Wangechi Mutu is a collage artist born in Kenya. Her work contains many subjects, from plants and animals, to the female body, to the industrial and the natural world- Within her work is a narration of how all these different subjects work together to make the world flow. Here is a quote from one of her interviews that I feel perfectly captures an important main theme in her work:

“I’m trying to just push up the volume on how incredibly important every single plant, and animal, and human is in keeping us all alive and afloat.”

https://art21.org/artist/wangechi-mutu/

Another topic explored in Wangechi’s work is the relationship between her Kenyan roots (she was born and raised in Nairobi) and characteristics of the western world. Through works like Ghouls on my Back Celebrate Murder (see below), Wangechi explores preconceptions made about African culture within the western world, and the overall impacts of globalization. She also criticizes colonialism and highlights its irreversible impact on human life through use of unsettling imagery and graphic connotations.

Currently, Wangechi resides in Brooklyn and continues her collage work. In her pieces she uses a variety of mediums including vinyl, mylar, and recycled material. Besides collage, she also practices sculpture, drawing, and digital work. With an education at the Yale School of Art, and her immersive work held in galleries internationally, Wangechi Mutu is a unique, talented artist worth checking out.

For this Collage/Overlap project, I only had a vague idea of having something open to a different world like a portal or a window to view it. So I worked with that idea and started to pick out images from magazines that I thought would work well together and make the idea of viewing into a different world a reality.

When I started to assemble the scraps of magazine paper together to try to form a cohesive image, I started to like the idea of a bedroom having a window that opened up to a weird portal of a world. The curtain of the bedroom picture bothered me and I was about to cut them out completely before getting the idea to cut them out to a certain amount and fold them accordion-style. Doing this made the curtains not take up too much room on the paper and the folded curtains added a small 3D/pop-up element that made this piece all the more interesting to look at.

From there, I liked the idea of having some of the elements of the collage pop out and have a 3D element to the piece, so some of the element pieces of the collage aren’t fully flat on the paper but rather pop out and slightly move when you pick it up. I felt this added to the overall feeling of weirdness and viewing into a different world a lot more versus if I had made every element on the collage flat.

I then decided to focus on finishing up the bedroom part of the piece to make it feel complete. So I tried to gather more pieces of magazine pictures to finish and develop a bedroom. After the piece was done, I decided that I would make the piece have a comic book/cartoonish feel to it by having dark outlines and some white highlights on some of the elements of the collage. I used India Black Ink with a paintbrush to make the black outlines and White Acrylic-Gouache to make the shiny highlights.

In the end, I love the end result of the Collage/Overlap project and what I ended up with was something I didn’t expect to have. Letting my mind guide me through this piece and just seeing whatever I felt would work together seemed to make this piece interestingly weird to look at.

Amanda Burnham creates large scale drawings that are often site specific installations. Burnham has a BA from Harvard University in Visual and environmental studies and an MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking. She is now a Professor as Townson University. Throughout the years she has had her work shown in many places; a few to note would be the Delaware contemporary,  Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, and  the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

Civic Body

Site specific installation at Visarts, Rockville Acrylic, flashe, paper, and tape on wall/floor approx. 30′ x 10′ 2017 photo credit: Joseph Hyde

The works shown below are a series of wall drawings that are of cities. A subject that became of interest to her when she moved out of the midwest to the east coast for school. The cities in the east coast were so much different than what she knew back home that it caught her attention. In and interview with inertia studios she specifically points out how “spaces that were dense, dynamic, and mixed use, where a lot of space is shared, and neighbors weren’t a thing you mostly avoided or ignored”. These are themes that I think come across really clear in her work.

In the work she often uses paper scraps. Her process starts by her taking time to walk around in the city to get inspiration and ideas. From there she then begins the process of making quick gestural paintings using acrylic. These paintings are then collaged together on the wall and armatures on site. Lighting is also an important aspect of this work as it is used in a way that emphasizes the layering in the work and as Burham states animates it.

Untitled (Under Surveillance)

Untitled (Under Surveillance) (installation view) Site specific drawing installation at Arlington Art Center Flashe, acrylic, paper, tape and lights 2016

When a show/exhibition is over Burnham will tear down all the paper from the works and put it bags with the intention of using it again in future works.

Citations

https://amandaburnham.com/artwork/4514108-Civic-Body.html

https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/amanda-burnham

STUDIO VISIT AMANDA BURNHAM