Click to enlargeYes. Drawings. London artist Jonathan Delafield Cook gets his inspiration for his remarkable hyper-realistic charcoal drawings on paper and canvas from nature. His attention to detail makes these works look almost photographic. He plays with scale by enlarging his subject matter, whether it be birds’ nests or bulls. Pretty amazing and beautiful, to boot.
Thanks, Breger.
Click to enlargeBangkok-based multi-disciplinary design studio FarmGroup (previously here) created this fun Christmas installation at the Siam Center. Using thousands of colorful plastic drinking straws, the sculpted the word “Yeah!” along with several shapes of animals, stars, and other holiday motifs.
If you like this you might also like Sang Sik Hong’s Straw Sculptures and Scott Jarvie’s Clutch Project, also made with straws.
Click to enlargeThe Impression Wall is an interactive installation designed by the Bangkok–based design studio FarmGroup. Inspired by an old toy, the Impression Pin, the installation is designed to encourage passers-by to engage with the wall by pressing against the acrylic pins to create a 3-dimensional impression on the other side. Fun!
Click to enlargeA couple of years ago, on a trip to Paris, we noticed many of these masks emerging from the walls around town. I came across a photo from that trip the other day and decided to google the artist. Gregos, as he is known, grew up in the suburbs of Paris and started graffiti painting in the late 80s. After stints in Athens, Greece and Boston, where he learned sculpting and painting, Gregos returned to Paris and street art, this time inventing his own 3D style combining all his newfound skills: sculpture, molding, and painting.
There are presently more than 400 faces, all cast from his own face — self-portraits that express his humor, thoughts, and most everything about Gregos.
You can see plenty more of these faces on his website and his flickr.
Click to enlargeIt may not have been the best day to inaugurate Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno’s new installation, Cloud City (his largest in a 10-year-old series Cloud Cities/Air Port City), on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum due to the heavy downpours of rain, but it was the previously determined date. I was looking forward to checking out the installation in person, having been aware of Saraceno’s habitable constructions (previously here) for a while now, but will wait for a sunnier day.
The sculptural/architectural piece atop the Met is made up of interconnected metal and acrylic modules with both reflective and transparent panels. Visitors are able to enter the structure for up to twenty minutes by obtaining a timed-entry ticket. If the regular views from the roof garden weren’t already beautiful enough, I would imagine that both, the views from the additional 20-foot high interior, as well as off of the mirrored panels on its exterior, are even more spectacular, as evident in Saraceno’s photos.
Definitely worth a visit, though there are likely to be long lines to enter, especially on weekends. Luckily, Cloud City will be on the roof of the Met through November 4, 2012, at which point it will travel to Green Box Arts Festival in Colorado where it will be placed in the middle of the forest.
Check out The Met’s site for details.
via The Metropolitan Museum and NY Times
Click to enlargeIt’s true that we have a soft spot for all things Brown, with Em being up there almost 9 months of the year, but we’ve also been fans of the year-old Granoff Center on campus, designed by DillerScofidio+Renfro, since its opening. And now, I came across the permanent kinetic light installation titled 2×5 (Brothers) by, ironically enough, the two brothers at Berlin-based firm Realities United, which hangs at the entrance of the building as of last month. This colorful installation just adds an extra ‘like’ to all of the above; a little Rothko meets Albers meets Turrell rolled into one that has been beautifully integrated with the window panes and doors of the main ingress.
2×5 is a time-based work with two identical casings containing poster scrollers with full-surface monochromatic colored prints on stretched fabric illuminated from behind.
You can see more of Realities United’s work, such as the very cool Bix/Kunsthaus Graz and the more recent mirror installation Transreflex, at their website.
Click to enlargeOriginally from Chicago, artist Brian Dettmer, who creates innovative sculptures with books and other forms of antiquated media, currently resides in Atlanta.
As is the case with other artists working with books as their material of choice, Dettmer uses his art, in part, as a commentary on the waning physical form of the information age. The long-lasting book is being replaced by the intangible, digital file, and the world risks being left with nothing.
Dettmer works by cutting into the surface of books and dissecting through it. Working with knives, tweezers and surgical tools he carves one page at a time. Nothing within is relocated, just removed. Alternate histories and memories are revealed. In the case of the series of quotes above, Dettmer has cut into groups of paperbacks, sealed with acrylic, carving out the easily recognizable unfinished quotes.
You can see much more of Dettmer’s work here (definitely worth a look) and his Pecha Kucha talk from 2 years ago here.
via tribe magazine
Click to enlargeWeighing in at 18,239 pounds (!!), Qzina Specialty Foods’ chocolate model of an ancient Mayan temple has broken the Guinness World Record for largest chocolate sculpture.
