April 20, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

GAUD12: Pratt Institute Exhibit

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For 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

April 18, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Simone Decker: Chewing in Venice 1 + 2

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.

From an article translated on her website:
All of these works consist of photographs, mostly series of photographs, that propose sculptures or architectural elements for the public domain. They are documentations of real outside installations of these objects. But it is only the perspective of the camera that lends the works a visual presence and a dimension that puts them in the relationship to the urban or architectural environment desired by the artist. In Chewing in Venice, for example, the chewing-gum objects only become sculptures that fill squares and lanes by virtue of the fact that they are photographed right in front of the lens.

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

April 17, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Mathilde Roussel: Lifes of Grass

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French artist Mathilde Roussel created these suspended anthropomorphic sculptures titled Lifes of Grass using soil and wheat grass seeds that, just like a chia pet, slowly transform with the growth of grass.

From the artist’s website:
I strive to show that food, it’s origin, it’s transport, has an impact on us beyond it’s taste. The power inside it affects every organ of our body. Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat makes us more sensitive to food cycles in the world – of abundance, of famine – and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality.

Roussel has exhibited these works in numerous gallery spaces since 2010, especially in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but most recently at Anatomia Botanica exhibition at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, Nashville.

via feel desain via notcot

April 17, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Eric Mistretta: Mixed Media

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Mixed media New York artist and student Eric Mistretta seems to be making a splash. First, his quirky yet touching pieces that range from type on paper to type on balloons, taped doors to painted pantyhose and paintings/collages made with melted candles and smoke (just to name a few) appeared in the Virgins Show at the recently opened Family Business Gallery in Chelsea, a space opened through the collaborative forces of Maurizio Cattelan and New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni, and now he’ll be showing his work at the Affordable Art Fair starting Wednesday. These colorful, offbeat pieces that seem to use found materials, made me smile.

Born in Queens, NY, Mistretta is an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts, “makes a great bolognese” and keeps a food blog in a addition to his art blog.

via artlog

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 10, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Matt McVeigh: Shopping Cart Sculptures

The multi-talented Matt McVeigh is an Australian set designer, painter, costume designer, puppet-maker, and sculptor. Most recently he has created a series of sculptures involving both life-size shopping carts and miniature ones. In these sculptures McVeigh explores consumerism and its resulting social issues by referencing the instability of our culture and the endless pursuit of more.

Last month in Cottesloe’s 8th annual Sculpture by the Sea, McVeigh had both an outdoor (top photo is The New Covenant) and indoor (bottom photo: Covenant Under Question?) sculpture exhibited.

You might also like last year’s submission, Ascension, as well as his kinetic piece Stentor.

via sculpture by the sea

April 9, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Good Design Lasts

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New York design office Spagnola & Associates faced the challenge of designing their new office space. They created a 20′ wide dimensional wall to stimulate ideas and complete the office. 2804 pencils were hammered into pre-drilled holes in the panels. The completed wall reads, in custom designed letters, “good design lasts”. The entire process is documented in the stop motion video above.

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 4, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

AVPD: Spatial Works

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AVPD, a Danish studio created by visual artists Aslak Vibaek and Peter Døssing, unites knowledge from fine arts, architecture, science and the humanities to create works that focus on the perceptual relation between man and space. These installations or spatial works have a fun house quality to them, with their mirrored hallways and infinite doors. The top photo shows their installation aptly named Hitchcock Hallway, while the next five images below are from their Broken View installation where a single corridor appears to become two. The bottom four images are from Diagonal View, which has an equally deceiving hallway.

From AVPD’s website:
We define our spatial works as meta-architectures where the normal perception of the spectator is challenged and displaced and a new experience of space is made possible. In our works, we try to rethink the triangular constellation of the subject, the object and the context. We are interested in how spatial constructions effect the perception of the spectator and how she/he grasps the space in a cognitive, emotional and intellectual way.

Our domain is reality and our artistic praxis is a spatial laboratory.

There are many, many more of these works to be seen on their site as well as videos and plans that explain each one, though I’m quite sure that nothing beats walking through them live.

via galeria leme

April 3, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Key Frames: Groupe LAPS

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Key Frames is a light installation created by the French design/artist studio Groupe LAPS — six artists and designers with combined expertise and technical know-how who work in film development, light installations, and multimedia applications. Using LED light tubes, Key Frames consists of multiple static stick figures that, when paired with a dance soundtrack, flash on and off in a choreographed display that evokes movement. Totally fun.

Originally designed for the Fête des Lumieres 2011 in Lyon, France, Key Frames was just included as part of the iLight festival at Marina Bay in Singapore.

You can see it in action below:

Photo credits: Reuters; flometal’s flickr; bernardoh’s flickr; and Groupe LAPS.

via voanews

March 29, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Bikeway Belém: P-06 Atelier

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The way I see it, most everything is improved with a little typography. Bicycle paths included. The Bikeway Belém in Lisbon is a prime example. The 7,362-meter bike route along the river Tagus has bold white wayfinding text and symbols painted directly on the pavement which, apart from its practical purposes such as providing direction and measuring distances, is also fun and engaging. There are some ‘zuuuums’ and ‘vuuuums’ printed around as well as arrows and questionmarks that always look good. In addition, along one of the piers, there’s a verse by Portuguese poet Alberto Caeiro about the river Tagus. The project was a collaboration between the Lisbon-based communication and environmental graphics studio P-06 Atelier (previously here) and Global Landscape Architects.

