Elsa Mora is a Cuban born artist living and making work in Los Angeles, California. What drew me to her work was the intimate quality she infuses in her images and sculptures. Her characters and scenes are silent stories and faces, nameless creatures and women looking over their shoulders at you and drawing you in. There is a beautiful natural quality to her pieces, which she maintains through a variety of media. Interestingly, while she makes and sells prints of work, these intricate black and white designs begin as paper cutouts.
I enjoy the handmade look to her pieces as well. She makes use of many different craft materials to make things such as buttons, enamel cameos, porcelain, and paper sculptures which she often incorporates in installations and collages. To me, Elsa Mora's approach of combining human and natural (plant and animal) imagery, such as bees and dragonflies, takes advantage of the inherent symbolism and narrative quality in nature, and comments on the human experience. Her arrangements deal with communities and relationships, memories and experiences.
I particularly like this piece from a 2001 exhibition entitled MUTE. She used handmade porcelain objects that represented an accumulation of her silence about past traumas and experiences in her life. Her presentation consisted of massive photographs of the objects interacting with her body and overlooking a table displaying the porcelain objects themselves, which I thought communicated her personal story very clearly and intimately.
Barry McGee was a graffiti artist during the 1980s, but he became particularly well-known for his murals and gallery installations. His work incorporates text and imagery from contemporary urban culture, as well as found objects, which combined seem to always comment on the human experience. I first learned about Barry when I was in middle school, but he is an artist who I keep coming back to. His trademarks, the almost grotesque cartoonish faces that seem devoid of much or any emotion, are my favorite aspect of his work. They seem to betray a hidden character within all of us; they carry a strange realistic quality that a traditional portrait would not have.
