As with many, I sometimes find The Art to be indistinguishable from fashion, design, or decorative art, which is completely fine. However, the trend towards their sugary, whimsical ilk sometimes gives me one too many (hot)flashbacks of semi-reluctant jaunts around Anthropologie and its twee brethren.
When I first saw a feature praising Juan Fontanive, I spotted the Merian hummingbirds nested under the alliterative heading “Beautiful Flip-Books Made From Recycled Bike Parts,” I was skeptical. But less novelty wall art and more an almost holographic zoetrope, the pieces in action reveal a frantic corporeality unable to be contained by the frames: the animated images hover suspended in margins of air. The rustling slaps emitted by the paper resembles the sound of wings–which in essence, if not in form, the paper is. In some ways then, the image of birds and butterflies act as a visual proxy, the projected spirit, of the actual sculptural work.
