Paul Villinski – Lost Gloves and Beer Cans
Paul Villinski is an American visual artist born in York, Maine in 1960. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and the Massachusetts College of Art, and got a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He uses slightly strange materials to create incredible installations. He transforms gloves into wings; wheelchairs and radio flyers into planes; or beer cans into fluttering butterflies. As he says, the city is full of lost gloves from all ages, classes, occupations or races; they are forgotten, damaged, carelessly left behind and homeless – qualities that frighten us. So Paul brings them into the studio and gives them new homes. Villinksi also collects crushed beer cans from the streets of New York and transforms them into flocks of butterflies. The artist says, “my process of “recycling” them into images of butterflies is a quiet physical meditation, a yoga of tin snips and files and fingers.”
