peace.
 
Medium: clay mixed with copper oxide, cobalt oxide, magnesium oxide, iron oxide and some kaolin as well as a wooden box

The Distance from Time #2

In Japan it is believed that people are able to keep supernatural, mysterious and precious things in a box. It is prohibited to show them to anyone.

When the lid of the box is raised, it is supernatural and mysterious time, isn’t it?

Additional boxes by same artist

Modoka Hirata, The Distance from Time # 1

Simulacra

Every little treasure has a message inside…..

SIMULACRA is the title I have chosen for my work in aluminum realized using the original box as a model for the casting. I engraved the cover of the box (previously covered with terra-cotta) with stylized signs, although the meaning of this work is not to be understood in these signs.

SIMULACRA (in the Latin larger sense means: copy, effigy, sculpture…) plays a role of criticism to the idea of original (represented by the original wooden box I received) and “copy” (in the way the original one is cast).

You may ask yourself which one has to be considered the original between the two: the two boxes having to be exhibited always together!

I play too with the idea of container and content implicit in the fact that the object is a box.

Finally the title SIMULACRA allows you to think about the platonic concept of mimesis (Art as imitation, in a larger sense), this is not to provide a solution but to push the viewer to think about these matters.