May 30, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Mary Miss: FLOW & Broadway: 1000 Steps

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In my search for something else, I happened upon Mary Miss’s exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) last fall, FLOW: Can You See the River? Mary Miss is a New York based artist who has been combining sculpture, landscape architecture, and installation art with the issues of our time, since the 1970s. Making environmental and social sustainability into tangible experiences is a primary goal. In FLOW, Miss reveals important elements of the White River water system through a series of mirror and red dot installations at stopping points along the river, engaging and educating visitors.

Upon visiting Miss’s website I learned of a similar interesting project coming to NYC in 2013 — Broadway: 1000 Steps.

Using a similar mirror system to the one used in FLOW, Broadway: 1000 Steps is an initiative to establish Broadway as the new “green corridor” of NYC. Twenty hubs along the length of Broadway will make planned sustainability initiatives tangible to passers-by. A test Hub last September at 137th Street attracted the attention of several universities who are now participating in conducting research that will be included in the future hubs’ contents.:

Undergraduate and graduate students from these schools are conducting research that will inform hub content, mapping each of the hubs, collecting photos and relevant images, and proposing their own solutions to the MM/CaLL challenge. Research, data and visual materials collected by the students can be found at http://www.mmcallpartnership.org/. Student efforts will be completed by spring of 2012, and content development, design, and testing will be advanced during the summer and fall 2012. The goal of installing a majority of the hubs has been set to take place in spring/summer 2013, and it is expected that hubs will be in place for approximately one year.

Additional information on the Broadway: 1000 Steps can be found here.

Photos courtesy of the artist, IMA, and City as Living Laboratory

May 30, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Museum: Cortlandt Alley

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This is the kind of quirky thing that makes NYC so great. Located in what was once a freight elevator in an alley behind a former paper warehouse, in the area between Tribeca and Chinatown, sits the Museum. This tiny space is filled with velvet lined shelves housing artifacts, objects, and, well, garbage from around the world. These pieces from assorted collections undergo a rigorous vetting process by the permanent curatorial staff who select only the most awe-inspiring objects.

Daniela and I went down for a quick visit today. Based on the 24/7 hours posted on the Museum’s website, we were not concerned about the time. These hours, we soon found out, are possible due to the three, different-level windows in the bolted shut door. Apparently, entrance can be gained by appointment only via email. I have to say that peeking through the windows works just fine and adds to the nuttiness of the whole concept. There’s a phone number on the door that acts as an audio guide service when punching in each object’s clearly displayed reference number. So, if a toothpaste tube from another country and/or its history would interest you, or maybe a misspelled food container label or air conditioner vent, then get yourself over to the Museum and peruse these lovely collections.

The Museum is located in Cortlandt Alley between Franklin and White Streets. Look for the windowed door under lots of scaffolding.

Photos: collabcubed

May 21, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Designboom Mart 2012 Designs

After two days at the designboom mart 2012 at ICFF, things are going really well at our table with lots of nice feedback, but we’ve also had the pleasure of being surrounded by so many interesting, clever, and beautifully designed products. Here are some of our immediate neighbors whose designs we’ve been admiring.

Above top, Seoul-based design studio TEEV has designed these very clever picture frames in the style of an airplane window. No, the window shade does not come down, despite many a person’s attempt at pulling, but even without that possibly-in-the-future fun feature, these frames put a smile on most everyone’s face.

Right below the photo frames, Nancy Froehlich’s Bold & Lovely chunky porcelain bowls with bright and colorful glazed interiors, are simply beautiful. Contemporary and fresh in their design, we’re still trying to decide which one of these bowls from Oregon we’re going to purchase for ourselves. Nancy also has a line of plates with quote marks on them that have been quite popular at the show.

A couple of tables over, Colombian design studio Proyecto Tres y Medio have brought along their Tápate messenger bags made of recycled plastic bottle caps that have been sewn together and lined to make a series of very unique bags.

UK-based Alex Garnett has an interesting collection of work that includes ceramic fruit bowls in the shape of squashed basketballs and, Daniela’s favorite (though she got there two minutes after the last one at the mart was sold): Conceptual Crap –“R. Mutt” stickers to transform your toilet into a Duchampian/DADA work of art. Brilliant!

Moissue from Taiwan has some spectacular woodwork. Their Dandelion stool — which doubles as a magazine rack — is beautifully crafted and would make a great sculpture on its own let alone a dual-purpose piece of furniture. Their wood and metal rings are lovely, but what really blew us away is their incredibly innovative packaging; a wooden cylinder that screws shut with the ring inside. Without a doubt the best jewelry packaging I’ve ever seen.

