Breast artist brings exhibit to art museum

Published: Thursday, 11/6/2014 PEACH WEEKENDER | COVER STORY

BY JANET ROMAKER BLADE STAFF WRITER

Overhead in a Toledo Museum of Art gallery, thousands of silvery gray boxes take flight on origami wings, tucked alongside what creator Pinaree Sanpitakcalls breast clouds.

On view through Jan. 4 in a portion of Canaday Gallery, Anything Can Break is a ceiling installation made up of a steel superstructure and mesh from which the flying cubes and clear glass clouds dangle in what the artist calls accurate randomness. The sculptural work, which took several days to install, is embedded with fiber optics and speakers linked to sensors.

As visitors move around in the space beneath the installation, the space comes alive with soundscapes.

Anything Can Break was first shown at the 2012 Biennale of Sydney in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and the installation at the Toledo Art Museum is downsized for space reasons.

The exhibition here has about 60 percent of the 5,700 origami boxes made by Sanpitak and an assistant who folded sheets of wrapping paper some silvery shiny with delicate patterns, others plain with a grayish tone into the work of art. About 200 breast-shaped glass pieces were made for Anything Can Break.

The Thai artists focus on the female form in metal, fabric, glass, or ceramic is designed to prompt admiration, rather than shock, and her artwork has earned her accolades and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, including in Los Angeles and Singapore.

Another of her installations will be on display for a year, from this month to next November, at the Toledo Museum of Art where finishing touches to the transparent glass sculpture were being made a few days ago in the Glass Pavilion where staff artists made 632 bubble-within-a-bubble beads that have been tied together to create a hammock, playing on a theme Sanpitak explored in the aftermath of the 2011 flood in her native Thailand.

Sanpitak, 53, who finished high school in the United States, said the glass hammock is an extension of her Hanging by a Thread art work that featured printed material from relief bags delivered during the flood crisis. Fabric, that had been used to fashion cradles in which to carry babies or used as blankets, was cut and tied by the artist to create hammocks.

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Breast artist brings exhibit to art museum