ERIN TUCKER

There’s something oddly beautiful about the figurative works of Kansas based artist Jamie Bates Slone. Her vibrant sculptures are teaming with diseased growths and discolorations, and the effect is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. Slone can relate to the physical and emotional impact that disease brings. “Through conjured memory, I revisit my family’s history with illness and premature death. These memories are flooded with emotion and anxiety that I use as the base of my sculptural work,” she says.

Now on view: “ALISON SAAR: Bearing” at Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco. NOV11-APR3

“My work has always dealt with dualities – usually of the wild, feral side in battle with the civil self” —–Alison Saar

So deeply entrenched in history, myth and a narrative so universal and inclusive, Alison Saar’s work seem to shy away from addressing the elephant in the room. Consisting primarily of Saar’s sculpture and installation work, this exhibition explores the ways in which the legacy of history bears on the body, and how this history both shapes and guides the way society conceptualizes identity. Her interest in the body, specifically the mothering body, present both the corporeal and cultural endurance of African American women.

In her 2013 show “slough” at L.A. Louver, Alison’s work conjured a duality of meaning, and a sense of both impasse and renewal, that pervades the 15 new works in the exhibition. The title for the exhibition Slough, is defined as “a situation characterized by lack of progress,” or “to cast off or shed dead skin.” 

“With a lot of my work, there are these really heavy sort of ideas and issues. But I like to think there’s always some element of play in them,” she says with a laugh, “so I don’t just scare everybody off.”

The largest work in the show, Thistle and Twitch (Mombie), depicts a larger-than-life female figure towering nearly 8 feet (2.4 m) tall, formed by built-up layers of thin paper, with painted barren briars veining beneath the skin’s surface. Massive in scale, yet delicately constructed, the viewer is invited to peer inside her navel to find the hollow form filled with a thicket of brambles. Captured in a transitory state, the figure appears to be exiting a stage of fertility, or rather, experiencing a rejuvenation of new growth following a period of dormancy. The title of this work borrows from Ovid’s Metamorphases and the mythological tale of Demeter (the goddess of harvest) who is overcome with grief when her daughter Persephone (the goddess of spring) was abducted by Hades and held captive in the underworld. 

Yuni Kim Lang - Hair once again

Yuni Kim Lang (USA) - Comfort Hair

Yuni Kim Lang is a Michigan-based visual artist who creates sculptures, photographs and wearable art that explores themes of weight, mass, accumulation, hair and cultural identity. She makes sculptures out of rope and synthetic materials where it transcends its materiality and become bodily. She is fascinated by what people give power and meaning to, along with our obsession with adornment.

Her recent work Comfort Hair is a sculpture inspired by the Gache, a big wig worn by Korean women of high social backgrounds back in history. So powerful and beautiful yet so burdensome and heavy. It is this intense, overwhelming, yet so satisfying relationship with our hair that makes us obsess over it. © All images courtesy of the artist

Micaela Lattanzio fragments portraits into mozaic-like works that appear to dissipate into the walls. Hers is an unconventional method of showing photography. She cuts her photos into abstract shapes. While in some, the original image remains intact, in others, she uses the image’s newfound porousness to intertwine multiple photos at once. The pieces become visual puzzles where details are scrambled and our eyes must do work to see them as cohesive wholes. Lattanzio has a solo show coming up titled “Fragmenta” at Ma’ Showroom (Largo S. Agostino, Montefalco, Italy) March 21 through May 21.