EL ANATSUI

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I first encountered El Anatsui's work at Art Basel in Miami a few years ago.  With acres of art on view, his piece stayed with me most.  Anatsui's glimmering tapestries carry both a majestic beauty and a layered conceptual significance.  Born in Ghana in 1944, Anatsui chooses raw and recycled material for his sculptures and installations.  Since 2002 he has been creating tapestries out of tin can lids and liquor bottle caps, linking them together with copper wire.  The pictured work, Straying Continents, was commissioned recently by the Royal Ontario Museum.  The solid expanses of lids adrift in the fine lattice of cap bands evoke continental shift while the product branding speaks of colonial introduction and subsequent local appropriation.  The piece is accompanied by a series of videos in which Anatsui speaks poetically about taking something abandoned and giving it new purpose, as well as the importance and freedom in using locally found and inexpensive materials. The undulating beauty that he creates with another's trash seems akin to the northern lights:  both intrinsically natural and somehow impossible.