Stand Up Inspiration: When Art Mirrors
Triple Point (Eclipse), 2013. © Sarah Sze, courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
I find inspiration, everywhere really, but mostly in the design, architecture, literary and art world. I love it when I find visual art that touches on my work as a professional organizer because it hones my skills in subtle, but necessary ways.
Sarah Sze, Jeongmoon Choi and Song Dong are three visual artists examining the role of space and the phenomenon of too much stuff in playful and thoughtful ways. They are my latest Stand Up Inspiration.
Their perspective places the issue that has developed between who we are and what we own in a new light. And we need that light, because on a global scale we have too much, buy too much, keep too much. And too often, the relationship between who we are and what we own gets in the way of how we live.
Triple Point (Observatory), 2013. © Sarah Sze, courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Ms. Sze, whose current installation at the Venice Biennale is making big waves, asks: "What objects in your life have value and how is value created?" I ask this of clients quite often and in a number of variations.
Her work makes me want to jump on a plane to Venice. Ciao! It also makes me want to suggest that all my clients take their piles of excess and make it into giant Modernist street art.
Installation by Jeongmoon Choi. Photo by Katharina Finke for Freunde von Freunden.
Ms. Choi grew up in crowded quarters in Seoul, Korea. This video has her sharing that her family "lived in tight quarters... one always had to think of ideas to make the room seem bigger... one had to be creative and as a child I had good ideas of how to handle spaces."
I also found it lovely that as a child she wanted to walk inside her drawings and this longing now informs her very immersive and meditative work. I look at photos of her work and want to walk inside them too.
Again, I want to jump in a plane and see her exhibit at the Olymps OMD Photography Playground. More about her, with tons of great photos by Debora Mittelstaedt, can be found in Freunde von Freunden.
Detail of Song Dong's Waste Not. Photo by Tom Page via Flickr.
Finally, Song Dong, whose Waste Not was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, prompted this post on Apartment Therapy that "fed our hoarder fascination." The phenomenon of hoarder fascination aside, it's a poignant, intimate work that should immediately make you drop the 'hoarder' adjective for simply: a person who saw value in objects.
I think Dong's installation brings the notion of hoarder to the high art arena and allows it to breathe that rarified air for a time. This is especially true now that the cultural zeitgeist is to shame folks for having too much.
