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 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 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 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 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 enlargeI probably walk by the Lomography store a few blocks from my apartment about once a week, but this past weekend I stopped in my tracks when I spotted these fun cameras in the window and stepped inside to see them up close. La Sardina Beach Edition cameras, as they are called, take their inspiration from the sardine tin—in their shape and size—and come in all sorts of fun colors and patterns which, in this edition, are printed on canvas. These 35mm film cameras (yes, film!) are super cute and cost between $75 and $110 and according to reviews, take a pretty decent photo in the Lomography style.
You can see more designs and purchase them here.
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
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 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
Click to enlargeThis has been posted all over the place, but I just love it so, here it is! The Umino Seaweed Shop commissioned creative agency I&S BBDO, who developed this laser-cut nori, to respark the sale of nori. This could do the trick. Design Nori is intricately patterned laser-cut seaweed for sushi rolls. Such a simple idea and yet so brilliant! Not that sushi needed much prettying-up, but it certainly does add a little more pizazz to the already appealing rolls.
The lasercut seaweed designs are on exhibit at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo as part of the Katagami Style show on view through May 27, 2012.
via swissmiss and designboom
Dos Toros
The Magical Floating Hat of 23rd Street
Elizabeth Street
Trader Joe’s
Baked by Melissa
Awed by art, at the MoMA
La Dolce Vita
Click to enlarge photos; click captions to go to photo on flickr photostream
Scott Lynch – best friend and beau – (aka Scoboco) has snapped photos for years, mostly of his daughters and, well, of me, but it wasn’t until about a year ago that he took photography on with a vengeance. Today he’s got almost 5,000 photos in his flickr photostream (and there are probably another 5,000 that didn’t make the cut!) His primary subject? New York City. He’s covered Occupy Wall Street from the beginning, compiling an impressive collection of OWS photos with rarely a day missed. His love of street art is also evident in his NYC Graffiti and Street Art photography set. And then there are his photos of art exhibits. But, for me, where Scott truly stands out is in his ability to see and capture the humor (and/or poignancy) in everyday New York City street scenes. These are my absolute favorites. And, though not necessarily evident in the photos I’ve selected, much of the time his captions are as clever and humorous as the photos themselves. In some cases they even make the photo (see Awed by art at the MoMA above).
The photos here are definitely in my top 20 but, as you can imagine, with 5,000 to peruse, it’s hard to narrow down to a handful. So, take a look for yourselves at Scoboco’s photostream, and you might want to wish him a happy birthday while you’re at it.
Just when you think they couldn’t possibly come up with more cardboard objects and designs, the fine folks at the Spanish studio cartonLAB (previously here), come out with a whole bunch of clever and innovative designs. All made from cardboard and flatpacked for easy shipping and transport. From their lovely lamps to their recent collaboration with Ecological Drive – a green company that recycles tires – where cartonLAB incorporated recycled tires as cushions for the company’s benches and displays.
But it doesn’t stop there. They’ve got uniquely designed chairs, bookcases, headboards and much more; all fun, sustainable, and stylish.
Check out the entire collection at their website, or download a pdf of their new catalogue on the upper left corner of their home page, to see the very reasonable prices. Can you tell I’m a fan?
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 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.
CollabCubed 