Gedi Sibony

        

Known for his sculptures and installations, which incorporate discarded materials and thrift store finds, turning them into poetic and harmonized assemblages. 'The works are fastidiously crafted, and not without humor; a 2008 sculpture in wood and colored light bears the title Its Origins Justify its Oranges.
When A.i.A. asked him about the exhibition's title, assuming there was a literary source, Sibony hesitated. "The source? The amazing . . . mind . . . word . . . jumbling . . . process," he said, breaking into a high-pitched laugh.'
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2012-04-10/gedi-sibony-pulitzer/

I watched Sibony talk about his work in youtube video 'Framing Sculpture: Gedi Sibony' (where key contemporary artists are asked what sculpture is to them) and 'Chief Curator talks about the work of Gedi Sibony' (Curator talks about Sibonys' work).
I have struggles trying to pin down how I think about my practice and why I see myself as a painter when I very rearly will pick up paint and a brush. I found the way Sibony talks about his wasy of thinking about sculpture and his practice very helpful to my own thinking.
There is a gentlness and an awareness surrounding his objects and he talks about how he 'catches them as they come through and just gently turning them over. Placing them.' By going with what is there with the object already and not trying to force anything, lessening the pressure to produce.
He reuses and re-sieves objects, breathing them a new way to be in the world without covering up what they were.
Sibony also talked about details that function to absorb attention, to keep people moving around the room/space.

Saving cast away objects and pulling them back to life; said objects keep their marks which hold their testiments to their previous uses.
Humor serves as an element to Sibonys work, while being gracefully mundane, the viewer could be being asked to take a piece of carpet very seriously, so viewers need to remember to laugh.

"It is tempting at first glance to consider the work in terms of Minimalism. Industrial materials and a reductive appearance aside, however, Sibony’s work isn’t cold or monotonous. His materials have been lived with. The surfaces are not fussy, but worn. Because there is a distinctly narrative, romantic quality to these objects, a more apt comparison that suggests itself is with the artists of the Arte Povera movement, who employed everyday materials in a humble condition. And yet, Sibony’s show manages to feel simultaneously anachronistic and extremely contemporary making us less inclined to question the artists’ placement in art history, and more free to enjoy the simplicity and poetry in his arrangements." http://www.artcritical.com/2010/12/15/gedi-sibony/

Link to interview between Zak Kitnick and Gedi Sibony on IDIOM called 'the truest that i have: Interview with Gedi Sibony', October 20 2010.