March 1, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

The Wynwood Walls: Street Art in Miami

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Well, this certainly puts the Houston graffiti wall to shame! The Wynwood Walls is a community revitalization concept conceived by Tony Goldman in 2009 as a way to transform the warehouse district of Wynwood, Miami into a center where people could gravitate and explore, thereby developing the area’s pedestrian potential. I should have picked up on something with so many street artists featuring projects in Miami on their sites.

Initially opened in 2010 with the Wynwood Doors, the project has since expanded to the Wynwood Walls and Outside the Walls. Street artists from all over the world have gone to Miami to participate and it has become a sort of “Museum of the Streets,” as coined by Jeffrey Deitch, one of the original co-curators.

Here Comes the Neighborhood is a series of short episodes on the project as a whole, as well as interviews with individual artists. If you like the trailer below you can head on over to their site to see much more.

via the delightful Karen aka Kaia!

March 1, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Will Ryman: Anyone and No One

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New York artist Will Ryman has taken a departure from his sculptures of giant roses that decorated the Park Avenue Malls in midtown last year here in NYC, and has now created two site-specific works: one a giant male figure, the other a giant bird. Presently, at both Paul Kasmin Galleries in Chelsea (the first artist to show in both at the same time) Ryman’s exhibit titled Anyone and No One consists of a 90-foot figure lying against the perimeter of the Tenth Avenue gallery walls, unclear whether he is sleeping or dying. The figure is made up of 250 pairs of shoes for the shirt and 30,000 bottle caps make up the arms, hands, and feet. The sculpture/installation, titled Everyman, seems to open up through the figure’s head into the next room where a labyrinth has been created out of 200,000 paintbrushes stacked on top of one another. I’m not sure if these organic structures are intended as a trip through the Everyman’s brain or not, but, in either case, this looks pretty amazing.

At the 27th Street gallery is Ryman’s Bird. This 12-foot high, 16-foot wide sculpture is made with 1500 actual and fabricated nails and weighs two tons. In the same way that the Everyman space becomes a box in which the huge man has been stuffed into, so, too, does the Bird’s gallery transform into its cage.

I think I’ll have to check this out in person soon. Both pieces will be up at both Paul Kasmin galleries through March 24th, 2012.

Photos courtesy of Paul Kasmin and Mark Rifkin’s flickr.

Thanks for the tip, Stephen!

March 1, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Slinky Springs Bridge: Tobias Rehberger

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The Slinky Springs Bridge in Oberhausen, Germany, was completed this past summer. Designed by artist Tobias Rehberger, the inspiration for the bridge came from the iconic Slinky toy and the catchy phrase “Slinky Springs to Fame” which seems to be the way the bridge is referred to. Rehberger was able to recreate the light, wild and irregular quality of the toy in his vibrating spiraling bridge that almost looks thrown across the Rhine-Herne Canal. This was no easy feat, if I understand correctly from the not-always-easy-to-decipher google-translated German sites that I read. Apparently, the execution of artist Rehberger’s, (self-admittedly clueless about bridge design) vision was successfully accomplished through the collaboration with structural engineers Schlaich Bergermann and Partner. A bit of description from their website on the 406-meter-long bridge with 496 coils:

Following the design of the artist Tobias Rehberger, a colorful ribbon wrapped in a light, swinging spiral connects the two existing parks. The lightness of this design is due to the minimalist structural design of the stress ribbon bridge. Two steel ribbons made of high strength steel connect to the inclined supports across the canal. The resulting tension force is transferred into strong abutments through the outer vertical tension rods. The walkway consists of pre-cast concrete plates, bolted to the stress ribbon, to which the railing and spiral are attached. The springy synthetic pavement of the walkway as well as the colorful rhythmization of the concrete and coating amplifies the dynamic experience of the bridge.

The colorful pavement pathway was carefully selected by Rehberger who had very specific ideas on its look. Then the bottom of the bridge was made to exactly match the colors on top in a separate material. It’s great how the nighttime illumination really accentuates the colorfulness.

