Lithuanian designer Gogelmogel has a humorous take on most things from street art to facebook icons. His clever concepts made me smile.
You can see much more on his website, and flickr.
Thanks Lukas!
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Slade Architecture: Virgin Clubhouse and…
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Virgin Atlantic’s new JFK Clubhouse – designed by our good friends James and Hayes Slade of Slade Architecture – opened yesterday at JFK International Airport here in NYC. The 10,000 square foot lounge includes a beautiful curvy bar, cool seating such as the also curved, oversized, custom-made flame red ball sofa, and a large maple wood and burgundy billiards table in the ‘Entertainment Zone’. Bumble and Bumble has opened their first US airport salon and spa as part of the Clubhouse, as well.
Slade Architecture have a slew of great projects under their belt (many of them award winning) and an impressive range to boot; from residential to commercial, educational to cultural…plus furniture and product design, to boot! Below are some of our recent favorites, but you should really visit their website to see much more.
Top three photos: Barbie Flagship Store in Shanghai; second from bottom: Pup Tent; bottom left: Diffa Installation (discarded furniture covered in duct tape); bottom right: East 67th Street Bathroom.
All photos courtesy Slade Architecture
Alexey Morosov: Antologia
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Russian artist Alexey Morosov creates sculptures, paintings and drawings combining the influence of famous masterpieces by sculptors of Ancient Greece and Rome with the contemporary cultural experience of modern man. His recent solo exhibition at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg was titled Antologia and included over 48 of Morosov’s works. From the museum’s press release:
The heroes that are marked by inspired beauty and imposing harmony seem to be protecting themselves from the threat of invisible aggressive force in the most part of presented works. The high skill of execution, natural combination of tradition and innovation, canonical and spontaneous helps Aleksey Morozov to discover the new possibilities of plastic language of the Antique Art and to emphasize the eternal significance of its humanistic ideals.
The contrast of these Hellenic nymphs on their super-rugged segways cracks me up. You can see more of Morosov’s work on his website.
Aristarkh Chernyshev: New Media Sculptures
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Moscow-based contemporary new media artist Aristarkh Chernyshev creates sculptures that integrate today’s technology while commenting on our obsession with it in a humorous fashion. His LED sculptures play with the idea of information overload, in some instances grabbing real-time news feeds from the internet, winding them around the LED lightboard strips through the trash as in his work Urgently! (top two photos), or winding around endlessly in a knot as in Knode (third from top), as well as taking poetic texts and breaking them apart then reuniting them as stock exchange rates in Lyric Economy (second from bottom).
In addition to his LED sculptures, Chernyshev has collaborated with other artists on some fun and interesting interactive pieces. With Alexei Shulgin —the co-founder of their art collective/gallery/creative electronics production company Electroboutique — they created the eyeglasses piece titled The Way I See It! as well as the wowPod, an oversized distorted iPod.
There’s lots more interesting work that can be seen on the XL Gallery’s site and the Electroboutique site.
Here’s The Way I See It! in action…with a very catchy poppy tune that I, unfortunately, don’t know what it is.
via XL Gallery
Serkan Özkaya: David
If you’re in New York City tomorrow (March 6th) you may notice a double-size golden statue of David being hauled around town from 11am through the early afternoon on a lowboy trailer. This would be the work of Turkish conceptual artist Serkan Özkaya, whose golden replica of Michelangelo’s David was initially created for the Istanbul Biennial in 2005. Özkaya’s work typically deals with the concepts of appropriation and reproduction. Apparently, the sculpture collapsed shortly after its installation, then was restored and two replicas were cast. One remains in Turkey and the other was acquired by 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
So, tomorrow the museum, in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture, will tour the David around town arriving at the Storefront Gallery on Kenmare Street in the early afternoon where it will be parked outside on display until 9pm. The gallery will be running a Manifesto Series titled Double, which will include a live staging of manifestos on the topic of doubling, replicating or copying, by a panel of artists, architects, critics and historians.
You can follow David (inspired by Michelangelo) on twitter @storefrontnyc #doubledavid to keep up with its whereabouts or visit the gallery’s website for details on the event.
Boa Mistura: Beauty and Pride in a Favela
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I love everything about this amazing project by the appropriately named Spanish art collective Boa Mistura (good mix): the typography, the color, the participative nature, and most of all the huge heart behind it.
Made up of artists Arkoh, Derko, Pahg, Purone, and Rdick who have developed their work in different fields, Boa Mistura represents a mixture of perspectives combined to create something better. Recently they have started a series of projects in the favelas (slums) of Brazil, starting with Vila Brasilândia near São Paulo where, directly involving the inhabitants, they painted the streets and alleyways with murals using anamorphic typography with pride-inducing words such as, well, ‘pride’ (orgulho), ‘beauty’ (beleza), ‘sweetness’ (doçura), ‘firmness’ (firmeza), and ‘love’ (amor).
