Local marketing and design agency Innereactive Media recently collaborated with international eyeglass frame manufacturer Marchon Eyewear, Inc. to facilitate an art show featuring seven current and former ArtPrize artists. The artists used recycled and discarded eyeglass materials to create pieces celebrating vision, art, and sustainability for the show Re-Visions of Art on exhibit in New York City.
Samantha Toth and Kristina Bird of Innereactive Media collaborated with Marchon to bring Re-Visions of Art to life. ArtPrize 2014 inspired the idea for the collection. All of the artists included the show were chosen to create pieces because of the interesting art they entered into ArtPrize 2014, and because they specialize in recycled materials and other unique media.
“ArtPrize brings so many amazing artists together,” said Samantha Toth, President and Founder of Innereactive Media. “We were so inspired by what we saw at ArtPrize 2014 and we wanted to bring that to the optical industry. Eyes are such an intimate subject matter, and the materials used to market eyewear are sleek and colorful. Really, everything came together for Re-Visions of Art, and we couldn’t be happier with the final show. We were so proud to make connections with these artists, supporting ArtPrize and highlighting West Michigan as an artistic hub.”
Since 2009, artists from around the world have entered over 10,000 pieces in the Grand Rapids-based art contest ArtPrize. More than $3 million in prize money has been awarded to artists based on public votes and jury selection. Many pieces in ArtPrize showcase causes the artists want to promote, and some are made from repurposed materials or recycled goods that would otherwise end up in landfills.
The artists in Re-Visions of Art and their pieces varied widely:
Eric Broekhuis – Eric created a paper art piece, Lost in the Crowd, from a single piece of cut and folded paper with reused glasses to portray a crowd of featureless faces.
Kim Ensch – Kim’s piece Perception used hand-stained and painted paper as well as reused eyewear parts to represent traveling a path on an inward journey.
Timothy Gabriel – Timothy’s piece How Do You See the World? uses recycled eyeglass materials to question the viewer and ask them to consider their perspective.
Hark + Hark – The artist team (Catherine Richards and Anh Tran) created Refract, a display piece with garments and a clear vanity top to showcase the recycled eyeglass materials and represent deconstruction and viewing the world.
Derek Stephens – Derek created his piece Tree of Spectacle with artfully arranged recycled optical materials creating a colorful tree symbolic of growing deep roots and reaching for the sky.
Gianluca Traina – Gianluca arranged mirrored lenses on a 2D surface at a 45° angle to create the image of an eye entirely from reflected colors for his piece Private Eye.
Steven Tozer Wipfli – Re-Fraction uses cut pieces of paper and repurposed lenses to explore the idea of bending light and images.
ArtPrize 2015 will be September 23–October 11 and will feature 1,554 artist entries from 48 countries and 42 states. Many of the artists from Re-Visions of Art will have pieces on display for ArtPrize 2015.