This post was originally published on Colossal
Installation view from “CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love & Reckoning” at Mulvane Art Museum. Photo by Jordan Whitten. All images © vanessa german, courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York, shared with permission
Working across assemblage, sculpture, and installation and often in communities, vanessa german (previously) frequently returns to love and honesty as the core of her practice and therefore, her life. She believes love is an “infinite human technology” with the immense potential to catalyze change and mobilize people, and it emerges in her work not as a theme or metaphor but as a material, named alongside others like rose quartz, Astroturf, and the artist’s own hair.
As she explains in this conversation, german is allergic to pretense and compartmentalizing. Instead, she makes work in the manner she lives her life, with an immense passion for curiosity and care and a deep understanding of what it means to be whole.
“Master Blaster Or, boombox from the 5th dimension,” lapis, pyrite, the sound of love as found in the frequencies of the mineral world, time before time was even time, sapphire, sodalite, sea jasper, the blues, 800 million tears and counting, a miracle, sun-Ră’s golden hand rising up the back to carry the night of sounds on his infinite and eternal shoulders, love and grief with no space between them, something awestruck and hopeful then, wood, blue pigment, gold glass beads, the earth, the stars, the sun and the moon, water, the outrageous mouth of the human heart, the beginning and the end switching places all the time, the glory of music, being awake and alive
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A Colossal Conversation: vanessa german On Being Whole and Having a Responsibility to Be Irresponsible appeared first on Colossal.
0 Comments