Corporate Pastry Chef Francois Mellet and MOF (Meilleur Ouvrier de France or Best Craftsman in France) Stephane Treand led their team in building the winning work. With a 10ft x 10ft square base, and measuring 6 feet high, the chocolate sculpture—which pays homage to the Mayans’ role in the origins of chocolate—accurately recreates the details of a Mayan temple.
The sculpture will be on display at the Irvine-based Qzina Institute of Chocolate & Pastry from June 4 to December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar year, when it will be destroyed.
If you like this, you might also like Sonja Alhauser’s work.
via gothamist
Click to enlargeFrench artist Jean Daviot works in a variety of mediums including painting, photography, video, and installation art. Throughout, he plays with aural and linguistic analogies. In his installations he is particularly interested in wordplay; in seeing words and type as shapes and then in essence dissecting them and seeing the words within the words. For example: MEmoiRE (memory), a word he uses in several installations, contains the letters M-O-I (self) inserted between the word MERE (Mother). He likes to take the words literally and then turn them upside down.
via documents dartistes and artpress
Click to enlargeFrench artist Laurent Perbos belongs to the genre of artist that enjoys reappropriating the everyday and banal by converting it into art where it can be seen as playful, ironic and/or critical. He uses materials such as sports equipment, pencils, pvc piping, just to name a few. Many of his works reference mythological figures such as the sculpture at the top – made of bungee cords and javelins – titled Calydon, a wild boar from Greek mythology said to have been sent by the goddess Diane, that devastated the territory of Calydon. Below, Forest Tears, are trees and tree stumps made of pvc piping.
Click to enlargeWhere to begin? Not since John Waters’ 1981 film Polyester with scratch ‘n sniff ‘Odorama’ have I seen anything like Peter De Cupere’s Olfactory Art. Apparently, a growing number of artists around the world are incorporating scent into their works. Belgian artist De Cupere creates smell installations, scent sculptures, olfactory performances, smell-movies and scented painting. He generates a sort of meta-sensory experience that goes beyond purely seeing or smelling. He started playing with, and noticing, fragrances as a child, fearing that he would lose his vision. He attributes his fascination with the combination of smell and visual to that early-life fear. De Cupere is also fascinated with people’s desire to change or cover their natural smell with perfume in order to be more attractive to others. He seems to be a firm believer in the natural, and not over-washing.
I find all his work very interesting, if a bit bizarre. From top to bottom here are some of his works:
Sweat: Peter De Cupere collected the sweat of dancers wearing plastic suits during a 15-minute performance choreographed by Jan Fabre. He applied the concentrated essence, enclosed in a glass box, to a wall at the dance company’s home base, in Antwerp. Visitors can smell it through a hole in the glass.
Air Polluter: an interactive smell installation which allows the visitor to decide in how far he or she contributes to pollution of the air. By means of a control panel at the start of the installation, visitors can activate good as well as bad smells. This subdivision into two so called Smell Fields is based on the socially accepted appreciation of the various smells.
Smoke Room: a smell installation made of more than 750,000 cigarette butts.
Smile Room: a smell installation made with 3400 tubes toothpaste, pu-components, creating an intense minty toothpaste smell.
Tree Virus: Smell-installation with intensive peppermint smell. Visitors start to cry by entering the plastic dome. The main fragrance is an intense mix of peppermint in combination of black pepper.
Flower Fragum Cardamomi: first Scratch ‘n Sniff Sculpture in the world, 9 meters high. Made of epoxy, metal, 1000 strawberries and cardamon.
Olfactory Tree: scented sculpture made completely of epoxy and fake. Fragrances: pine, cedre, forest, mushrooms, grass
Garbage City Holiday Jina Park: a smell installation made to look like garbage but smelling of pine & cedar, honey mustard, and peach-cassis.
Smell Me Project: People’s necks are stamped with the words “smell me” and everyone goes around sniffing each other exploring others’ scents and which attract and repel.
Olfactiano: A piano-like instrument that emits different smells when played called ‘Scent Concerts.’
There’s much more to explore if you find this as fascinating as I do. For older work check De Cupere’s website, and for more recent his facebook page. Click through the links above for more on the individual projects.
