SCULPTURES | Nancy Azara

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RECENT SCULPTURES

This body of work employs found wood from the forest and the city streets in combination with milled lumber. These works are not extensively carved, allowing whole limbs to dictate the form of the sculpture. Painted silvery white, and accented with Azara's traditional pinks and red, tree limbs and vines are juxtaposed with arboreal imagery. These objects stand as figures, metaphors for the artist's own presence, and markers of their own former lives and growth.

Feminist structures and altar works

Azara's altar works engage with generational rites of transition. They incorporate touches of Azara herself, her mother, daughter and granddaughter. These works also demonstrate Azara's wide range of spiritual influences and interests, from the death mask of ancient Etruscans totems of the indigenous peoples of the North West Coast, and eastern burial treasures. They reflect Azara's continuing interest in lifecycles, ancient shamanism, burial grounds and ritual sites and their relevance to contemporary life and a female focused spiritual practice.

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PASSAGES AND CHANGES

"A similar sense of human-scale monumentality comes across in an accordion-style wooden book, a collaboration with the poet Judith Barrington. Ms. Barrington's emotionally measured writing and Ms. Azara's simple emblems of handprints and footprints, of a kind familiar from Tibetan Buddhist paintings, are well-matched. Neither ironic nor guileless, they make vulnerability seem like a considered choice." -Holland Cotter, Art in Review, The New York Times, 2000

A series of interchangeable works mostly 12" square about a kind of visual thinking process which connects one to the other thought, but remains an intact statement.

botanical

As a child, Azara was drawn to nature and to trees by the feeling that they held a metaphor for her experience of life. She loves plants for their physical presence and the illusionistic symbolism inherent in trees, both of which she utilizes in their transformation into her autobiographical sculpture.

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Broken Red Leaves.jpg

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large scale installations

Azara's approach to public work is intended to interact with the community, to reveal itself over the course of multiple interactions, to unfold or unravel, into a story with personal relevance for the viewer.

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Time Path.jpg

Widow's Tongues.jpg

Goddess Wall.jpg

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