As much as I love the Hudson River bike path, I think a project like this would only enhance it even more.

Photos courtesy P-06 Atelier and Decorating the Duck.

via segd

March 27, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Kansas City Public Library Parking Garage

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Though the Kansas City Library Parking Garage in Kansas City, Missouri was completed in 2004, I had never seen it before. Designed by cdfm2 architects (now apparently 360 Architects), the book spines measure approximately 9 meters by 3 meters and are made of signboard mylar. The shelf showcases 22 titles reflecting a wide variety of reading interests suggested by Kansas City readers and then selected by The Kansas City Public Library Board of Trustees. Clever.

Photos: Jonathan Moreau, Hanneorla, Worldslargestthings, and Jonathan Kemper.

via visiondivision

March 26, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Plastique Fantastique: Fantastic Plastic

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Based in Berlin, Plastique Fantastique is self-described as a studio for temporary architecture. Since 1999 this team of designers, artists, and engineers – headed by architect and founder Marco Canevacci – has been creating fantastic plastic bubbles in urban spaces for art exhibits, trade shows and festivals.

From their website:
Plastique Fantastique’s synthetic structures affect the surrounding space like a soap bubble does: it is a foreigner which occupies and mutates usual relations and points of view. By mixing the landscape, it gives birth to a new hybrid environment that allows an osmotic passage between private and public space. The installations crop the subject from its context by beaming it into a new realm of space. Whether people interact with the bubble simply by seeing it, or walking around the exterior, or actually moving through the interior, the structure is a medium to experience the same physical setting in a temporary extraordinary situation. Plastique Fantastique creates light and fluid structures that can lay on the street, skirt a wall, infiltrate under a bridge, squeeze in a yard, float on a lake, invade an apartment and generate an “urban premiere”.

Very fun and cool. If you like these you might also enjoy the work of Lang/Baumann, Architects of Air, and Olga Diego.

via cityvision

March 26, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Choi Jeong Hwa: Air/Air & Life/Life

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Choi Jeong Hwa, who the LA Times called “the internationally recognized leader of Korea’s Pop Art movement” had a few works included last month as part of the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia. Typically using synthetic materials in oversized installations, it’s not surprising that Air/Air, two pyramids in the Stirling Gardens, was made up of over 15,000 molded plastic shopping baskets, one pyramid in pink, the other bright green.

His installation in the Gallery Central, Life/Life, consisted of 15,000 squiggly balloons creating an explosion of synthetic color for people to walk through and interact with, giving the sense that synthetic materials are taking over the world.

You can see much more of Choi Jeong Hwa’s work on his website, including his giant motorized red lotus sculpture Breathing Flower, also at the Perth International Arts Festival.

Photos courtesy of the artist and coweena’s flickr

via coweena’s flickr

March 22, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

The Simpsons in Stained Glass…OK, Plastic

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Here is more from the Recycle Group (previously here): these stained glass windows made from recycled plastic à la Recycle Group style, made me chuckle. Though my preferred window is the Simpsons rosetta, the Superheroes triptych windows are also well done. Continuing in their mixing of classical art with the recyclable materials of the present, Andrey Blohin and Egor Kuznecov definitely seem to be having fun with their art.

Photos Galerie Rabouan Moussion and Perm Krai Capital of Culture

March 22, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Recycle Group: Recycled Renaissance

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Andrey Blokhin and Georgiy (Egor) Kuznetsov are the Russian duo that make up the Moscow-based, contemporary art collective Recycle Group. Much of the art that Recycle Group creates involves (not surprisingly) recycling. Taking objects such as plastic nets, thermal moldings, garbage cans and more, Bolkhin and Kuznetsov play with the idea of the permanence of classical art in the non-permanent material. There is humor as well as message in the immortalization of rubbish. Seeing a a trash can as a sarcophagus depicting the office battles of an office warrior, or The Last Supper as a tense business meeting, clearly Recycle Group has a sense of humor.

You can see more of their work on their website as well as at Galerie Rabouan Moussion.

You might also enjoy Alexey Morosov’s work.

Photos: Galerie Rabouan Moussion/picasaweb.google.com/tiffoen/

March 22, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Alan Rath: Digital Video Sculptures

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Last Saturday, while half the world was at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the other half was walking on the High Line (myself included), I meandered around Chelsea checking out some exhibits on a list supplied by my art-savvy friend Eric. One of these was the delightful Alan Rath show at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery titled Skinetics. It’s impossible not to smile at these ultra-expressive digital media sculptures. Whether it be the large eyes looking in all directions, or mouths with tongues sticking out at you, these are just a lot of fun. Greeting you in the window is the electronic pheasant-feathered piece titled Yes, Yes, Yes! doing a little dance; reminded me of a more elegant version of a venus flytrap. Leaving the gallery, I witnessed a cab driver sitting in his cab, captivated by the robotic performance, while the passengers in the back were laughing and smiling at the same spectacle. You can see it in action in the video below.

Alan Rath is based in San Francisco and originally received a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He has been playfully exploring new media – as well as expression and gesture without the inclusion of speech – with his distinctive sculptural works using moving and interactive digital media since 1990. His show Skinetics includes his most recent work, mostly from 2012, and will be on exhibit through April 7th.