New York artist David Altmejd's grotesque sculptures usually comprised of heads or other fragments of monstrous bodies directly engage the repressed underside of our imagination and incongruously mix the things we dare not consciously consider .His recent works, an accumulation of small sparkling found elements surrounding an incomplete werewolf body spring from an intuitive process that serves as a metaphor for peering into the realm of unspoken.
Almejd rarely knows how a work will look when it is finished.He is an obsessive conjuror bringing implausible sculptures into being as if in a trance or channeling spirits through the Ouija board. The sculptures are absent of any explicit violence,preferring the dread of the unknown or the otherworldly to a forensic analysis of cruelty.
It is easy to imagine Almejd's monsters as protagonists in a cryptic narrative, yet Altmejd does not intentionally set any into motion .Instead his creative energies are invested in the object itself-the artist likens his proactive to process art and the rest is left to the viewer.The sculptures are specimens laid out for us to examine and are dark, exquisitely beautiful , often employing eye pleasing colours and seductive material, compulsive, meticulously detailed without being fussy or perfectionist shiny and just a little bit sick.The intensely appealing layer of crystals, glitter,rhinestones, jewelry and other material that seem to spring up organically from plaster heads defer the horror of beholding such monstrosities. Altmejd highlights the tension between the need avert our eyes and take in every gruesome detail .
His bringing together of opposite worlds -the horrific and the glamourous-suggests that the distance between them may reside in our perceptions alone.
Almejd rarely knows how a work will look when it is finished.He is an obsessive conjuror bringing implausible sculptures into being as if in a trance or channeling spirits through the Ouija board. The sculptures are absent of any explicit violence,preferring the dread of the unknown or the otherworldly to a forensic analysis of cruelty.
It is easy to imagine Almejd's monsters as protagonists in a cryptic narrative, yet Altmejd does not intentionally set any into motion .Instead his creative energies are invested in the object itself-the artist likens his proactive to process art and the rest is left to the viewer.The sculptures are specimens laid out for us to examine and are dark, exquisitely beautiful , often employing eye pleasing colours and seductive material, compulsive, meticulously detailed without being fussy or perfectionist shiny and just a little bit sick.The intensely appealing layer of crystals, glitter,rhinestones, jewelry and other material that seem to spring up organically from plaster heads defer the horror of beholding such monstrosities. Altmejd highlights the tension between the need avert our eyes and take in every gruesome detail .
His bringing together of opposite worlds -the horrific and the glamourous-suggests that the distance between them may reside in our perceptions alone.
http://www.ngcmagazine.ca/artists/an-interview-with-david-altmejd
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