Artwork of the Week: Fleur de Sel

Fleur de Sel, 2002-2004 

by Anu Tuominen

I bought this postcard on a visit to the Pompidou with my dad in 2007. It has hung framed in my kitchen since 2009 where I look at it everyday and it never fails to make me smile. The idea is so simple and so perfect; salt crystals, each one hand-crocheted and unique like a snowflake. There is something about art with a domestic edge that often draws me in.   

Finnish artist Anu Tuominen is the woman responsible—and gasp!—while looking up more information about the artist for the first time I discovered that she also made this other piece that I've always loved. Huh! It's so satisfying to make those connections and see how consistent your tastes really are. To know thyself! Hip hip! 

- Cathleen  

Artist of the Week: Pooneh Maghazehe

When I first met Pooneh Maghazehe, she was branding slabs of meat, tortillas, and anything else people volunteered (mostly boots and T-shirts) with complex Islamic star-shaped patterns. Then she started making these amazing dresses for performers to wear during rituals she would orchestrate in museum spaces while wearing a hot pink hair suit also of her own design. The costumes she created began with the plain forms of traditional Mennonite or Quaker dresses that she would then embellish with intricate embroidery, beading, tassels, animal skins, transforming the unadorned garments into vestments that you could imagine on a priestess with a patchwork of different beliefs and various cultures, performing her elaborate ceremony.

Pooneh just received her MFA from Columbia where she expanded on this work, incorporating tools into the dresses, and photographing people wearing them in the stark, almost other-worldly, Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah. Her latest work has involved Sisyphean performances wherein she has simultaneously climbed and wallpapered a crude structure she constructed in a gallery space, and most recently, a collaboration with her fiance/musician Skye Steele at the Central Utah Art Center where their indoor leek and potato grow house touched on ideas of communal agriculture and current/historical architecture. Now she’s about to move to Germany for a three month residency where she will be working in the key of "globalization and its impact on the art market since 1989." Girl's keepin' bizz-ay. See more for yourself at her website poonehspeaks.com.

 - Cathleen 

[all images care of Pooneh Maghazehe]