I began the Constructions series in late 2005 while visiting London. I’d met up with a friend the day before and we’d stayed up for the sunrise, then I walked around the city the next afternoon. I was tired, but moving fast and shooting, looking all around, and checking my camera when I suddenly realized […]

My practice is concerned with contrasting different aspects of production, including video, photography, drawing, installation, and performance. My artworks and performances explore the accumulation and dispersal of everyday materials, highlighting the residues and remnants of “events.” Through an abiding concern with the idea of trace, I explore dematerialization and the relationship between the “fixed” and […]

My paintings are montages of portraits, figures, miniature landscapes, fragments of objects, and an eclectic array of cherished objects. I tend to think of it as a collection of objects in a “curiosity cabinet” similar to those of the 17th century. Every image I paint is a picture or object that I have collected for […]

I have been a full-time artist since graduating in fine arts from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 1996. Recently I have made the transition from oils to pastels, and it is mostly in this more direct medium I portray South African laborers in full work attire and within their working environments. By treating […]

My work is informed by my experiences as a result of my mixed African heritage. I was classified “colored” under South African apartheid classification, but being fair-skinned, I was simultaneously labeled as “whitey” within this community. My work explores the confines of these narrow labels. I aim to reflect on and counter the systems and […]

I sit at a big wooden table and piece together fragments of the world around me. My goal is to pause a moment in time just long enough for examination. As today’s world edges closer to chaos, and we are inundated with imagery and information, the centuries-old art form of collage is more relevant than […]

The core of my current body of works is dealing with middle stages, focusing on a critical, compressed moment. Through the mediums of sculpture, installation, drawing and collage, I investigate aspects of banal evil, bureaucratic violence, and alienation that exist underneath the surface and threaten to emerge. In my “laboratory,” I use nature as a […]

In this age we are often surrounded by concrete, and in most cities you will find concrete areas in the process of construction. The name of the cement widely used in the world is Portland, hence the title of my work. The elements of iron scaffolding, used on construction sites and rusted by time, give […]

Shawn Kuruneru’s black-and-white portraits of figures, busts, and faces convey a slick, cold feeling of anonymity. Their visual constructs, the descriptions of muscle and hair, are anything but distant, but through the artist’s personal paths in aesthetic, they have become clean, graphic, wiping away much human recognition. In the artist’s act of portraying an individual, […]

In less sure hands, New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design’s Dead or Alive, an exhibition of 37 international artists, whose work is composed of feathers, bones, egg shells, insects, fur, antlers, dried and rotting plants, with a few stuffed birds and animals thrown in, would be a creepy, crawly experience, one that could […]