Well, this is certainly news to me. Definitely will be placed on a must-see list next time I visit my relatives in Argentina. TheJames Turrell Museum opened a couple of years ago within Estancia Colomé and its winery in northern Argentina, near Salta. The museum belongs to the Hess Art Collection and is fully devoted to Turrell’s work; all light and space. Fifty years worth of work are exhibited in nine rooms within a 1,700-meter space.
A winery and a James Turrell museum in one location? Sounds like a nice combination, to me.
VollaersWart is a Dutch design studio that focuses on the intersection of architecture with public and visual communication, thus creating many projects for exhibitions and festivals as well as sculptures and public art.
Evergreen is a permanent typographic sculptural installation that was designed for the new Twents Carmel College de Thij—a high school in Oldenzaal—to be used primarily as student seating and as a meeting place in a park-like setting. The large, multi-level letters spell out the word ‘Evergreen’ and are grouped in a way that makes the space resemble a labyrinth. The structure is covered with artificial turf and its circular shape echoes the shape of the school building itself.
Yep, I really love these. All that color and geometry makes me happy. Australian artist Kyle Jenkins, based in Sydney, paints, sculpts, makes collages and more, but here we have some of his acrylic paintings and works on paper. His work is concerned with aspects of intuitive abstraction which incorporates hard edge and organic abstraction. Through the use of basic elements such as lines, color, form and surface, Jenkins explores the construction and deconstruction of the work; what it looks like and how it was made in addition to the displacement of space.
I like them all! Hard edge or organic form; paper to wall mural.
We Make Carpets (previously here and here) the Dutch collective that creates contemporary interpretations of the centuries-old medium, recently put together a Glow Carpet for the Glow Festival in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Consisting of 750 kilogram glow-in-the-dark pebble stones, the carpet was charged with bright light for five minutes every ten so that when the lights were turned off, the luminescent carpet, well…glowed!
Continuing with the escalator theme, here’s an installation by Irish artist Bryan McCormack that was at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a couple of months back. Preservation of Life: Les sons de la vie—as the sound and light installation was called—started at the museum’s façade and continued up its famous 6-floor escalator as part of the art center’s AIDS annual fundraising campaign. 80,000 condom covered light bulbs in different colors, with hues changing on every floor, were used to form a condom tapestry. Accompanying the dramatic tunnel visuals was audio of a human heartbeat, with the pulse changing along with the colors, starting at the base with the cardiac rhythm of a fetus in the womb and progressing at every level, to a newborn baby’s heartbeat and, finally, to the artist’s own heartbeat on the top floor.
Though I didn’t see it written anywhere, I’m pretty sure that the title is a pun. In French, and in Spanish, preservatif, and preservativo, mean condom.
Recently, I’ve come across several interesting photos of escalators and after doing a search found a whole group on flickr. It was hard to select just a few photos (who knew there could be so many great shots of escalators?), but I went for a variety of angles and styles.
German artist Sonja Alhaüser at times makes food her subject matter, as in many of her watercolor paintings, and other times makes it her choice of material. She has created sculptures from butter, chocolate, and marzipan, as well as performance pieces using milk and melted chocolate.
Taking food, a major part of our everyday lives, and using it in art converts it into a new medium that departs from its normal associations. It becomes about the process and about the relationship between art and other aspects of life. In many cases, Alhaüser’s works are edible, encouraging the viewer to eat them, as in the green pedestals made of chocolate (pictured above) included in the Eat Artexhibit at Harvard some years back.
Alhaüser will be part of an upcoming group show at Galerie Gesellschaft in Berlin this year.
This seems to have made the rounds a couple of months back, but I hadn’t seen it till now. Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain is a site-specific, large-scale, walkable rollercoaster designed by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth positioned at the highest peak of the Heinrich-Hildebrand-Höhe in Duisburg, Germany. Visitors are invited to walk up the zinc-plated steel sculpture, which soars to 21 meters at its highest point, and, add to that the height of the artificial mountain that it sits upon, and a person gets a view of the Rhine from 45 meters above the landscape. Unfortunately, for the more adventurous types, you can’t actually climb on the center loop past a certain point.
Dutch artist Remon de Jong created this collapsing ceiling art installation titled Tremor Laquearia. Fixing time in the way a photograph does, the installation takes the familiar and turns it upside down.The chaos completely changes the perspective of the gallery space.
De Jong, who makes paintings, music, sculpture, and videos in addition to his installation work, often references the theme of man and his relationship with the environment.
Below you can see the creation of the installation in progress.
Buff Diss, an Australian street artist from Melbourne, has been using tape instead of paint for the past six or seven years. Though he “tape paints” all kinds of images from abstract to skulls, there seems to be a strong hand theme. Diss cleverly integrates the elements and variations of the street to his advantage, at the same time adding humor to many of his pointing and pinching taped fingers.
The bottom three images are from one of his most recent works: a mural for Red Stripe in London.
