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Artistaday.com - Find new contemporary art, create your own gallery of art

Guest curator: Seth Orion Schwaiger  
Glasgow, Scotland artist


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About Seth


Seth Orion Schwaiger is an artist, curator, and critic based in Austin, Texas and Glasgow, Scotland. Forthcoming projects include the curation of Sehnsucht at The Chalet in Glasgow as part of Glasgow International and continued writings for Glasstire.com and the Austin Chronicle concerning the shape of the inter-urban art scene in Texas.

Seth explains his picks by saying, “Talent is not enough. Creativity is not enough. Though each of these artists posses both, they go further. They’ve each created or exposed meaning beyond the aesthetic, and they do so consistently. Their work is at once timeless and pertinent – the product of deeply considered and honed practices.”


Seth's selections


Sarah Shaw

Brighton, UK

"

Shaw’s paintings sneak right up to the classical formulas of beauty and composition, and then quickly back away again leaving the viewer wanting. She dangles completion in front of the onlooker like an unreachable carrot. While this palpable manipulation is at times uncomfortable, its reflection in contemporary life is equally so. The works evokes the emotions of incompleteness and wanting that can riddle this over-promised and unfulfilled 3rd millennium reality.

"

Fredrik Akum

Gothenburg, Sweden

"

Akum taps into a a number of conceptual veins in contemporary painting: nostalgia, memory, retro-graphics, anonymity, poverty glam, and disillusioned youth to name a few. Akum goes further than most, however, tying these elements together into a seamless whole and overcoming the skulking postmodern skepticism, pessimism, and sarcasm that frequently accompanies these motifs. It’s also worth noting the artist boasts a broad portfolio marking no barriers between painting, photography, or installation art.

"

Tony Orrico

New York, NY

"

Play the video on this one. Orrico brings the elements of The Vitruvian Man to life. His Performance/drawings are hypnotizing. There are clear parallels between his and Mathew Barney’s endurance-based drawings and films, though the two artist’s work differ in flavor - Barney, trained as a full contact athlete, shows more strain and violence, and Orrico, trained as a dancer, displays grace over force. I also find it strange to see inner body based imagery, the hemispheres of the brain, or an MRI slice of the torso shadowed in much of his completed work; work that is produced solely through the geometry of the outer body.

"

Gregor Gaida

Bremen, Germany

"

Surprisingly, the work pictured here is some of Gaida’s least haunting. What I truly enjoy about Gaida’s work is its confidence. He is a master of his craft but refuses to let that be enough. He uses his toolset to create unique, dramatic sculptures that frequently break the borders of the pedestal and seem to engage with our reality directly. It is easy to fall under the illusion that these works are self-willed entities, a fact that surprisingly holds true even for his non-human forms.

"

Richard Box

Bristol, UK

"

Box demonstrates the unseen but wholly pervasive acoustics of our wired and wireless life. He brings to mind concepts of unseen waste, our relation with technology, infrastructure, and the natural world. At once captivating and worrisome, Box’s fluorescent fields serve as a reminder of the otherwise invisible and perhaps not wholly benevolent unforeseen effects of power, electrical or otherwise.

"


Check out some other great guest curators


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Michael Shapcott

Plainville, CT artist

Kevin Box

Santa Fe, NM artist

Bradley Platz

Co-founder and Curator at Modern Eden Gallery

Joyce Varvatos

Art advisor

Scott Eagle

Asst. Dir. / Professor ECU

Garry Booth

Owner, Phone Booth Gallery

Liz Devlin

founder of FLUX. Boston

Valerie Hegarty

Brooklyn, NY artist

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