materiality.

Another artist that t's book shelf invasion reminded me of is the great and fascinating Vik Muniz. I first began to look at Muniz's work early on in my undergraduate career and have always been totally compelled by his innovative use of materials and how he goes to such great lengths and commits so much time to creating the piece and then photographs it, destroys it, and starts again. Leaving the photograph as the remaining work.


As I was looking through a catalogue of his I got reminded of his thread drawings where he just piles thread on a surface to recreate famous landscape paintings. The textural quality is incredible and with my current work moving more and more towards a textural dimensionality I was inspired.

soil drawing

Muniz works with so many varied materials to "re-create" famous art images. Sometimes it is iconic works of art or...

pb & j

images of the icon artist themself.

chocolate

But generally conceptually delving into ideas of what is art, what is the value of art, what can we trust in media and imagery, etc...

wire.

I love how his wire drawings seem so much like thread in the style of drawing.

Muniz's most recent series are images created from garbage and where extremely huge installations- check out the size of the chairs in the above image to get scale... But the work has so much back story that it is impressive. Read about these works here.


I saw these large scale photos in person and they are so incredible the overall image is great and then when you start to see what the image is created from, such as a bureau of drawers or a pile of discarded iron work...it sucks you in on a trip of discovery.

I like to be reminded of artists that have inspired me in the past. You can see a Ted talk with Muniz here and see more of his work here.