Trapped in Beauty

Susan Sontag, a Jewish American literary theorist, novelist, filmmaker and feminist activist once stated about photographs:  “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Freezing moments is, in fact, very much what Seung Mo Park, a Korean artist based in Brooklyn, does with his stunning aluminium wire sculptures. His artwork is intimately linked to photography, since he actually starts his creations using a projected photograph and then slowly placing layer after layer of wire meshing by cutting and welding until the three dimensional sculptures of his subjects materialise to the fascination of viewers’ eyes.

Tempus fugit

“... Time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail", stated the Roman poet Virgil in his poem Georgics. Commonly found under the form of an inscription on clocks, it enhances our concerns about the fleetingness of time and the ravages thereby caused. This further evokes French author Marcel Proust´s work À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – “In Search of Lost Time” – whose theme is exactly the anguish and grief about time that has irretrievably gone.

Imagination at Work

Do you remember the transformers, those toys which made the wonders and delight of kids in the 80s and which could take various forms? Mainly, they looked like incredible futuristic robots which could, by skilful manipulation and the use of imagination, become highly sophisticated cars defying our wildest dreams.