Silent voice | 300×240×45cm | used white clothes

Japanese artist Naoko Yoshimoto began her career studying psychology at the University of Kyoto but moved gradually after it more into art. Her main medium are clothing and textiles. She creates very interesting and strong conceptual sculptures and installations made from garments like for example dresses, tops and trousers.

In the early days as she began collecting these clothes she saw them a bit as symbols of the people living in the places where she met the clothes. She imagined the histories behind them. Touching these used garments, gave her the idea she gained a feeling for the memories of these people and their everyday lives which the garments used to touch, a feeling that could not be communicated by words. But after while this gave her an uneasy feeling as she realized that she could imagine the people and the everyday life of the place she visited, but that she could not directly touch them. There was a feeling of distance and uncertainties. These thoughts had great influence of her current work and made sure she shifted even more towards a conceptual approach in her work.

In some of her current works like for example ” silent voice”, “shadow portrait” or “history behind clothes” she removes the colour of garments by bleaching or uses white coloured garments and compresses and condenses these “white shaded” clothes and transforms them into building blocks for her conceptual sculptures. These works depict conventional as well as more abstract objects and give an interesting social commentary which is created by the medium and its carrier.

 White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

 White coffin detail | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

 Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

 White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

 White coffin | 150×130×180cm | used white shirts

 River of oblivion detail | bleached clothes

 River of oblivion | bleached clothes

Photos Naoko Yoshimoto | conceptual clothing sculptures

Sculptor Willy Verginer was born in 1957 in Bressanone and currently works and lives in Ortisei, Italy. He creates interesting sculptures and installations using the traditional craft of woodcarving. At first glance all the figures seem to reflect everyday life. This idea gets strengthened by the fact that most of them also wear contemporary casual clothing. They also have a link with the archaic and classic Greek sculptures. However, a closer and more focused look at the work shows that it goes beyond just that. The compositions of the installations, the positioning, the inclusion of surreal elements and the use of vibrant colour blocking across three dimensional surfaces which cuts the sculptures into fragments, lifts these works above just pure perceptual and figurative art. These elements and details give the viewer an access into the deeper conceptual layers of the fascinating work produced by Willy Verginer.

Photos: Willy Verginer | sculptures and installations

Christopher Coppers is a Belgian artist who is based in Brussels. His current work consists, for a large part, of interventions, either with, within or on magazines. Construction and deconstruction are important key elements in his art. He has by now used many different magazines as his medium, for the most fashion related ones. Some examples are: Elle, Vogue, BEople, Playboy,View magazine, Vanity Fair and ID fashion magazine.
He Combines his love for printed matter with an obvious urge for creative distortion or destruction. Christopher extremely careful and diligent revisits these magazines, he dramatically reinterprets the original covers by intricately carving them and so transforming them into sculptures. By doing this he gives them a second purpose, a second life.

Photos: Christopher Coppers | magazines

The Kinetic Sculpture by Art+Com is a fascinating metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. The interplay of mechanical and electronic components creates a dynamic art piece reflecting the precise exchange between a great number of individual elements and the single, coherent picture that emerges from them.714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the Kinetic Sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of form-finding in different variations.

The installation is on display in the BMW museum, Munich, Germany.

Video and Photos: Art+Com | BMW Museum, Munich

Bride fight is an already older but still very unique and interesting installation by American artist E.V. Day (1967, New York). She Used heavy-duty fishing line and hardware to reassembled clothing items which where untangled into small pieces.

Taking as her subject an eruption in the traditional social fabric the idea of two “glowing” brides locked in mortal combat E.V. Day touches something dark in the American social unconscious. Her work does link to reality television shows about brides-to-be, like Bridezilla, where tension gets to a boiling-point because of all the planning and frustration. But although E.V. Day’s piece may trigger such fetishistic responses it is a work primarily characterized by the humor and anxiety that accompanies a transformation of tradition. Fierce but nonetheless liberating, Bride Fight feels more like the jouissance of exploded boundaries than the pathology of confined ones.

The bride fight installation developed from a series of installations called Exploding Couture, begun in 1999, in which Day suspended women’s dresses in space. For example, in Bombshell (1999), exhibited at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Day took a piece of iconic attire (Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress) and arranged it to feel as if the forces of the implied figure are so powerful that the garment literally blows off, as if outgrowing its stereotype.

The visual result of the works are extremely light sculptures with architectural features.

Photos: E.V. Day | Lever House, New York