Seems to me that bouncing across the incredibly cool and unique Slinky Bridge could be a lot of fun, if maybe a little unsettling as well.

If you like this bridge then you’ll probably enjoy the Tiger & Turtle Walkable Rollercoaster and the Twist Bridge as well.

Photos: Dirk Jungholt’s flickr, Roman Mensing, Jens Stachowitz, and AP.

February 29, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Winter 1972: Post-it Installation

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Swiss design studio I Never Kissed A Dog created a winter wonderland in a living room using thousands of white Post-its as part of a photoshoot for the perfume Winter 1972. Designer Adrian Merz painstakingly covered the entire room and then photographed it using different light sources and effects to add to the image…as if a room covered in white paper from top to bottom isn’t impressive and surprising enough!

via urbanpeek

February 29, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Doug Aitken: Song 1 at the Hirshhorn Museum

After not thinking about the Hirshhorn Museum in years, right on the heels of finding out about the plans for a bubbled garden (see previous post) is now news of the upcoming Doug Aitken installation, turning the exterior of the circular museum into a 360-degree projection screen. The piece, titled “Song 1”, will consist of 11 high-definition projectors streaming multichannel yet-to-be-disclosed images in conjunction with the song “I Only Have Eyes for You” with covers created and performed by several artists including Beck, and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, specifically for Aitken’s work.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen by Doug Aitken, including his video installation Sleepwalkers at MoMA back in 2007 (where does the time go?!) which was also projected on the building’s façade (bottom photo). Based on past experience, this should be worth checking out. Maybe a trip to D.C. combining cherry blossoms and the Hirshhorn is in order this spring.

This impressive project will be on view from March 22nd to May 13th, 2012.

Renderings courtesy of the Doug Aitken Workshop. Bottom image courtesy of MoMA.

February 28, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Claude Lévêque: Dreamy Light Installations

French artist Claude Lévêque has been creating light sculptures and installations since the ’80s. There’s a surreal quality to much of his work — upside down blacklit beds, abandoned trailers with chandeliers, or an elevated one with stringed lights inside, precariously balanced on cement blocks — as well as wit. I also like the way many of his neon signs are integrated with chairs or paintings, resulting in a strange juxtaposition.

Lévêque currently has a show at La Maison Rouge in Paris through May 20th.

via galerie kamel mennour

February 24, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Olga Diego: Interactive Inflatables

We certainly have posted our fair share of inflatable sculptures and installations, but somehow each one has its own personality and style. This exhibit, Aire (Air), a few months back at the Mustang Art Gallery, is an installation by Spanish artist Olga Diego. Working with plastic, both translucent and transparent, and plastic bags, along with electronic circuits that inflated and deflated each structure, Diego filled the gallery with six separate inflatable works that interact with each other and with those who viewed the show in its space. Some of the pieces allude to well-known images such as Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, and the hanging man to Christ. Some of her shapes are organic in form and complement the more figurative ones nicely.

The two bottom photos are from a previous exhibit by Olga Diego at Plataforma Petracos, Hábitos de Habitar (Habits of Inhabiting).

You can see the works in Aire being inflated in the video below, as well as their general movement and interactivity.

Photos by Álvaro Vicente and El Periodic.

via revista treintaycuatro via the multi-talented anA

February 22, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Julia Davis: Headspace

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Sydney based artist Julia Davis focuses on the relationship between objects, places and spaces. With works installed in salt lakes, deserts, coastal precincts and parklands in addition to galleries, Davis explores the experiential as well as ideas of temporality and duration.

