SingartSurrealistically From Oz
Australians are fond of lovingly calling their country Oz. Every time they do so, lucid images of the 1939 movie classic “The Wizard of Oz” comes to my mind. I can clearly see young Dorothy as she embarks on her quest to find the yellow brick road; forming friendships along the way with the Scarecrow who badly wants a brain, a Tin Man who craves for a heart and a cowardly Lion in great need of lots of courage.
Everything in Dorothy’s Oz is ever so strange and beautiful. And it is that way too for the artworks by 2 artists coming from Oz down under for Art Stage Singapore 2014 – namely by Juz Kitson and Sam Jinks.
Kitson’s work has a surreal freakish beauty: she thrives on the hidden workings of the body and the Frankenstein-like melding together of animal and man. Each resulting sculpture has an unsettling gravity that polarizes between the beautiful and the morbid: she obviously aims to initially shock and then seduce you into a sense of great uncertainty that compellingly draws you closer for a study that will turn into fascinating wonder.
You see, her jewelry-like installations give this gravitating impact by fusing foreign materials to ceramics. The foreign materials being latex, resin, polyurethane, plaster, terracotta clay, horse, fox goat and human hair and bone, alpaca and sheep wool, deer and cow hide, seaweed, snake skin, silk thread and even tulle.
To her, fragile latex and wax symbolize our eventual death and decay; while the bits and pieces of floral and fauna she picks up on her daily bush walks and travels beyond Australia’s shores have trapped within them a history. By embedding them into her work, she creates for them a new story – one that hints at the natural but eventually ends up being alien but yet breathtaking.
To create such fused works, the animal carcasses and road kill she picks up are first brought back to an ants’ nest within the compound of her studio so that these ravenous insects can strip their bones of whatever tissues that may remain.
They are next cleaned and bleached before being covered with porcelain and then petrified or dipped into glossy wax that will congeal into a pretty water melon-like pink. The results are an appearance of giving bones flesh again; which are then conscientiously pricked to put in real human hair or animal fur.
Her ceramics are equally organic in nature as they are often shaped into human organs (like the heart, the stomach and female genitalia) or congealed blood red buds of flowers: all built around everlasting motifs of love, death and desire.
Her walk on the surreal side began from inspirations she drew from artworks by Kiki Smith and Fiona Hall. German American Smith is renowned for her Frankensteinish rebuilding of life-like bodies from dismembered parts of animal and man while Australian Hall’s works entices you to lovingly behold the natural while weeping over its destruction by man.
Now she has progressed to finding fresh ideas from life forms that live in the depths of our vast oceans or below ground where there is no light and the worlds beyond our earth. She is also translating into her art what she experiences from her travels; from the fascinating cultures and practices of worlds vastly different from hers.
As Kitson develops as a person and artist her surrealistically strange and yet vaguely familiar work develops with her.
At a direct opposite end to Kitson’s form or surrealism, Sam Jinks prides himself in creating hyper-realistic artwork; but unlike what you can find in London’s Madam Tussard’s: this famous wax museum displays life-like sculptures of real famous celebrities, like singer Michael Jackson and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, during definitive moments of their very public lives.
Jinks’ are about putting into one sculpted person a composite profile of real different people: for example, the children he fashions are an amalgamation of his own, each often at a different stage of life from the other siblings. He has crafted an elderly woman tenderly and protectively nursing a sleepy infant who is an exact replica of herself at that tender age as well. He has even had a fetish time crafting foxes’ heads onto human bodies laying curled up into instinctive fetal positions.
In a nut shell, his artistic compositions are all surrealistically conceived but so realistically executed that you need insight into his inspiration before you realize the true extent his synergistic imagination is driving his creative endeavours.
Another trait that sets his sculptures apart from Madam Tussard’s is the uncanny fact that each embodies a snapshot of their briefest and usually most private moments in time – moments you will only encounter when you already know them intimately for years and years. To top that off, they capture moments of private elements of the artist himself as well.
And their combined vulnerability and fragility will move you in ways most contemporary art would not be able to achieve as this sense of being human and the stirred up compassion it is capable of drawing from you is exceptional in today’s world.
That he is able to achieve this, without having to resort to load the surrealism with the sensationalism many contemporary artist employ to get noticed, speaks volumes about his skills – they far outstrip the standards of this wax museum: the skin he puts on his sculptures look like real skin, one that light penetrates and makes luminous; making you think that you can see its individual pores and hair follicles when you scrutinize it under a microscope.
His surrealistic hyper-realism is so powerful that often times his sculptures are confused with real people’s presence: Jinks succinctly captures in silicone what contemporary Italian painter, Luciano Ventrone, succeeds in hyper-realizing his nudes.
As such he has horned his craft to such an extent that he far out-strips what famed Italian sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had achieved by creating the Baroque style of sculpting in the 1600s: while you will accept that Bernini’s dynamic movement and energy of human forms, all spiraling around a central vortex to reach outwards into the surrounding space, are but a splendidly enthralling effigy, you simply cannot do the same for Jinks’ sculptures. His have the ability to cleverly mimic human textures in ways that are almost too life-like.
If you have to make a kindred comparison of Jinks’ works to another contemporary sculptor’s, then realist Ron Mueck comes quickly to mind. Like this German Australian artist, Jinks’ sculptures are also either smaller or larger than life. Both artists do so to attain greater dramatic effect.
Yet, only his sculpted ‘people’ are consistently open about showing their intimate sense of fragility and vulnerability: Jinks wants you to be more than just wowed by his technical expertise. He wants you to be able to see something that you can relate to in your own life and so be moved or touched by it beyond the context of the moment. He wants that feeling to stay with you in the bigger sense of your own life.
Immerse in both ends of the surreal spectrum offered by Kitson and Jinks: their wonderfully evocative or touching works of art will be on display at Art Stage Singapore 2014, at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center, Halls D, E and F from 16 to 19 January next year.
