This ad came on my television this morning and it made me stop and look. I can’t remember the last time I actually watched a commercial… It’s a campaign from July of last year made by Art.com, an amazing website selling fine art prints of the best, most beautiful kind. You can even choose a living room that looks like yours to see what the prints would look like in the space.
In the commercial, the framed Art.com poster works as a portal into masterpieces turned three-dimensional, emphasizing how different a room feels when there’s a painting inside it. The three-dimensional part is kind of mind-blowing, it volumizes the paint, transforming the works of art into a really incredible Pixar movie the we float through one at a time. The whole thing is set to the upbeat rallying sounds of “I Could Go” by Oberhofer.
Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet 1899
Even though she creates the likenesses of people, they’re not portraits in any traditional sense. Kumi Yamashita has worked with shadow, alphabet letters, and even shoe prints to render the delicate faces of individuals, using whatever obscure medium she’s working in to highlight every glance, wrinkle and shadow. Her portraits focus on faces and let the rest of the body fade away underneath, each face revealing a perfect, unique composition of nose, eyes, mouth, and cheeks.
Her two newest works were created in opposite ways – the first involves the stripping away of white threads from a single piece of denim, revealing the vertically oriented portrait of a woman who turns to look back at us in “Warp & Weft – Mother #2.” Her second latest work comes from her Constellation series – portraits made from a single unbroken thread that’s been wrapped around a dense forest of galvanized nails. “Constellation – Mana #2” reveals the nail-speckled face of a little Asian girl, her eyes cast down in wonder and her face glowing against a dark background.
“Warp & Weft – Mother #2”
The intricacies of Kumi’s Constellation works can only be fully appreciated in the detail shots that let you see how much intricate detail it takes to capture a likeness with just nails and a single piece of thread. One eye alone takes at least thirty nails, and who knows how many hours to create. According to Kumi’s website each Constellation portrait takes a process lasting many months to create, all the nails piercing through a wooden panel painted solid white.
Detail, “Constellation – Mana #2”
It looks like the little girl is discovering something for the first time, her face glowing and eyebrows arched with interest. In my mind she’s watching Kumi create this very portrait, lips parted in awe as the string is wound rapidly around the nails to create her likeness out of a single black thread.
A Japanese artist living and working in New York City, Kumi Yamashita has been showing her work all over the world since the early 2000s. Her piece “Constellation – Mana” was chosen as a finalist in the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Competition, and will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for almost an entire year, from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014. The competition asks artists to create a portrait from a living person they’ve had direct contact with.
According to Philip Kennicott’s Washington Post article about the competition, “Constellation – Mana” shows an image of Kumi’s niece, someone she described as “chatty, awkward and sometimes obnoxious.” Kennicott writes, “From a distance, the portrait appears to be a photograph that has been slightly altered to give its surface the look of a lightly crackled pottery glaze. Closer inspection reveals the astonishingly complicated method of its production: A single fine string has been wound around hundreds of delicate nails, giving a sense of the missing snapshot through the density of the web it creates.”
Giant bold letters sit in a field. They should be easy to spot, but they’re covered in mirrors so from a distance they blend in, echoing the same colors and patterns as the grass that surrounds them. In a work like this one the photographer has all the power, because choosing an angle determines what’s reflected in the glass. In some photos you really have to search for it, but it’s always there – four giant letters that spell F-E-A-R. When we see the word from straight on, the outlines of the letters look like they’re just floating there, reflecting a shinier swirled version of the green-brown grass.
Up close you can see that the letters in “fear expanded” are plated in mirror that’s been cut into differently sized rectangles, which is what causes parts of the letters to reflect patterns differently when seen from far away. Fear doesn’t seem so scary when it’s just a few giant letters and not something deep inside us. Manifesting Fear as something this huge and unthreatening forces us to laugh at it, but at the same time the Fear is being sneaky with all those mirrors, lurking in the grass, and if you could see it up close in person you’d be faced with fragmented bits of your own reflection.
Ryan Everson is an artist from the midwest, who recently completed an MFA at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This work Fear Expanded was created in collaboration with artist Jason Garcia, who typically works as a painter.
His artist statement reads:
My most recent work comes from abstract emotional states stirred up from specific self reflective moments. These moments arise as I become more aware of myself in the present and my inability to control the future. (continue reading on Everson’s website)
UPDATE for all those close to the Denver area: Ryan has a new show titled Long Lost that just opened last week at Denver’s Gildar Gallery. Long Lost will be on view from April 12 – May 11, 2013.
