March 28, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Charles Atlas: The Illusion of Democracy

This is an exhibit that we will definitely be checking out this week. I mean, numbers, projected on multiple screens in different variations, sizes and colors…totally our kind of thing! For their inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Bushwick gallery, Luhring Augustine is featuring works by video artist Charles Atlas. The exhibition is titled The Illusion of Democracy and includes three installations by Atlas never before exhibited in New York: Painting by Numbers (2011), Plato’s Alley (2008), and a new site-specific, large-scale video work 143652 (2012).

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Atlas has lived and worked in NYC since the ’70s and is considered a pioneering figure in film and video.

If you’re in NYC and thinking of visiting the Bushwick gallery, it’s important to note that it is only open Fridays through Sundays. The Illusion of Democracy will be on exhibit through May 20, 2012.

via artinfo via notcot

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 23, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Freude auf Morgen: Chezweitz & Roseapple

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Last month in Freiburg, Germany, in commemoration of 111 years of electrical engineering at Alexander Bürkle, a technological company, a room was turned into an art installation combining video, paint, and beams of light creating a surreal and futuristic interactive environment. The installation by Chezweitz & Roseapple in collaboration with kubix and Stefan Hurtig was titled Freude auf Morgen and invited visitors to walk through the red fluorescent tunnels of light and ponder time and technology. Cool.

via luminous mushroom

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.

Liu Bolin: Lost in Art

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As previously mentioned, artist and photographer Liu Bolin currently has a show titled Lost in Art at the Eli Klein Gallery in Soho. I stopped by yesterday pre-opening while the many gallery workers were setting up wine and cups, cleaning floors, as well as organizing a couple of armfuls of stuffed animals which, if I overheard correctly, were going to be given away as part of the event. All the prep aside, the exhibit is definitely worth visiting if you’re passing through Soho before May 11th. Though I’ve seen several of these images before online, as with any art, seeing them in person was a real treat. They are larger than I imagined and the detail is incredible. Plus the top three photos were completely new to me.

As far as the JR/Bolin collaboration on Elizabeth Street near Spring? Gone. Finito. Not a trace left. It’s as if it never happened.

Photos taken at Eli Klein Gallery by collabcubed (sorry for the reflections) except for the photos of Jean Paul Gautier and Andrea Missoni pre-paint which are courtesy Harpers Bazaar.

March 20, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Sergio Garcia: Tricycles Reinvented

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It’s difficult not to smile when looking at Sergio Garcia’s work. His delightfully fun tricycle sculptures play with the viewer’s structural expectations while at the same time stimulating childhood memories. According to Garcia, “Sometimes it’s good to step back and laugh and not take everything so serious.” That lighthearted mentality is evident not only in his sculptures, but in their titles, as well as in his Billboard series (bottom three photos.) Some of the tricycle sculpture titles are: “Its not always easy to tell whats real and whats fabricated” and “And then there were two” (the top photo and third one down, respectively.)

Fun work all the way around.

If you like these, you might also enjoy Dario Escobar’s work and Tulio Pinto’s.

via irreversible

March 20, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

JR and Liu Bolin Collaboration in Nolita

French street artist JR (previously here) and Chinese artist Liu Bolin (previously here) have collaborated in Nolita, NYC, on a great looking work. NewYorkStreetArt has documented the ‘making of’ Liu Bolin’s part on her flickr here. Love it.

I’m going to take a guess that this has something to do with the opening of Liu Bolin’s exhibit Lost in Art at Eli Klein Fine Art in Soho today, which will be up through May 11th, 2012. Happy Spring!

UPDATE: JR’s mural is a photo of Liu Bolin. You can see the first stage of JR’s wheatpasting over at Arrested Motion.

All photos NewYorkStreetArt’s flickr except bottom photo from Arrested Motion.

March 19, 2012 by collabcubed - 14 Comments

Rob Mulholland: Vestige Installation

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Scottish sculptor Rob Mulholland has created a ghostly art installation in the woodland walk at the David Marshall Lodge in Scotland titled Vestige. Originally intended to be temporary, the six mirrored life-size silhouettes (three men and three women) have been so popular that they are now to become a permanent fixture in the previously inhabited woodlands. Mulholland’s idea behind the installation seems twofold: 1) to create a vestige of the people who once occupied the land until following World War I, when they were re-located while forests were planted to generate timber and; 2) to make people ‘reflect’ upon man’s impact on the nature.

The almost imperceptible sculptures camouflaged by their surroundings have an eerie quality that has been compared by many to the predator in the 1980s film of the same name that seamlessly blends into its surroundings.

