Click to enlargeThe Slovenian, multi-disciplinary, design collective Multipraktik organized a series of street TapeArt actions – with different artists across Slovenia – as part of the new campaign for Orto, a cellphone carrier company. Aside from the resulting wonderful murals, it looks like these guys had a lot of fun. Take a look at one of the many stop-motion videos below.
via urban pride
These are fun. Texas-born artist Kay Rosen, who teaches at SAIC in Chicago, loves type. The shapes. “They are the architecture of text.” Her typographic art installations are playful and fun to figure out, but just to make it a little less challenging, I’ll list the titles from top to bottom here:
Blurred
Deep Beep
Wideep
Tent
Pendulum
MañanaMan
Overbite
Go Do Good
Many more on her website!
via IdN
Click to enlargeJust ending this past weekend at the MACG (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil) in Mexico City, was an exhibit titled Esto (no) es un libro de artista (This is (not) an artist book) which included the book sculpture works of Guillermo Álvarez Charvel and Héctor Falcón. Yes, the amount of art revolving around books these days is both overwhelming and a little depressing, but at least these soon-to-be-extinct objects will live on as sculpture and installations.
It’s interesting to see both these artists side by side and, in some cases, collaborating. While Álavarez Charvel uses paper folding to create his book sculptures and works up from the original volume, Falcón’s works are more topographic, where he will stack books but then cut them into pieces or carve into them.
via espacio blanco
Click to enlargeSouth African artist Stuart Bird creates sculptures, videos, and installations, often utilizing type, that speak to the socioeconomic situation of his present day country; South Africa’s potential for greatness existing side-by-side with empty government promises, hence the title of his recent solo exhibit: Promise Land. The show included the pieces shown here, the top three images being stills from Bird’s video Calling shot on a cellphone. The video documents the act of inscribing the words ‘Revolution’ and ‘Counter’ onto the roof of a building with an acetylene torch. From the artist:
You can see more of Stuart Bird’s work at the Goodman Gallery’s website.
via Goodman Gallery and artthrob
Click to enlargeI stumbled across Mexican artist Aldo Rojas’ work and really like the thinking behind it. Rojas is a conceptual artist who is interested in social conflicts and popular expression. His art deals with socioeconomic disparities. He likes to shake things up by bringing these quotidian examples of contrasts in economic levels from the streets to the interiors of art world institutions.
For his Vasos de Lismoneros (Panhandlers’ Cups) Rojas, along with Alfredo Wigueras, bought used cups from several panhandlers. They enjoyed the irony in these corporate brand cups starting as a tool for commercial consumption, subsequently converted to garbage, then rescued by the homeless panhandler and converted into a working tool once again, of a different sort, with the final twist in the artists buying these cups again and making them into ‘art’, exhibiting them in galleries, once again converting them into merchandise but in a completely different circle and social class.
Rojas’ other projects make similar statements and poke a bit of fun at the art world as well. His Mexico a Traves de sus Paletas (Mexico as seen through its Lollipops) is a collection of different style lollipops from different sections of Mexico City. Mobiliario Urbano Informal: Mingitorios Personales (Informal Urban Furniture: Personal Urinals) are a collection of bottled urine (from Evian water intake) in PET bottles, representing the bottles left around Mexico City by bus, truck and taxi drivers due to the lack of public toilets.
Lastly, Rojas’ Colecta de Conos (Cone Collection) depicts the lack of quality control in the cheap brand of cones typically dispensed to lower income families by ice cream cone carts in the parks of Mexico City, displaying them as a chromatic palette.
You can see more of Aldo Rojas’ work on his blog and in his Behance portfolio.
via Behance
Berlin-based artist Evol – known best for his street art interventions of scale models of abandoned and decaying buildings left on electrical boxes and cement blocks in cities around the world – currently has his first solo show in the United States at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea. Repeat Offender, as the exhibition is titled, is a collection of Evol’s recent work of multi-layered stencil paintings on used and flattened cardboard boxes, as well as other paintings on scrap metal. These works continue to convey general urban decay and, more specifically, the walls and façades of pre-gentrified East Berlin. Incredibly realistic (I thought they were photo-silkscreened), these spray-painted pieces work beautifully on their chosen canvases. The combination of the painted façades with the type, tape, and icons on the original boxes gives them a wonderful texture. Though they photograph well, seeing these in person, as with most art, adds another dimension.
Repeat Offender will be at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery through this Saturday, May 5th.
You can watch a video of Evol’s process here.
