Not Clay But… | Christina West at Mindy Solomon Gallery, “Intimate Strangers”

A few months ago Garth Clark interviewed sculptor Christina West regarding her works in ceramic, resin and marble. We ran a photograph of one of these works, Misfits, which was a resin sculpture of two nudes with brightly-painted red and orange feet.

Above image: Christina West sculptures, installation view. Photographs courtesy of the gallery.

Those figures and others like them have been given their own show at the Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Intimate Strangers (May 29 – July 3). They’re not clay, but we wanted to give these deftly-executed and arresting figures a nod in this week’s issue.

From the gallery:

“Intimate Strangers is an installation of Christina A. West’s boldly colored figurative sculptures, which aim to highlight a sense of isolation within society. Using scale shifts as a metaphor for psychological distance, the figures range from larger-than-life to half-size. Rendered mid-gesture in acts of either dressing or disrobing, figures gaze toward others without connection. West’s stylized yet realistically sculpted bodies nod to the classical nude, while asserting a vulnerability and lack of idealization that firmly place the work in a contemporary context.”

West lives and works in Atlanta and is a teacher at Georgia State University. She received her BFA from Siena Heights University in 2003 and her MFA from Alfred University in 2006. She’s been an artist-in-residence at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the Clay Studio in Philadelphia.

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