...Vic Muniz...

Vic Muniz is a Brazilian Artist born in 1961 who has lived in New York since the late 80's . He is famous for creating images by arranging certain unconventional materials, to recreate well known works of art, and then photographing it, resulting in the final piece.

He was born in Brazil where he was trained and started out as a sculptor, but soon moved on to even more creative methods of making art. He at first would take pictures of his sculptures, but then focused completely on the photographing of his work. One of his most famous pieces called "Pieces of Dust" was done by collection dust around The Museum of American Art and recreating it into the pictures that where being exhibited in the museum. The ironic thing about this is, that dust is seen as a destructive thing in art, especially in museum exhibitions.

Another famous piece of work by Muniz is titled "Clouds" where he would sky wright cartoon images of clouds in the clear sky over New York and then photograph them. While "Clouds" is a well known exhibition by Muniz, I myself am not a fan of this particular piece.

In this video I found online, he talks about himself and what he thinks it is to be creative.

http://www.ted.com/talks/vik_muniz_makes_art_with_wire_sugar.html

His work really caught my attention when I was researching for my Relive and Remake project. The first image of his I saw was the image of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth, that he had redone in chocolate syrup. The detail of the image is amazing, showing alot of precise work and dedication. Also the way he had lit the image gave it more depth which worked really well, as it could have looked flat being a 2d image of a 2d drawing.

References -

• The Photograph as Contemporary Art - Charlotte Cotton
• http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph080
• http://www.artnet.com/artist/12255/vik-muniz.html
• http://www.vikmuniz.net/html/bio.html
• http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2001/clouds/muniz/about_clouds.htm