Originally from Georgia, but now living and working in Berlin, Eka Sharashidze creates photo collages. Her series Wall People caught my eye. In these images, the panels almost look like paintings, (though that may not be the case in person) but, if I understand correctly (my Georgian and German are a bit rusty, as in I don’t speak either at all), Eka sets up her camera facing a big white wall and shoots the passersby collecting photographs of people going about their everyday business, from walking to biking, to standing and pointing. She then proceeds to take these images, often repeating many of them, (which makes for an interesting effect), other times placing the images sequentially illustrating the progression of time, and, finally, printing them onto aluminum panels. Sharashidze has some nice architectural photo collages as well.
Anemone is an art/architectural installation in Taipei, Taiwan designed by Oyler Wu Collaborative based in California. The concept behind Anemone was to create an installation that is not only appreciated for its aesthetic beauty but also allows for interaction through touch. Built using thousands of transparent flexible rods at different depths to add to the undulating feel of the structure, and give the look of bristling tentacles, the shape invites the viewer in and encourages them to feel the the walls as well as sit in the incorporated benches and bed-like elements. The cantilevered canopy adds elegance in addition to protection.
New York City based artist Lael Marshall probably makes more trips to Kmart than the art supply store when making her art. Initially working out of her apartment, Marshall found that the domestic cleaning materials lying around started “creeping into” her work. The result? Mixed media collages, many of which are on vacuum cleaner bags; dish towel paintings; and soap sculptures, including a series of soap cameras.
Li Hongjun lives and works in Beijing, though originally from Shaanxi Province in China. His life has been split between peasant and artist, with a break in the 90s and then returning to his art at middle age in 2006.
His paper sculptures are almost like architectural or mathematical models with their topographic style. Using layers and layers of paper to create this topology, Hongjun utilizes negative and positive shapes, as well as rotation and skewing, resulting in a very impressive effect. He combines both eastern and western paper cutting methods to create his distortions.
Last year at the Armory Show, here in NYC, I saw this work but didn’t make note of the artist’s name. Thanks to the amazing Google images, I was able to upload my photo and end up onHsin-Chien Huang’swebsite.Read My Lips(as the piece is titled) is an interactive sculpture of Andy Warhol’s face with mechanical eyelids and lips. Taiwan-based artist Huang (who has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Taiwan University, in addition to a B.S. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and an M.S. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, so he really combines science, technology and art) created this work as an experiment, inspired by the Facebook pages of dead artists and their Facebook “friends”. The computer that controls the eyelid and lip movements is connected to the internet. The work posts questions of artistic relevance and social significance to its Facebook page every week and friends can post responses. Using a text-to-speech engine, the artwork then reads back the responses silently.
An interactive public art project from 2010 is shown in the bottom group of photos. Listening is located in a Lo-Sheng sanatorium which used to be a leprosy house in 1929. Between the two large ears made of laser cut steel, is a platform in the space representing the brain. Pedestrians can walk onto the platform and reflect on the sounds they used to hear in the location, as well as the current sounds. There are also 15 QR-code labels on the ground which viewers can use to watch videos with their smartphones.
You can see Read My Lips in action in the video below.
Here is the latest from German artist Nils Völker (previously here and here.) One of his largest pieces to date, Seventy Five measures eight meters in height and traverses three floors at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts as part of their Transjourney exhibition going on in Taipei through February 19, 2012. This time the inflatable “cushions” are made of Tyvek, inflated by cooling fans via custom made electronics. You can watch it in action below.
Last Thursday night, as part of the opening party for the Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012 and Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, activist artist Judy Chicago re-staged her 1968 performance piece Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment. Using thirty-seven tons of dry ice and red flares the performance was staged outside in a parking lot near Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar. No one knew how long it would take to melt, or when the ice would stop smoking. Apparently, it was still smoking on Saturday night, but by Sunday the installation had, for all practical purposes, “disappeared.”
Judy Chicago’s career now spans over five decades. Throughout, she has been committed to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change, especially pertaining to women’s rights. The original staging of Disappearing Environments (shown in bottom photo) took place in 1968 when Chicago teamed with artists Lloyd Hamrol and Eric Orr to produce the original installation in, a then still-under-construction Century City, in the shadow of a department store, creating a contrast between a minimalist piece and consumerism in America.
Brooklyn artist Meg Hitchcock creates elaborate type collages using texts from holy books of all religions. Through an incredibly labor-intensive process, Hitchcock painstakingly cuts out individual letters from one text and assembles them to form a different text in a variety of patterns and shapes.
From the artist’s statement:
I select passages from holy books and cut the letters from one passage to form the text of another. For example, I may cut up a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible and reassemble it as a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, or I may use type from the Torah to recreate an ancient Tantric text. A continuous line of text forms the words and sentences in a run-on manner, without spaces or punctuation, creating a visual mantra of devotion. By conceptually weaving together the sacred writings of diverse traditions, I create a multi-layered tapestry of inspired writings, all pointing beyond specifics to the human need for connection with the sacred.
You can click on the images to see more detail. At a distance they almost look like chains. You can see more of Hitchcock’s works here, here, andhere. You can see her in action, complete with neck pillow, in the video below, putting up her first installation. It’s a pretty insane process!
Click to enlarge
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