Art & Geometry
Every artist experiences the dreadful ‘artist block’, but Lee Griggs seems to have no grasp of such ridiculous notion, in his on-going series Deformations. When we wanted to talk about geometry, we couldn’t have imagined such a literal approach – his subjects look like they have swallowed it whole and forgot to spit out the bones. A cross between a cartoon character taking the shape of whatever it has eaten, or a Nightmare On Elm Street, comes this bewitching and intriguing digitally 3D scanned series.
Grigg’s distorted utopia, where aliens are birthed, makes you scrutinize these freakish beings whilst peering through their disturbingly life-like masks. Each face as gruesome as the next one, we discover that we have somehow dug ourselves into a hole – searching for more as we scroll down in anticipation to squint and squirm in our seats. Hopefully not coming across a Paul McCarthy scene reenacted with these creatures.
Grigg’s 3D scanned faces are downloaded from the production house Ten24 and rendered in a program called Arnold. What makes these creations more unsettling is their resemblance to human-faces, rather than resorting to colour or pigment permutation. The artist admittedly constructs these alien-human visages without even himself knowing the end product, simply experimenting with the original scan. His goal for the project is to create complex images with detailed deformations. The artist is fascinated with ‘blurring’ the lines between the real and surreal, and as a result has us ‘blocked’ in what he will come up with next.
The anthropomorphic faces will fascinate, horrify and make someone point out to you to ‘stop staring’. We sure couldn’t, so we’ll let it pass this time and resist pointing.
If you have ever wondered what you would take with you in your ‘after-life’, then step into the Coffin at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. ARTCUBE was brave enough to experience, along with our art market expert Magnus Resch, the multiple art pieces on display. From blown up coffin’s marked with the notorious label of Pepsi and that 90s kid’s Nokia phone to President Obama’s portrait pimped-out, we are glad to say that this exhibition has it all.