Photos courtesy of the artist and The Daily Mail.

via trendhunter

March 15, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Cartoon-like Handbags: Jump from Paper

These bags are ridiculously fun. Designers Chay Su and Rika Lin from Taipei asked themselves “How amazing it would be if a two-dimensional hand-drawn illustration could come to life as a real bag?!” And from there Jump from Paper came to be. Pretty amazing. Though the bags look flat, apparently they are quite roomy. These bags will definitely turn a head or two on the street.

via swissmiss

March 15, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Dmitry Gutov: Pictorial Sculptures

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Moscow artist Dmitry Gutov tackles several mediums in his art but he is consistently interested in the existence of three-dimensionality; “a dense space inside which everything lives.” With his metal sculptures, he likes to play with that three-dimensionality, giving the illusion of flatness from the front, when in reality these pictorial iron works are very much 3D.

Gutov has been drawn to metal and wire from an early age as well as calligraphy and old manuscripts. Many of his paintings and drawings have wiry motifs and, not surprisingly, he has a fascination for abandoned fences and their expressive nature which inspired him to create his series of iron metal sculptures, some calligraphic, others abstract, but most of them rendering famous drawings (such as his Rembrandt Drawings series), icons, and composers in his signature style. Seeing these sculptures at different angles changes them completely. Ideally hung from the ceiling, these pieces look flat from the front and become more and more abstract at every angle as one circulates around them.

Gutov’s series Used Goods is another iron based work of 13 assemblages that combine objects from the 60s, as if flying through the air, to create a sort of still life. These are also worth checking out here.

Starting next week, Dmitry Gutov has a show in Moscow: new 3D metal works of ancient Russian icons at the Marat Guelman Gallery through April 20, 2012.

March 12, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

CollabCubed at 1

Last week marked our one year anniversary as a blog and, though not an especially remarkable feat in this sea of blogs, it seems like a good time to say of few words and acknowledge some people. It’s been a fun year for us and surprising how this blog, as well as a few related side projects, have been major topics of conversation between the three of us even at a semi-long distance. We’ve had fun trying to come up with somewhat unique content and it’s been really satisfying, and sometimes a little thrilling, to have many of the blogs and sites that we admire pick up some of our posts. Notcot and Rugenius (aka Jean and Justine) over at notcot.org have picked up many of our submissions and have been instrumental in giving us exposure. You can see our collabcubed posts on their pages here. Christopher Jobson at the amazing Colossal has had many kind words for us and been very supportive, as well as picking up several of our posts during the year and kindly linking back to us…this is where the little thrills came in. Same goes for the wonderful thisisnthappiness. And a big thanks to holycool and the always generous swissmiss for being the first ones to post our EARonic phone cases causing them to go viral with buyers cropping up all over the globe and eventually leading to a deal with Fred and Friends who will be distributing a variation on Daniela’s initial concept starting next month but, have no fear, we continue to sell our own EARonic models at our shop.

We’ve got other exciting projects in the works for this year, starting with being selected to exhibit our EARonics and some other designs at the Designboom Mart at the ICFF 2012 in New York this May, which has us super excited, but we’ll talk more about that later.

In the meantime we’ve added a bunch of photos and links to our facebook page – we’ll be adding more in the next few days – making it easier to look at some older posts, so maybe you’d like to ‘like us’ there if you haven’t already, and of course there’s also twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed or emails.

Below are a few of our most popular posts this past year (in case you missed them the first time around); click on the photo to go to the post. Most importantly, thanks to all of you for following our blog and making it fun for us to keep posting.

Sang Sik Hong Plastic Straw Sculptures

Nicole Dextras Ice Typography

The Portrait Building by ARM Architects

Matchheads by David Mach

Blackfield by Zadok Ben David

The Transfinite: Ryoji Ikeda

The Twist Bridge

Ana Soler: Causa-Efecto

EARonic iPhone Cases by Daniela Gilsanz

March 9, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Wave of Matter: Grönlund & Nisunen

I was fortunate to be invited by a friend to the Vernissage of the Armory Show 2012 here in NYC on Wednesday night. It was a great show, if a bit overwhelming as these art fairs can be, but I’ll be back to see the rest of it for sure. Right up front in one of the closest booths to the entrance of Pier 94 was an interesting piece by a Finnish duo from Helsinki, Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen. Trained as architects – they have a studio called a.men – both Grönlund and Nisunen are record producers and artists as well, creating installations and mixed-media pieces that explore sound and space in a relatively low tech, simple manner.

