College of Arts and Architecture
School of Visual Arts
SCULPTURE
BONNIE COLLURA
Assistant Professor of Art
Bonnie Collura received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994 and her Masters of Fine Art, concentrating in Sculpture, from Yale University in 1996. Upon graduating with her MFA she has been in numerous solo and group shows in New York, Germany, France and Italy. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, BOMB magazine, Beautiful Decay, Time Out New York, and several other publications. She has been awarded The Emerging Artist Award in 1997 from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, for Sculpture, in 2005.
As a DJ combines copasetic and differing references to create a string of sounds that are at once familiar and foreign, I try to impart this muti-tiered logic in three-dimensional form. Greek mythology, renaissance sculpture, biblical stories, fairy tales and pop culture icons are some of the references that launch the framework for a non-linear narrative that can only be completed by the viewers movement through the sculptural space I direct. Fascinated in how film can distort, pervert, and alter one’s memory through its cyclically and unfolding structure, I make three-dimensional figurative and non-figurative forms operate on this visual manipulative level. Every degree of my sculptures strive to challenge a viewers circulation, encouraging them to move around the sculpture not because that is what they may understand to do cognitively in relation to art viewing, but because that is what they are propelled to do emotionally to become more connected to the gesture and narrative of the sculpture in front of them. While making, what guides a dubious subjective/objective balance is a dance between my head and hands. What results is a space where I freely coalesces multiple points of reference while rearranging them into a new logic. My hope is that each angle of my work poses questions that a viewer can only answer by physically moving in the space that surrounds the sculpture, thus turning the viewer into a collaborator and coconspirator of meaning.
My current project, which I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, consists of sculptures, videos, and drawings representing the journey of a fictitious three-dimensional soul mate entitled “The Prince Project”.
GALLERY OF ARTWORK
