In porcelain, bronze, glass, and stone, Karen LaMonte’s sculptures discover concepts round femininity and conventions of magnificence all through historical past. She nods to time-honored sculptural traditions with silhouettes redolent of, for instance, the three marble goddesses of the Parthenon pediment which have formed classical sculpture and exemplified beliefs of magnificence for millennia.
LaMonte conceives of lounging or posing figures in her Nocturnes and Etudes collection with robes or robes that seem spectrally inhabited. “Like spoken or written language, beauty is shaped by common idioms and shared experiences that are the foundations of culture,” LaMonte says. “In this way, it is more than just a description; it is a reflection of a greater whole, a visual representation of what is valued in society.”
Munson Museum of Artwork simply opened a survey of almost 60 items titled Celestial Our bodies: Sculpture by Karen LaMonte, exploring the artist’s use of assorted media. The artist juxtaposes a variety of resilient, heavy-duty supplies with exaggeratedly draped materials related to softness and vulnerability, interrogating the intrinsic dualities between power and fragility, visibility and absence, and solidity and transparency.
Celestial Our bodies additionally features a multimedia collection of scientifically correct depictions of cumulus clouds that billow ethereally from their bases. “Clouds intrigue me because they make visible the invisible forces of the natural world,” LaMonte says.
The extra the artist explored the ripples and folds of cloth and material in her gown sculptures, the extra she started to interpret the physique as a panorama formed and outlined by the weather. LaMonte started to discover the notion of climate, and her collection Weathering emerged, imbuing cloud types with a sublime bodily high quality.
Celestial Our bodies continues via December 31 in Utica, New York. Discover extra on LaMonte’s web site and Instagram.
