Rebecca Stevenson, Bambarella, 2007http://www.rebeccastevenson.net
Rebecca Stevenson's polyester resin and wax sculptures are suspended within critical ideas of art, craft, tradition and hybridization. I have an inherent need to make anything and everything about visual identity and I continually manifest intrinsic links to cultural production through these realizations. The use of wax and synthetic materials with the combination of traditional western forms and processes moves Stevenson's work into the realm of post-identity, into a physical hyperreal that proves a tactile existence. This is something craft pushes visual culture to realize, the importance of hybridity, the location of culture swerving in and out of determined boundaries, beyond 'post.' If we are academically situated in that overfed 'postmodern cloud' of intellectual obscurity, we need work that locates us as we are, as consumerists of the image. Because the work is so tactile -sensory response is actually stimulated through aesthetic choice- we are made aware of our visual bias and the work moves visual identity into a new state of 'seeing' or peripheral understanding. Stevenson's work points to the manipulation of tradition, the deconstruction of visual aesthetic and the contemplation of craft material. The sticky, the sappy, the waxen slippage between past present and future is our current western location. As dominion continues and neocolonialism creeps throughout our socially constructed boundaries; this hybridization takes on bizarre renditions of Bernini encrusted with mucusy flora, an opening up of our circumscribed perusal.
Rebecca Stevenson's polyester resin and wax sculptures are suspended within critical ideas of art, craft, tradition and hybridization. I have an inherent need to make anything and everything about visual identity and I continually manifest intrinsic links to cultural production through these realizations. The use of wax and synthetic materials with the combination of traditional western forms and processes moves Stevenson's work into the realm of post-identity, into a physical hyperreal that proves a tactile existence. This is something craft pushes visual culture to realize, the importance of hybridity, the location of culture swerving in and out of determined boundaries, beyond 'post.' If we are academically situated in that overfed 'postmodern cloud' of intellectual obscurity, we need work that locates us as we are, as consumerists of the image. Because the work is so tactile -sensory response is actually stimulated through aesthetic choice- we are made aware of our visual bias and the work moves visual identity into a new state of 'seeing' or peripheral understanding. Stevenson's work points to the manipulation of tradition, the deconstruction of visual aesthetic and the contemplation of craft material. The sticky, the sappy, the waxen slippage between past present and future is our current western location. As dominion continues and neocolonialism creeps throughout our socially constructed boundaries; this hybridization takes on bizarre renditions of Bernini encrusted with mucusy flora, an opening up of our circumscribed perusal.