As you can see, the result is fantastically joyful. Bravo!
via juxtapoz
Ana Soler: Red Way
Ana Soler: Causa-Efecto
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Spanish artist Ana Soler has a knack for taking the everyday object and creating spectacular installations. Her most recent, Causa-Efecto (Cause and Effect) involved 2000 tennis balls giving the illusion of bouncing all over the various rooms and levels of the Mustang Art Gallery in Alicante this past fall. The multiple trajectories that these balls take have you looking in all directions. A bit like a three-dimensional airline route map.
Very fun and cool!
Photos courtesy of the artist.
via mag
The Wynwood Walls: Street Art in Miami
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Well, this certainly puts the Houston graffiti wall to shame! The Wynwood Walls is a community revitalization concept conceived by Tony Goldman in 2009 as a way to transform the warehouse district of Wynwood, Miami into a center where people could gravitate and explore, thereby developing the area’s pedestrian potential. I should have picked up on something with so many street artists featuring projects in Miami on their sites.
Initially opened in 2010 with the Wynwood Doors, the project has since expanded to the Wynwood Walls and Outside the Walls. Street artists from all over the world have gone to Miami to participate and it has become a sort of “Museum of the Streets,” as coined by Jeffrey Deitch, one of the original co-curators.
Here Comes the Neighborhood is a series of short episodes on the project as a whole, as well as interviews with individual artists. If you like the trailer below you can head on over to their site to see much more.
via the delightful Karen aka Kaia!
Will Ryman: Anyone and No One
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New York artist Will Ryman has taken a departure from his sculptures of giant roses that decorated the Park Avenue Malls in midtown last year here in NYC, and has now created two site-specific works: one a giant male figure, the other a giant bird. Presently, at both Paul Kasmin Galleries in Chelsea (the first artist to show in both at the same time) Ryman’s exhibit titled Anyone and No One consists of a 90-foot figure lying against the perimeter of the Tenth Avenue gallery walls, unclear whether he is sleeping or dying. The figure is made up of 250 pairs of shoes for the shirt and 30,000 bottle caps make up the arms, hands, and feet. The sculpture/installation, titled Everyman, seems to open up through the figure’s head into the next room where a labyrinth has been created out of 200,000 paintbrushes stacked on top of one another. I’m not sure if these organic structures are intended as a trip through the Everyman’s brain or not, but, in either case, this looks pretty amazing.
At the 27th Street gallery is Ryman’s Bird. This 12-foot high, 16-foot wide sculpture is made with 1500 actual and fabricated nails and weighs two tons. In the same way that the Everyman space becomes a box in which the huge man has been stuffed into, so, too, does the Bird’s gallery transform into its cage.
I think I’ll have to check this out in person soon. Both pieces will be up at both Paul Kasmin galleries through March 24th, 2012.
Photos courtesy of Paul Kasmin and Mark Rifkin’s flickr.
Thanks for the tip, Stephen!
Slinky Springs Bridge: Tobias Rehberger
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The Slinky Springs Bridge in Oberhausen, Germany, was completed this past summer. Designed by artist Tobias Rehberger, the inspiration for the bridge came from the iconic Slinky toy and the catchy phrase “Slinky Springs to Fame” which seems to be the way the bridge is referred to. Rehberger was able to recreate the light, wild and irregular quality of the toy in his vibrating spiraling bridge that almost looks thrown across the Rhine-Herne Canal. This was no easy feat, if I understand correctly from the not-always-easy-to-decipher google-translated German sites that I read. Apparently, the execution of artist Rehberger’s, (self-admittedly clueless about bridge design) vision was successfully accomplished through the collaboration with structural engineers Schlaich Bergermann and Partner. A bit of description from their website on the 406-meter-long bridge with 496 coils:
Following the design of the artist Tobias Rehberger, a colorful ribbon wrapped in a light, swinging spiral connects the two existing parks. The lightness of this design is due to the minimalist structural design of the stress ribbon bridge. Two steel ribbons made of high strength steel connect to the inclined supports across the canal. The resulting tension force is transferred into strong abutments through the outer vertical tension rods. The walkway consists of pre-cast concrete plates, bolted to the stress ribbon, to which the railing and spiral are attached. The springy synthetic pavement of the walkway as well as the colorful rhythmization of the concrete and coating amplifies the dynamic experience of the bridge.
The colorful pavement pathway was carefully selected by Rehberger who had very specific ideas on its look. Then the bottom of the bridge was made to exactly match the colors on top in a separate material. It’s great how the nighttime illumination really accentuates the colorfulness.
Seems to me that bouncing across the incredibly cool and unique Slinky Bridge could be a lot of fun, if maybe a little unsettling as well.
If you like this bridge then you’ll probably enjoy the Tiger & Turtle Walkable Rollercoaster and the Twist Bridge as well.
CollabCubed 