Artist: Arthur Hash
Orchid Gallery: http://www.ganoksin.com/orchid/hash.htm
The definition of contemporary jewelry is always being stretched to
include alternative materials such as cardboard, resins, found
materials and animal parts. Today with our technologically driven
society, materials seem to coincide with popular culture. This is
the dawn of entertainment art. Formal qualities fall by the wayside
and the viewer no longer gets lost in the piece. These issues of
formal beauty are replaced with everyday pop-culture iconography.
With today’s low attention span/ instant gratification society, the
one-liner piece seems to have more of a foot hold on today’s culture
and more of an impact on the contemporary art viewer. Color field,
pattern repetition and formal materials that seemed to lure viewers
in the past have been supplanted with contemporary imagery, social
issues and political motives.
The use of shape and material in these pieces address the formal
qualities in contemporary jewelry and speaks of the instant. This
media evokes emotion and exploits its beauty to combine formal
qualities with concept, bringing back the elegance and beauty that
is linked with body adornment. The fact that jewelry is an art form
that is mainly consumed or admired by the non-jeweler forces the
maker to constantly question the value of adornment. This work
questions the automatic, the instant recognizable subject of
ourselves.