Their latest work, currently at the Armory in Galerie Anhava’s booth, is subtly dramatic creating an appealing and soothing sound. The piece, titled Wave of Matter, consists of a large metal sheet low to the ground with thousands of small metal beads on top, automated to tilt ever-so-minimally every minute or so. The result is visually stunning with all the beads shifting to the other side, creating a similar effect to sand along the shoreline as the water retreats. The swishing sound of the metal beads is also very water-like. It’s quite mesmerizing. Probably best to see it in action, as in the video below:

March 8, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Sprinkles 24-Hour Cupcake ATM

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Not being much of a dessert person myself, I can’t really imagine a 4am craving for a cupcake, but I guess it’s reassuring for some of you to know that now there is a 24-hour cupcake ATM to assuage such a desire. The Beverly Hills bakery Sprinkles has recently installed the cupcake vending machine as part of their storefront and judging from a photo posted to their facebook page, the late-night lines are insane. We’ll have to ask our LA correspondent, Moni, to check this out for us.

UPDATE: Apparently there will be three of these ‘cupcake automats’ opening in NYC within the next year, the first one opening this summer on the Upper West Side. (Thanks, Breger!)

You can watch the video below to see it in action:

You might also like these other unique vending machines here.

Photos: Sprinkles facebook, we heart, and Sprinkles

via @mrfidalgo

March 6, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Slade Architecture: Virgin Clubhouse and…

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Virgin Atlantic’s new JFK Clubhouse – designed by our good friends James and Hayes Slade of Slade Architecture – opened yesterday at JFK International Airport here in NYC. The 10,000 square foot lounge includes a beautiful curvy bar, cool seating such as the also curved, oversized, custom-made flame red ball sofa, and a large maple wood and burgundy billiards table in the ‘Entertainment Zone’. Bumble and Bumble has opened their first US airport salon and spa as part of the Clubhouse, as well.

Slade Architecture have a slew of great projects under their belt (many of them award winning) and an impressive range to boot; from residential to commercial, educational to cultural…plus furniture and product design, to boot! Below are some of our recent favorites, but you should really visit their website to see much more.

Top three photos: Barbie Flagship Store in Shanghai; second from bottom: Pup Tent; bottom left: Diffa Installation (discarded furniture covered in duct tape); bottom right: East 67th Street Bathroom.

All photos courtesy Slade Architecture

via Virgin Atlantic’s facebook page

March 5, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Aristarkh Chernyshev: New Media Sculptures

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Moscow-based contemporary new media artist Aristarkh Chernyshev creates sculptures that integrate today’s technology while commenting on our obsession with it in a humorous fashion. His LED sculptures play with the idea of information overload, in some instances grabbing real-time news feeds from the internet, winding them around the LED lightboard strips through the trash as in his work Urgently! (top two photos), or winding around endlessly in a knot as in Knode (third from top), as well as taking poetic texts and breaking them apart then reuniting them as stock exchange rates in Lyric Economy (second from bottom).

In addition to his LED sculptures, Chernyshev has collaborated with other artists on some fun and interesting interactive pieces. With Alexei Shulgin —the co-founder of their art collective/gallery/creative electronics production company Electroboutique — they created the eyeglasses piece titled The Way I See It! as well as the wowPod, an oversized distorted iPod.

There’s lots more interesting work that can be seen on the XL Gallery’s site and the Electroboutique site.

Here’s The Way I See It! in action…with a very catchy poppy tune that I, unfortunately, don’t know what it is.

via XL Gallery

March 4, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Boa Mistura: Beauty and Pride in a Favela

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I love everything about this amazing project by the appropriately named Spanish art collective Boa Mistura (good mix): the typography, the color, the participative nature, and most of all the huge heart behind it.

Made up of artists Arkoh, Derko, Pahg, Purone, and Rdick who have developed their work in different fields, Boa Mistura represents a mixture of perspectives combined to create something better. Recently they have started a series of projects in the favelas (slums) of Brazil, starting with Vila Brasilândia near São Paulo where, directly involving the inhabitants, they painted the streets and alleyways with murals using anamorphic typography with pride-inducing words such as, well, ‘pride’ (orgulho), ‘beauty’ (beleza), ‘sweetness’ (doçura), ‘firmness’ (firmeza), and ‘love’ (amor).

As you can see, the result is fantastically joyful. Bravo!

via juxtapoz

March 3, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Ana Soler: Red Way

Another nice installation by Ana Soler (previously here) titled Red Way. Red string on a teak pathway in Alishan Park, Taiwan. I love how dramatic it looks; the contrast of the tall pines and the red criss-crossing string. Lovely.

March 2, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Ana Soler: Causa-Efecto

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Spanish artist Ana Soler has a knack for taking the everyday object and creating spectacular installations. Her most recent, Causa-Efecto (Cause and Effect) involved 2000 tennis balls giving the illusion of bouncing all over the various rooms and levels of the Mustang Art Gallery in Alicante this past fall. The multiple trajectories that these balls take have you looking in all directions. A bit like a three-dimensional airline route map.

Very fun and cool!