Daily Art Fixx

Canadian artist Mandy Tsung was born in Banff, Alberta in 1984 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2006.

For Tsung, “People are fascinating and beautiful; the human face in it’s complexity of nuances will take a lifetime to fully capture. It is always the look in a person’s eyes that inspires me to pick up my pencil. I want to distill that moment and, more importantly, express how powerful it is for me.”

Mandy’s work has been exhibited in galleries in Calgary and Vancouver, Canada and has been featured in collections in LA, New York, Hong Kong, and Canada.

To see more of Tsung’s work, visit MandyTsung.com.

To create her sculptures, Ganz finds discarded objects including plastic utensils, toys, and metal pieces and gives them a second life and a new home..

“The human history behind these objects gives them life in my eyes.  My goal is for each object to transcend its origins by being integrated into an animal form that seems alive. This process of reclamation and regeneration is liberating to me as an artist. By building these sculptures I try to understand the human relationships that surround me. It is a way for me to contemplate and remind myself that even if there is conflict right now, there is a way for all the pieces to fit together.”

To see more of Ganz’s work visit SayakaGanz.com.

Sources: This iz Art

Related Books:
Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap
The Altered Object: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration
Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu moved to New York in the mid-1990s. She received her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000.

“Mutu’s work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia, Mutu’s works document the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage.

Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations. Their forms are grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. Mutu examines how ideology is very much tied to corporeal form. She cites a European preference to physique that has been inflicted on and adapted by Africans, resulting in both social hierarchy and genocide.

Mutu’s figures are equally repulsive and attractive. From corruption and violence, Mutu creates a glamorous beauty. Her figures are empowered by their survivalist adaptation to atrocity, immunised and ‘improved’ by horror and victimisation. Their exaggerated features are appropriated from lifestyle magazines and constructed from festive materials such as fairy dust and fun fur. Mutu uses materials which refer to African identity and political strife: dazzling black glitter symbolises western desire which simultaneously alludes to the illegal diamond trade and its terrible consequences. Her work embodies a notion of identity crisis, where origin and ownership of cultural signifiers becomes an unsettling and dubious terrain.” (bio from Satchi Gallery)

Mutu’s  work is in the permanent collections of numerous major art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Wangechi’s new series “This You Call Civilization?” is on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada from February 24, 2010 through May 23, 2010.

For more information, visit the Deutsche Bank Group art section where Mutu has been chosen as their 2010 Artist of the Year.

Related Books:

Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise
Wangechi Mutu: In Whose Image
Contemporary African Art Since 1980

Bathsheba Grossman is an American artist based in Santa Cruz, California who creates stainless steel and bronze sculptures using computer-aided design and 3D metal printing technology. Her  sculptures are primarily mathematical in nature, often depicting intricate patterns or mathematical oddities.

Grossman’s work been exhibited in art galleries around the world. She has been featured in the New York Times, the London Times, Der Spiegel, Wired, Discover and Make magazines.  One of her lamps was in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential designs of 2007.  Her sculptures have also appeared in the TV shows Heroes and Numb3rs, in Second Life, and on a Japanese videogame commercial.

To see more of Bathsheba’s fascinating work, visit Bathsheba.com.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Lisa G. is a self-taught artist working and living near Paris, France. There isn’t much information about the artist online but you can see more of her work at LisaGPeintre.Blogspot.com.