WAUSAU — This summer’s immersive installation of colorful, assembled-object sculptures by Miami-based artist Federico Uribe opens at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum on Saturday, June 2.
For his installation, “The World According to Federico Uribe,” on view through Aug. 26, Uribe will create a large-scale, walk-in environment brimming with whimsy, according to a Woodson news release. On the opening day of the exhibition, at 700 N. 12th St., Uribe leads a gallery walk and shares insights about his work from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Uribe’s sculptures of animals and jungle scenes are fanciful transformations of everyday objects reimagined and reconstructed in unexpected ways, according to the Woodson. Colored pencils become a giraffe, wooden crutches convey a crocodile, telephone cords convert into a sheep’s curly fleece, tennis racquets morph into a camel, white electric wires represent a ram’s coarse coat.
Uribe turns books into trees, shoe leather into animals, measuring tapes into pigs, and bullet shell casings into bunnies.
Although Uribe now lives in Miami, he remains deeply rooted in his native Columbia where he says beauty and art have immense healing potential in a country torn by more than 50 years of war. According to his artist’s statement, “the ability to turn destruction and death into peace and beauty is for Federico a way of reconciliation with life. His work and his art are the expression of an incredibly culturally rich and diverse nation striving to overcome clichés, to heal its wounds, and to look with hope into the future.”
Also on View from the museum’s collection
“Dynamic Designs: The Serigraphs of Anne Senechal Faust,” on view through February 17, 2019. Vibrant silk-screens affirm Anne Senechal Faust’s mastery of the medium and her knowledge of and affinity for birds and their habitats. Faust’s artwork conveys a sense of place achieved through her experience as an artist and close observer of the natural world. Faust was honored by the Woodson Art Museum as the “Birds in Art” Master Artist in 1999.
Photos courtesy Woodson Art Museum.