Click to enlargeBrazilian artist Henrique Oliveira, based in São Paulo, started as a traditional painter, but after some time he started experimenting with scraps of wood found in his father’s woodworking shop as well as on the streets. In many ways his installations are seen as his own unique style of painting. With these splintered scraps of wood as his pictorial material, Oliveira evolved from a painter and sculptor to simply an artist.
His large-scale, labyrinth-like installations burst through walls and façades in a sculptural, painterly, and collagey way. Inside, these works resemble the interiors of caves and, in some ways, the inside of the human body as entered through a vaginal-like entrance. The gigantic and jammed quality of these ‘paintings’ sprawl out of exhibition spaces and buildings in a beastial and amazing manner.
Oliveira’s most recent exhibit just closed yesterday at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz, Austria, but coming up in July he will be having another show in Galeria Millan in São Paulo.
via ok-centrum
Chinese artist Liu Wei is a man to watch in the new Chinese art scene. He creates installations, paintings and videos oscillating between order and disorder. His installations/cityscape sculptures are at times sprawling and depict cities in a state of metamorphosis, something he can relate to in the development of his native city, Beijing.
Presently, Liu Wei has his first solo exhibit, Foreign, at the Almine Rech Gallery in Paris. The installations in this exhibit are, once again, cityscapes made from stacks of schoolbooks, held together by steel rods and wood clamps. These are unidentifiable skylines, including a range of iconic buildings from the Pentagon to Saint Peter’s Basilica.
His hanging installation above, is titled Don’t Touch and was exhibited at the Farschou Foundation in Beijing last year. That work is made of oxhide, wood, and metal. His earlier work Love It! Bite It! was made of edible dog chews.
Liu Wei’s exhibit at Almine Rech Gallery will be on view through May 16, 2012.
via saatchi gallery
The Spanish art collective Boa Mistura (previously here) composed of five self-proclaimed ‘graffiti rockers’ created this cool anamorphic typography installation for the interior design fair Interiorissimo Decoracción 2011. Inspired by the poem “Order is” by Louis I. Khan, the words “El Orden es Intangible” (Order is intangible) were painted on an abstract furniture composition that is only legible from one specific angle. This sort of thing always blows my mind.
Click to enlargeEnglish artist Robert Currie creates large scale installations using unspooled videotape transforming spaces into dramatic physical and optical experiences. Many of his works are actually titled by the length of the videotape, which I find sort of fun, such as 2 Days, 1 Hour, 59 Minutes and 47 Seconds.
Also interesting are his sculptures made of layers of black nylon monofilament creating both abstract three-dimensional structures as well as image-based ones that appear photographic.
You can see more of his installations here and sculptures here.
Click to enlargeCzech artist Roman Tyc (née David Hons), member of the guerilla art group Ztohoven, replaced 48 traffic lights in Prague by amending the standard red and green figures to show them in situations such as drinking, urinating and being hanged, as well as more benign ones such as a man walking his dog. The act was embraced by the public as great fun (as well as awarded top prize at Austria’s Sidewalk Cinema Festival in Vienna that year) but, naturally, not so much by the authorities. Tyc had to pay for repairs in addition to a large fine. Tyc paid for the repairs but, refusing to pay the fine, was sentenced to 30 days in prison this past February. In protest, his supporters signed petitions and ‘decapitated’ – by blacking out the heads – traffic light figures throughout the Czech Republic. Despite their efforts, Roman Tyc served the 30 days and was released in March.
Here’s a video of the installation:
via gestalten
Click to enlargeAwhile back I came across a student project for a redesign of the Casino VLC in Valencia Spain, by interior design student Vicente Ortuño at Escuela de diseño Barreira. The design features a large sculpture of a hand wrapping around the building as if grabbing it. Ortuño’s design is meant to break with the traditional Roman architecture approach to casino design. He opted for a surrealist vision, with a dreamlike quality in a place where people hope for dreams of winning and wealth to come true. The hand was specifically chosen for its presence in such game-playing phrases as “a good hand” or “sleight of hand” as well as for its strength, not to mention making a clear indicator as the main entrance.
Shortly after, I came across a case study for a house in Los Angeles by Greek architect Andreas Angelidakis who maintains an experimental practice in Athens which involves “building, designing and speculating the contemporary ecosystem of screens and landscapes. He usually operates at the intersection of systems: Art and Architecture, Virtual and Real, Building and Nature, Ruin and Construction.” Angelidakis’ design for the Hollywood Hand House has an involved story behind it. Basically, a concrete hand of a giant girl punches through a mountain off Wetona Drive from the direction of the Hollywood sign. After the anger subsides the hand comes out of a reservoir water basin and elegantly holds a glass box building on a serving tray, perched over the cliff like a billboard. The punched-out cave and glass house are connected via the reservoir which is converted to a swimming pool…it’s quite a fictionalized and surreal story which you can continue to read about on Angelidakis’ blog.