There are plenty more creative products at the designboom mart and we’ll also be sharing some designs from ICFF 2012 as well in the coming days.

May 18, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

CollabCubed at the Designboom Mart 2012

If you’re planning on heading to this year’s ICFF here in NYC, we hope you’ll stop by and say hi to us at the designboom mart! We’ll be selling our EARonics at a discount as well as Daniela’s fun silver two-finger bicycle rings. We will also have prototypes of other designs on display that we will be producing for our shop, in the near future.

Should be a fun 4 days!

May 18, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

NY Design Week 2012

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Well, it looks like the ever-growing NY Design Week 2012 is off to a great start with exceptionally beautiful weather in store for the next three days. Aside from ICFF at the Jacob Javits Center, the event at the core of Design Week (and we – CollabCubed – will be there as part of the designboom mart, but more on that later) there are special design-related events going on all over the city. Too many to list here, but here are a few I ran across today in my travels through NoHo on my way to the East Village.

Tom Dixon along with Fab, Surface Magazine and Stumptown Coffee have teamed up and transformed the basement of the Bleecker Street Theater into a Pop-up shop and café: London Underground. Filled with lamps designed by Dixon, the space has a cool feel with interesting shadows cast upon the walls. My favorites? His new line of industrial looking ceramic lamps due out in September.

Two blocks north on Great Jones Street, Japanese Premium Beef (a unique butcher shop worth visiting anytime for its singular boutique-like quality) has a display of beef and sausage balloons created by Balloon Factory.

On the same block, The Future Perfect looked like they were setting up a special exhibit and across the street at Partners & Spade, Mondocane has an exhibit of historically relevant children’s chairs. Around the corner, Core77 was setting up their First Annual Core77 Open, a Pop-up exhibit featuring 5 designers from the 5 boroughs. The stacks and stacks of wooden flats(!) that they were loading into the shop look like they’ll make for an interesting installation.

More events include: Roll & Hill’s temporary showroom at 2 Cooper Square; Areaware at 22 Bond St.; and Hotel California at The Standard East Village.

You can see more events on the Noho Design District site, as well as Metropolis Magazine’s list, Core77, and WantedDesign for other events outside of Noho.

Enjoy!

All photos collabcubed except for bottom row of chairs courtesy of Mondocane and Partners & Spade.

May 16, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Tomás Saraceno: Cloud City at the Met

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It 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.

Photos courtesy of the artist and The Met.

via The Metropolitan Museum and NY Times

May 10, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Daniel Buren: Excentrique(s)

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French 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!

Photos: Courtesy of Monumenta, Benoit Tessier/Reuters, Francois Guillot/AFP/GettyImages and Francois Mori/AP.

via voanews and the telegraph

May 9, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Helmut Lang: Sculptures

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Who 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.

Bottom photo courtesy of 24 Washington Square; all others collabcubed

May 7, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

And That’s the Way it Is: Ben Rubin

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A 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.

From austinist:
The profound differences between Cronkite’s world and ours are felt as the projection evolves, both in their content and manifestation within Rubin’s piece. For the Cronkite transcripts, Rubin slows the pace and allows the text to move slowly up and down the CMA with fully legible quotes. When projection segues to live news feeds, the text flies across the building, occasionally as just snippets of stories and other times with full news coverage. The words overlap and eventually become so dense that the overwhelming presence of media becomes the dominant character in Rubin’s piece. Rubin accurately portrays this amassing of information and reinforces the oversaturation of current journalism.

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:

Photos courtesy of the Ben Rubin and Paul Bardagjy.

via frame and austinist

April 30, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Evol: Repeat Offender

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.

Photos courtesy Jonathan LeVine Gallery.

April 23, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Anthony McCall: 5 Minutes of Pure Sculpture

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New 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.

Photos: Markus Schreiber (AP); David Levene (the Guardian); Hugo Glendinning; luyu2’s flickr; College des Bernardins’ flickr; Sean Gallup, Getty Images; AnatR’s flickr, and courtesy of the artist.

April 23, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Alison Knowles: Make a Salad (Follow-up)

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Tempted 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.

April 19, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Architect’s Eye: Speech Tchoban & Kuznetsov

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As 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.

April 16, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Alison Knowles: Make a Salad on the High Line

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If you find yourself in NYC this coming Sunday, you may want to head on over to the High Line to see Fluxus artist Alison Knowles restage her 1962 Make a Salad performance piece in honor of Earth Day. Knowles will be chopping lettuce and other ingredients, in collaboration with Jessica Higgins, to the beat of live music by Joshua Selman. Originally premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1962, the artist has repeated the event over the years at such venues as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Wexner Museum in 2004 and most recently at the Tate Modern in 2008. The vegetables may vary from event to event, but the music is typically Mozart.

