These anti-war posters were designed in 1970 by Gerry and Joe Simboli. Unfortunately, 40-plus years later, they’re still relevant. I do like them, though.
Two of them are still available in their Etsy shop.
via Fab
Category Archives: Art
Jess Dunn
Jess Dunn is a sculptor and installation-based visual artist and landscape designer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As stated on the alumni page of the University of New Mexico:
Her [Dunn’s] art focuses on ecological sustainability–generating conversations where the familiar opposition of nature and culture is reworked in fragile, hybrid, and intensely corporeal ways. Her three-dimensional and installation projects speak to how historically and culturally specific human populations intersect and transect natural worlds…She continues to create awareness about environmental sustainability through public art.
The top two images are from Dunn’s Diagram for Substance Transferal project, where the suits were created for the study of thermal depolymerization (the process by which any organic material can be turned into oil) in The Human-to-Oil Project (which is the project in the photos below it.) The instrument, in the latter, can be used to transform donated human organic matter into oil; faucets on the sides emit the liquefied matter into collection barrels paralleling the press.
The final project shown here are the Salt Preservation Skins. Designed to be grown over water canals, these suits serve a dual purpose: to preserve donated organic matter until a Human-to-Oil Press is ready for use; and to reserve processed, liquefied organic matter until needed for energy.
Apart from being conceptually intriguing, I find these projects visually interesting, if a little morbid. See more of Jess Dunn’s work here.
Hans Kotter
Click to enlarge
Yes, it’s true. I’m consistently drawn to art that uses colored light, light bulbs, or LEDs. I’ve liked it for as long as I can remember. When I was younger the big attraction was neon, and I dreamed of having a neon sign on the wall of my room. Later, the discovery of Dan Flavin’s colored fluorescent bulb sculptures was very exciting and in the last ten years or so I’ve become a big fan of James Turrell’s work. So it’s not all that surprising that I should post about other artists working in the same medium as I come upon their work. And, just like paint, these artists all create quite different effects and artworks.
Hans Kotter, a German artist, falls in this group of light sculpture artists. Really nice work. It appears from his site that he will be exhibiting work next week at Design Miami Basel and he was recently a part of the Kinetica Art Fair in London where he exhibited his Tunnel View piece (top photo).
Claydies: The Fairytale of a Bicycle Helmet
The ceramicists/designers ladies of clay at Claydies came up with these humorous bicycle helmet concepts for a crafts exhibit at the Art Museum of Northern Jutland in Denmark. 18 Haute Couture bike helmets in all! Check out the rest at their site as well as their floating tea cups and their hairstyle inspired ceramic bowls. They certainly seem like a fun pair.
via Lustik
Rainbow City and High Line Too (Two)
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The pop-up plaza, deemed The Lot, at 30th Street and 10th Avenue is just as promised. Rainbow City, the interactive balloon installation by Friends With You is cute, fun, kid-friendly and adult-silly. It feels a little like being on a real-life Candy Land game board with a hipster twist. The food section (The Lot On Tap) with its tables nicely angled to be parallel with the High Line above it, and stylish hanging lights, food trucks, large bar and container ticket booth, is all very appealing and I can imagine will be hugely popular in the evenings and weekends.
For me, the true star, once again, is the High Line. It’s hard to believe that they could top the original section, but in some ways I think they might have. Much more seating is available and incorporated very creatively and elegantly. There’s a coziness due to the proximity to the adjacent buildings (which might get a little claustrophobic on a crowded weekend) and there are many romantic little branches, or cul-de-sacs, throughout which work very nicely. Oh, and a lawn! A decent size lawn for NYC standards.
Definitely worth a visit, or three, this summer. Rainbow City is up through July 5, 2011, and Colicchio & Sons’ The Lot On Tap will continue through the summer. Open Sundays through Wednesdays from 11am to 10pm, and till 11pm Thursdays through Saturdays.
Fesetti: Disappear
Juan Astasio: 100 Smiles Project
I saw the charming, funny, and smart Juan Astasio (who just finished his MFA in Graphic Design at Yale) speak last night at the AIGA Fresh Blood event. Many of Astasio’s projects combine a playful wit with an interesting interactive aspect. The photos above are from his 100 Days project (I believe this is a Michael Bierut assignment) called 100 Smiles. Juan made a smile a day from found objects, every day for 100 days and photographed each one. They have all been placed on a website and scroll to the song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle.
The rest of his site is worth checking out as well. Some of my favorites include: Issues, a personal project showing our insensitivity towards powerfully disturbing images; One Minute of Silence Project where you can write epitaphs for things you’ve lost; and Weather Escapes.
Szum: Polish Street Art
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Recent work from Polish graffiti artist Szum.
Michael Craig-Martin
Dublin-born artist, Michael Craig-Martin, currently has a show of new paintings and sculptures at the New Art Centre outside London in the town of Wiltshire. I especially like the sculptures, which really do look like 3-dimensional line drawings of everyday objects.
Chelsea in Motion or, Motion in Chelsea
Zilvanas Kempinas’s piece at the Yvon Lambert Gallery, part of the Play Time group show exhibit. Kempinas had another one of his fan pieces at MoMA last year: Double O.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s Sweeping Spirals installation at the Jack Shainman Gallery. I’m thinking of purchasing this one for Daniela’s room.
Rainbow City at the High Line
U P D A T E : See our post-visit post here for the latest on Rainbow City.