Oh, and he’s making a perfume called ‘Peter’ of his own smells, coming out soon, so keep an eye out for that!
via saatchi online
Click to enlargeLateral Office, an architecture firm based in Toronto and founded by Lola Sheppard and Mason White, was commissioned by the Harbourfront Centre to address the theme of ‘personal space.’ They responded by creating an installation — titled Clearing — with a dense field of over 4000 elastomeric strings running vertically along a tight grid. As people entered the space they would be given an acrylic collector tool that would allow them to navigate the field and manipulate the density of the space.
Click to enlargeFrench artist Daniel Buren has unveiled his monumental installation Excentrique(s), Travail in situ, for this year’s Monumenta, the annual art project that’s in its fifth year and challenges an internationally known artist to ‘own’ the 145,000 square foot space of Paris’s Grand Palais.
Buren, a minimalist, has filled the space with primary colored discs horizontally eight feet off the ground, except for the area underneath the nave which has 9 circular mirrors on the floor facing up. Utilizing the sunlight that shines through the space, Buren fills the Grand Palais with color and light that, apparently, is rather breathtaking.
This would be so much fun to see in person…because of the installation and because it’s in Paris!
via voanews and the telegraph
Click to enlargeWalid Raad is a contemporary media artist originally from Lebanon and now mostly based in New York. He formed The Atlas Group, an imaginary art collective whose work is exclusively produced by Raad. His works include video, photography, literary essays and these architectural wall reliefs, of which I spotted the top one at the Frieze Fair here in NYC last week.
These sculptural wall hangings have an exaggerated perspective and all seem to be inviting one in through their portals. Concerned with the contemporary history of Lebanon, particularly the wars between 1975 and 1991, Raad’s works are often representation of traumatic events. His work examines the social, political, psychological and aesthetic ramifications of the various wars that have been waged in Lebanon.
In his series of wall reliefs—an ongoing project in part titled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World—Raad literally sets the stage for his upcoming play about art institutions in the Middle East, depicting what the architectural interior of the museum’s gallery spaces would be.
Walid Raad is an associate professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
Click to enlargeWho knew fashion designer Helmut Lang also makes sculptures? Not I. Yesterday, I went over to Washington Square to take a look. Lang has collected and repurposed materials such as tires and foam to create saggy, multi-layered totems that are a cross between fungi and phalluses. Combined with tar and plaster these mostly monochromatic pieces are rich with their original textures and indentations. There’s something very appealing about seeing them all together, as if in a surreal forest of strange vertical vegetation, many taller than me…though that doesn’t take much.
There is something vaguely Louise Bourgeois about these sculptures and later I read that Lang collaborated with both Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer over the years. He retired from fashion in 2005 to dedicate himself to his art full time.
Seeing these works in the parlor floor of a Washington Square townhouse just adds to the unusualness of the exhibit. It’s fun just to see what one of those houses looks like inside.
Helmut Lang’s Sculptures will be on exhibit at 24 Washington Square North (Mark Fletcher is the buzzer) through June 15, 2012.
Click to enlargeOriginally from New York, but now living in California, artist Chris Mason started as a muralist before he began working extensively with wire. As a sculptor, Mason attributes the two biggest influences on his work to High Renaissance Figurative Art and comic books. The latter might explain the Spiderman quality to his climbing wire sculptures.
Mason has humorously titled his wired sculpture series as Social Climbing and Rewired. I think walking into a gallery filled with these little guys would be a fun experience.
Click to enlargeA few weeks ago, The University of Texas dedicated one of their plazas to the legacy of Walter Cronkite. The newly named plaza was debuted along with media artist Ben Rubin’s (previously here) art installation titled And That’s The Way It Is; a digital interface that intertwines transcripts of Cronkite’s legendary broadcasts with contemporary journalism, projected in a beautifully choreographed manner (reminiscent of Jenny Holzer’s work) as compositions of moving text, onto the façade of the CMA building, overlooking the Walter Cronkite Plaza.
The permanent installation is on display nightly from dusk to midnight on the southern façade of the College of Communication A Building on the UT Austin Campus.
You can see the installation in action below:
Click to enlargeI can just imagine the smiles provoked by coming upon Milan-based street artist Guildor’s floating phrases. Write on the Water (love the punniness) is a series of installations created by the artist in several cities including Amsterdam, Milan, and Venice. Linking foam letters together to create words and statements such as “Clap First”, “Happiness Happens”, “Think Once and a Half”, “Pensa Spensierato (Think Carefree)”, and “Love; Let the Rest Flow” and floating them on water – from fountains to rivers and canals – is simply a happy and nice concept.
If you like this you’d probably enjoy Nicole Dextras’ Ice Typography installations, too.
via flickr
CollabCubed 