Having taken part in (and thoroughly enjoyed) the High Line’s last communal food event —the Social Soup Experiment—this past fall, I imagine this will be a lot of fun.

This Sunday’s event (April 22, 2012) will take place on the High Line at West 16th Street in the Chelsea Market Passage. Salad prep will begin at 10am through 12 noon at which point Knowles and her team will toss the salad for spectators. 12:15 to 1pm the salad will be served up to audience members. Oh, and it’s free!

Photos courtesy the artist and the High Line.

UPDATE: See follow-up post here.

April 12, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Rivane Neuenschwander: Continent Cloud

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Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander is known for her poetic-styled installations. Currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, is her previously exhibited piece titled Continent-Cloud. Composed of a polypropylene lining that supports small styrofoam balls which occupy the entire gallery ceiling, the balls are moved around by hidden fans creating changing forms in constant movement. The way these forms rearrange themselves is evocative of clouds moving across the sky, while at the same time some of the solid masses are also reminiscent of land formations on the globe, hence its title.

Neuenschwander’s installation will be up at MCA as part of their Marking Time exhibit until June 3, 2012.

Photos: Reuters: Daniel Munoz; MCA; and Stephen Friedman Gallery

April 4, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Studio 400: White

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Now this looks like a fun class! Design, developed and installed by students in Professor Karen Lange’s Studio 400 class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo College of Architecture and Environmental Design, White is their recent book show installation. White served as a showcase for Studio 400’s thesis books, filling the gallery with 80,000 square feet of plastic sheeting that was loomed, crocheted, stapled, bent, and tied over a 4-day period. The result was a fun, comfortable net, creating hammock-like reading spaces within which to peruse the hanging books. Must have been a blast.

You can watch the process in the video below:

If you like this you might also enjoy Ernesto Neto’s installations and For Use.

via sinbadesign/archinect

April 3, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Delancey Underground: the “LowLine”

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This is a project that I’m very excited about. Being a big fan of the High Line, the idea of revitalizing another set of unused train tracks to create an additional public park space in NYC sounds great. The Delancey Underground project (a.k.a. the LowLine) is the brainchild of James Ramsey (RAAD) and Dan Barasch (PopTech). They propose to convert the former Williamsburg Trolley Terminal – opened in 1903 but not in use since 1948 – into a 60,000 square foot underground green space beneath Delancey Street in the Lower East Side. They have found beautiful architectural details in the abandoned space such as cobblestones, vaulted ceilings and crisscrossing train tracks.

Dark and gloomy you say? Well, Ramsey has designed a new technology that would direct sunlight below ground via fiber optic cables. Solar collectors would be placed at street level, collecting sunlight throughout the day which would then be reflected below ground. This light would not emit the ultraviolet harmful rays, but would support photosynthesis enabling the growth of plants and trees.

Arup Engineers are now working with the team on a series of feasibility studies as well as on the sunlight irrigation prototype.

The project has a Kickstarter page with three more days to go and information straight from the creators. They have met their initial goal but, as always, a project like this could use more money. In addition, from now until the end of April, the Mark Miller Gallery on Orchard Street has an exhibit previewing the LowLine Park titled Let there be light, with large renderings, a 3D model of the space, animated video and protoypes of the solar reflectors.

via lowdownny and inhabitat

March 30, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

No Longer Empty: “This Side of Paradise”

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The contemporary public art organization No Longer Empty, is revitalizing the Andrew Freedman Home — a block-long mansion along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, originally built as a welfare hotel for the retiring wealthy who had fallen on hard times beginning in the 1920s and lasting into the 80s, when it was taken over by the non-profit Mid Bronx Senior Citizens Council — by inviting 32 artists to create site-specific works.

Many of the artists included are well known graffiti artists such as Crash, Daze, and How & Nosm who have each taken one of the rooms and are bringing them to life. There is a bit of irony in the choice to invite street artists to revitalize the grand mansion when its decline coincided with the rise of Bronx graffiti in the 70s and 80s, but there are also parallels which the curator points out: “…the role of the artist rising from the ashes of the burned-out neighborhoods then and an art show in the decay of this home now.”

The exhibit, titled This Side of Paradise, begins the evening of April 4th through June 5th, and will open the gates of the Andrew Freedman Home to the public.