to move up and down
In the sea of clay figurines
Local volunteers arranged some of the thousands of clay figures that make up part of Antony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles,’ being installed in Barrington Court on April 25, 2012 near Ilminster, England. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
About a decade before Lady Gaga donned a meat dress at the 2010 Video Music Awards, a similar fleshy ensemble was attracting controversy at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic featured 50 pounds of raw flank steaks stitched together. A city councillor called it a “decadent and perverse waste of taxpayers’ money.”
![Heather Graham: Coming into focusLook. Take a step back. Lean in. This is the dance artist Heather Graham watches people do at her shows, waiting until the moment when — there. Everything comes together for them and they can see the face rising out of the painting, like a ghostly polaroid or a woman projected on the canvas.The subjects of Graham’s large-scale paintings aren’t always clear at first, but with movement and patience, each canvas of dark smudges becomes a face looking back at the viewer.“If you stand there long enough, it all comes into focus,” Graham says of her work, on display now at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Ontario. “It’s almost like [the painting] pulls you in, because you have to kind of just stay there and say, ‘I know what this is. It’s a ghost.’”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lptx3eZlnE1qze0z6o1_500.jpg)
Heather Graham: Coming into focus
Look. Take a step back. Lean in. This is the dance artist Heather Graham watches people do at her shows, waiting until the moment when — there. Everything comes together for them and they can see the face rising out of the painting, like a ghostly polaroid or a woman projected on the canvas.
The subjects of Graham’s large-scale paintings aren’t always clear at first, but with movement and patience, each canvas of dark smudges becomes a face looking back at the viewer.
“If you stand there long enough, it all comes into focus,” Graham says of her work, on display now at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Ontario. “It’s almost like [the painting] pulls you in, because you have to kind of just stay there and say, ‘I know what this is. It’s a ghost.’”