Obviously, they seemed like natural projects to group together…you know, with the giant hands and all. Both projects have a creepy quality, but then, I think that’s what each designer was going for.
Click to enlargeNew York based artist Anthony McCall has been creating unique light installations since the 1970s with a 20-year break in between. Currently, McCall has a solo exhibit in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof, titled Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture – his largest to date – showing light installations created since 2003. His works are a combination of film, sculpture and drawing, though his more recent works are digital with complex forms created with the aid of computers. These light sculptures are ephemeral, yet seem tangible and physical. The projected beams of light — some vertical to the floor, others horizontal onto the walls — engulf the viewer in the slow-moving cones while animated lines, drawn in black and white, are projected into a haze-filled room, creating the sculptural forms.
The choice of space sounds and looks perfect, too; the spacious former railway station has been converted into a black box filled with haze and light. I vote for this coming back to NYC at the Park Avenue Armory!
Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture will be on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof through August 12, 2012.
Click to enlargeTempted to skip it due to the rainy-day wetness, at the last minute I bussed on over to the High Line for the special Earth Day Make A Salad event with fluxus artist Alison Knowles (see previous post). I arrived in time to witness the chopping (though not exactly to the beat of the music) by the crew who ranged in age from around nine to upwards of sixty. The covered, two-tiered Chelsea Market Passage was the perfect spot, both for avoiding the rain and the required dramatic height for pouring the salad contents onto the mixing tarp. The reasonably large crowd (I’d say over a hundred people attended) gathered around the tarp, some vigorously shaking and tossing the lettuce, celery, carrots, mushroom, radishes and onions, while Ms. Knowles added a couple of pitchers of dressing and the rest of the crowd cheered them on. Knowles came down to put the final raking touches and the salad was then shoveled into large salad bowls by Jessica Higgins and served up by the young High Line staffers.
It was a fun event, with lovely music “DJ’ed” by Joshua Selman with his lettuce covered guitar and nori shredder around his neck. How was the salad? Very tasty, though I personally would have preferred it onion-free. Good ol’ NYC fun.
Click to enlargeFor their Graduate Architecture & Urban Design Student Exhibition, the students at Pratt Institute, under the tutelage of their professors Michael Szivos and Carrie McKnelly of SOFTlab (previously here), created this series of suspended tubular tunnels made up of over 2,400 lasercut cardboard triangles interconnected with 6,000 thin plywood clips, taking over the Robert H. Siegel Gallery. The walls of the gallery are papered with five years worth of student work which can be seen through the portals created by the cardboard installation, which are also used to display models by the students.
You can see the installation in progress in the time lapse video below.
via designboom
Click to enlargeAs part of this year’s Interni Legacy event at the Università Statale in Milan, in conjunction with Milan Design Week, Sergei Tschoban and Sergey Kuznetsov, partners of the Moscow based architecture studio SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov, have designed a high-tech sculpture titled The Architect’s Eye. A stainless steel sphere, completely smooth and reflecting, features an LED system to create the image of a huge human eyeball that rotates to look to the sky as well as at visitors and the ground. The iris changes color and the pupil increases and decreases in size. Very cool.
The theme of Interni Magazine’s event is ‘legacy’ and SPEECH’s sculpture dutifully works that in by including images and video of abandoned monuments of the Russian avant-garde, commenting on the importance of preserving our history and cultural legacy.
These photos are a lot of fun. Luxembourger artist Simone Decker created them in 1999, but I just happened upon them for the first time now. Decker is interested in perspective shifts and often explores the way public space is arranged. Much of her work appropriates said space as in her photographic series shown above: Chewing in Venice 1 + 2. Using photographic trompe l’oeil devices, Decker includes the streets and squares of Venice as the backdrop for her oversized gum sculptures; a proposal for sculptural work, or at least that’s the way I understand it.
Those big bubbles remind me a bit of the RedBall Project. I think the realization of these sculptures would be a huge hit.
via chiquero
Click to enlargeLondon based artist David Shillinglaw’s (aka Dodie Boy) work is new to me, at least by name, but by the number of street art blogs that came up when googling, I have a feeling I may be in the minority. Either way, I really love it. Shillinglaw’s work moves between street and studio, usually working on multiple projects at once…no time for boredom! His bold, colorful, type-infused illustrations convey the ups and downs of life, often including humorous idioms and metaphors.
Here’s a nice interview with Shillinglaw, and you can see more of his work on his website and blog.
via dirtcheapmag
CollabCubed 