Art Talk: Cynthia Minden

add to outlook add to google calendar remind me

Saturday, September 13th, 2014
1:00 PM

Reclamation
Cynthia Minden � mixed media assemblage
Art Talk: Saturday, September 13 at 1:00pm
Exhibition Dates: 16 August � 13 September, 2014

This new body of assemblages are composed with gathered materials from the margins of wetlands, forest floor and foreshore, intertwined with cast off findings from human civilization. The abandoned cast-off detritus of a crowded world, set amid a jungle of plant life, a flotilla of regrouped bits and pieces.

I am building a library of artifacts drawn from the landscape, woven together in an artful conversation. The linkage of nature and art has always been important for me.

By pairing bone with porcelain, nail with knife and vine, I am looking for multiple meanings, layers of interpretation and a framework for thinking about the relationship between art, society and the environment.

A proliferation of stuff, which can be dispiriting, entwined with the regeneration of nature, which can be hopeful to imagine, these assemblages can be seen as modern fetishes; both poetic meditations and symbolic warnings about the present state of affairs. � Cynthia Minden. (photographs: Sarah Joyce)

Cynthia Minden started as a basket maker in 1987. Intrigued by the idea of containing space, she states: I started to make odd shaped vessels that could contain little more than one�s imagination. I�ve made hundreds of containers; call them shelters or nests, boats or baskets. Inspired, I learned papermaking and added it to my vessels as a skin, indulging in my love of collage. Then bees wax, gauze, plaster and pigments found their way into my work, which has continued to evolve into a wide range of projects.