Sculptor and installation artist Lucy Slivinski works with found objects to create conceptual spaces of human connection. Drawing upon ideas of recycling, regeneration, and interconnectedness, the works in Soul Touch seem at once repelling and inviting, asking the viewer to consider the materials as objects of consumption and waste, but, more importantly, as tools that generate discourse and encourage energetic, physical engagement. In posing complex dynamics such as this, Slivinski's work lends a unique and innovative tint to notions of decay and beauty, promoting neither one nor the other, but rather intertwining and even collapsing the two together.
Using bottles, wire hangers, chairs, mufflers, and a vast array of other found and recycled materials, Slivinski synchronizes the harsh tensions in her work to produce structures and systems that both bend to natural forces and defiantly resist them. Individual pieces cling together as energetically as they threaten to break apart; materials heap themselves into masses, and at the same time, beg to be unwoven. The works in Soul Touch demonstrate Slivinski's unique ability to harness opposing forces in the name of balance, and to draw beauty and tenderness from the anonymous and the disposable.
'Lucy Slivinski, a sculptor in Chicago who makes lighting fixtures out of salvaged metal scraps, attributes her affinity for recycling to her grandparents, who recycled as a matter of necessity during the Depression. Wonder Bread bags, with their red, blue and yellow polka dots, she said, were crocheted into rugs; even stray pieces of string would be collected and crocheted "into a container for a Kleenex box," she said. "I was always picking up found objects, anything that caught my eye, little pieces of glass, pieces of metal wire."' -- Elaine Louie, New York Times
Artist Talk, Saturday, August 2, 1pm
Nurturing the Creative Soul, Lucy Slivinski talks with Paul Slivinski
Closing Event, Friday, August 22, 6-8pm, $20 admission
Finale Soul Touch, Premiere music of Kahil El'zabar for string quartet with Slivinski performance installation
|
