Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim was born on October 6, 1913 in Germany, yet grew up in Switzerland. She joined the Surrealists and began to create sculptures. Oppenheim’s sculptures embraced feminine domestic object, but with a twist. She would specifically underline how one household item can be used in an entirely different way or by adding other materials that usually do not belong to the item. For instance, her fur-covered cup is one of her famous sculptures. Oppenheim was one of the first female members in the Surrealists group and brought these sculptures to present different forms of an object.

Kurt Schwitters was born on June 20, 1887 in Germany. He studied art and drawing at Dresden Academy from 1909-1915. Schwitters began his artistic journey by collecting garbage and turning it into art masterpieces. He began his ventures after World War I and used his creative building by finding materials around him. With the garbage, Schwitters would directly place the pieces of garbage onto his current works. Through these art pieces, he would create collages that would incorporate his artistic mind and the media’s printed works. He later created journals, advertisement and he founded the Merz journal.

Brian Jungen is a Canadian artist known for his contemporary art, who currently is living and working in the North Okanagan of British Columbia. He creates sculptures out of a variety of materials that are considered everyday. Many of his sculptures take the form of traditional Aboriginal art forms, or resemble standard tools, and components of Aboriginal cultures. By combining everyday, very mainstream, materialistic, and superfluous, he is able to create and highlight the juxtaposition between the materialistic modern culture we currently experience, and its cohabitation with Aboriginal cultures. He has made things such as totems, and masks, out of sporting goods, such as golf balls, and has an installation in the National Gallery of Canada that is a whale created out of plastic lawn chairs.

Works

Hajra Waheed is a Canadian artist from Montreal who works with various medias (from collage, to video, sound and sculpture) to explore issues around covert power, mass surveillance, cultural distortion, other other traumas faced by displaced subjects through mass migration. She uses extensive research and new accounts to prompt and support her work. She expresses her work in a variety of ways. For instance, since 2008 she has been working on an ongoing series called the Anouchian Passport Portrait Series. She created renderings, drawn in pencil and charcoal that mimics the automated movements of a printer, of men and women whose pictures were taken by an Armenia photographer, Antranik Anounchian. She also has done video installations, and other medias throughout her career.

http://hajrawaheed.com/works/

Here are various profiles of artists that we looked at in this course.