Karen LaMonte: NocturnesAn engrossing exploration of the artworks of Karen LaMonte, a renowned contemporary artist who has gained international recognition for creating life-sized figurative sculptures that investigate complex ideas of identity, body culture, femininity, fashion, feminism, transience, and perceptions of beauty. This monograph focuses on LaMonte's Nocturnes series, featuring essays by Dr. Steve Nash and the artist, and over 200 pages of beautiful color plates. On the Nocturnes, LaMonte writes "Inspired by the beauty of night, I call these sculptures Nocturnes-dark, seductive, and sublime. They are absent female forms rising from penumbral garments as figurations of dusk." Dr. Nash writes, "...A key aspect of the sculptural impact of the Nocturnes is the way they actively engage space. With the pronounced physicality that the casting process produces they strongly push against and displace space but, with their hollow cores, also contain it, resulting in a complex in-and-out dynamic. The fabrics add to this movement with their landscapes of ridges and valleys that alternately project against and swallow their spatial envelopes. Each of the materials in the Nocturnes-glass, iron, and bronze-reacts to light differently but all possess a distinctive tactile attraction that reinforces by real or imagined touch their volumetric presence, while the containment of these formal qualities within an overall sense of equilibrium and balance testifies to the innate classicism of these works. One attribute not present in the earlier sculptures, however, is that manifestation of a shadowy, dreamy vision that makes the figures more elusive and mysterious, taking, so to speak, the objects of desire farther out of reach and increasing the sense of longing. As LaMonte has pointed out, the sculptures are wed to night, not day, with all that this connotes..." LaMonte's works are included in more than thirty important public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. LaMonte's works have been exhibited widely at museums around the world. |