This looks like fun! Em just read about this upcoming event on the Friends With You site (you may be familiar with their collaborations with KidRobot, among other things.) In celebration of the opening of the second section of the High Line, FriendsWithYou (sponsored by AOL) will be showcasing their forty piece installation Rainbow City.
FriendsWithYou presents a vibrant collection of mutable, air-filled sculptures. Inaugurating in the art district of Chelsea during the month of June, this will be FWY’s first large-scale installation in New York City. This happy city is made up of intensely colored balloon pieces, encouraging visitors to be active and explore the giant 16,000 square foot playground. Built for adults and children alike, the installation allows for interaction with each art object, making the experience unforgettable.
According to the article in the New York Times, the installation is part of a “pop-up plaza” at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue. There will be a 350-seat bar run by Colicchio & Sons, as well as a variety of fashionable food trucks offering a range of edibles from lobster rolls to ice cream.
The installation and festivities open on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 and run through July 5th. Worth checking out for sure.
Port Authority Bus Terminal Goes Graphic
Come the end of this month, the Port Authority Bus Terminal here in NYC will be covered with a 6,000 sq.ft. LED-embedded mesh which, from the interior is transparent, but from the exterior provides a fabric for high-resolution graphics wrapping around the corner façade. The MediaMesh appears opaque during the day (see rendering above).
Hopefully the façade will be used as a medium for art though, unfortunately, unlike the renderings, it’s likely that advertising will be displayed instead. It would be great to be wrong.
via notcot, via Architect’s Newspaper
Noaz: Street Art in Madrid
Leo Villareal
Click on images to enlarge
After seeing some of Leo Villareal’s work online, I went over to the Gering & Lopez gallery the other day to see his current show called Volume. The solo exhibit is mainly comprised of the pieces in the top two images: Cylinder and Cube. Cylinder takes up a whole room and is quite impressive, measuring 12ft tall and 9ft in diameter. Made up of white LEDs and mirror finished stainless steel, it’s like your own, personal (I was the only one in the gallery at the time) fireworks show contained within a cylinder. I realized later that he was also the man behind the sparkler-like windows at BAM two or three years ago that were very intriguing at the time.
As much as I liked the few works in the gallery, I would love to see one of his larger shows such as the one at the San Jose Museum of Art which, (based on the photos), looks like it included beautiful colored light panels that are the sort of pieces I imagine Rothko would have created had he had LEDs to play with. Really lovely work and probably even more so in person with the changes in lighting and movement; the complete experience.
Another big project (possibly one of his largest) is Multiverse (bottom left image) at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, through the Concourse walkway. You can see a video here.
All photos are from Gering & López’s site, as well as Leo Villareal’s and Conner Contemporary Art.
The exhibit Volume is up at Gering & Lopez through June 25, 2011.
Origami Madness
An impressive collection of origami from different sources has been put together by Pavol Janovicek on Cruzine.
From top to bottom and left to right:
Blue Bar Pigeon by Seth Friedman (for Em)
Piggy by Roman Diaz
Onitsuka Tiger by Sopho Mabona; Gorilla by Black Scorpion
May the Autofocus be With You by straightfromthecask; Wall-E by Brian Chan
Tow Mater by Black Scorpion
See many more here.
Gabriele Basílico: Contact 1984
Click to enlarge
When I came upon the wall of these large blown-up images at the Armory Show here in NYC a couple of months back, it filled me with a silly happiness. Who hasn’t, as a child, wearing shorts in the summer, been fascinated by the different bumps or ridges left on their thighs after getting up from an extended sitting? I certainly was. So, a sort of nostalgia and instant smile overcame me when I observed these photos by Gabriele Basílico, an Italian photographer who according to his gallery’s web site, first shot these photos in 1979. He had been asked to participate in an exhibit entitled “Freedom limits/the object: faced interpretations” and thought to take an ironic approach that invited free interpretation. From the artist:
The opportunity to participate in such cultural and artistic event helped me to take aside the beauty and formality of the still life photographies and to conceived a project more symbolic, ironic and freedom to interpreted the matter.
Thinking through the images about the relationship between the object-chair and the human body it came to my mind the funny and grotesque image that the hard summer chairs left in the naked bodies of the swimmers. It is a real negative “by contact”. A provisional relief tattoo which is printed on the body aesthetically developing the original surface of the contact.
I had neglected to take down Basílico’s name when I saw this at the Armory and had since been looking for it online, so I was especially happy the other day when I happened upon it via La Lettre de la photographie.
Adrián Navarro
(Click images to enlarge)
Nice work from Adrián Navarro, presently based in London. His Fragment Series paintings (up top) seem to be his most recent, followed by the Ring Series, and then the Sphere Series.
His paintings describe implosions of colour trapped inside virtual volumes that float weightlessly in the pictorial space. Navarro´s work explores the paradox between the physical confinement and the expansive freedom inherent to the organic painting, and by extension to the human being.
I’d love to see these live.
Autone
Autone is a Polish graffiti artist who paints very detailed murals that, to me, almost have a Northwest American Indian influence to them, but then, maybe that’s just me.
You can see his process in the video below. I like the way he stands back every once in a while to, understandably, look at what he’s done so far. It’s especially cute due to the sped-up quality of the video.
You can see more of Autone’s work here and here.
via outerspaces
CollabCubed 