In Headspace, Davis used salt harvested from Lake Brown in Western Australia to create a cast of her head and shoulders. After, she reintroduced the sculpture to its original source and documented its dissolution over a 9 week period.

via Perth International Arts Festival

February 21, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Do Ho Suh: Floor plus Cause & Effect

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I’ve recently become acquainted with Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s work, both online and in person this past fall at Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s exhibit of his work. However, these two installations are new to me and both appeal to me very much. Floor, which was recently exhibited at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, consists of almost 2,000 plastic little men pushing up on a walkable glass surface, trying to prevent being crushed. These small figures en-masse deal with individuality and collective force, a running theme in Suh’s work. Similarly, his installation Cause & Effect, a tornado-like structure made up of thousands of piggy-backed figures suggests, once again, that there is strength in numbers.

Cause & Effect is currently on display at Western Washington University.

Photos: Phaidon, Huffington Post, The Stranger, and Korea.net’s flickr

via colossal

February 20, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Hirshhorn Bubble: Diller Scofidio + Renfro

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This is such a clever and fun idea! Diller Scofidio + Renfro (fast becoming one of my favorite architects after the High Line, Alice Tully Hall and all the renovations at Lincoln Center, as well as the ICA in Boston, just to name a few…) have designed an inflatable temporary event space for the cylindrical courtyard of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The thin translucent membrane of the pneumatic structure is meant to be squeezed into the void of Gordon Bunshaft‘s donut-shaped building, and ooze out the top as well as beneath the mass. The contrast of the soft and hard structures is great, and by roofing over the courtyard the museum gains 14,000 sq. feet of sheltered space in the spring and fall that will accommodate up to a 1000-person audience for performing arts events, films, lectures or even art installations.

The project was initially scheduled to open in Fall 2012, but due to lack of sufficient funding, the project may be delayed slightly. Hope not too long…

Images all courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

via Architect Magazine

February 16, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Espacio Cultural El Tanque: The Tank

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Though they are celebrating their fifteenth anniversary this year, Espacio Cultural El Tanque de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, is news to me and, judging from my googling, might be news to many. Menis Arquitectos transformed the old oil tank, the last of its type in the formerly industrial landscape, into an ever-changing cultural space used to display art installations as well as a performance venue for concerts. 50 meters in diameter and 20 meters in height, the tank has a temple-like quality. An old train car is used as the entrance ramp adding to the drama of the space. That, combined with the impressive installations and lighting of the space make it a cool-looking destination for anyone heading to Tenerife.

Photos: Colin Kirby, omarnahas’s flickr, encarneviva’s flickr, georgepompidou’s flickr, Hisao Suzuki, and Teresa Arozena

February 13, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Shay Frisch Peri: Energy Fields

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Shay Frisch Peri is an Israeli artist and industrial designer living and working in Rome. Creating an almost weave-like look with the repetition of electrical adaptors and light indicators, Frisch Peri’s light sculptures are like energy fields. The one that Daniela and I saw this past weekend in Chelsea (Campo 4012 N – the circular one with ‘N’ signifying the color black) had a wonderful glow to it as we walked into the gallery. Frisch Peri takes into consideration each individual space and the appropriate proportion of light required.

This piece, as well as Campo 1 N (the individual component used to create the larger work) will be at Haunch of Venison in Chelsea through March 3, 2012. You can see more of Shay Frisch Peri’s work here and here.

February 13, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Giles Walker: Animated Sculptures

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For over the past twenty years English sculptor Giles Walker has been working with robots, creating kinetic sculptures from materials found in scrap yards. A member of the guerilla-art group The Mutoid Waste Company, Walker’s robots are a creative intervention into our throw-away capitalist culture as well as a commentary on the surveillance practices or our time.

All of these pieces are just great, but the DJ and Pole Dancers’ Peepshow with their surveillance-camera heads, in addition to excellent hip and pelvic movements, might be my favorites. The telephone-headed drunks are (at least in some cases) programmed to interact with the public using presence sensors.

Walker’s robots have been exhibited all over the world, most recently this past week at the RAW Art Fair, part of the Rotterdam Art Fair 2012.

Photos courtesy of the artist; LookforArt; Epicfu; maggie jones’ flickr; and de_buurman’s flickr.

February 10, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Three NYC Architectural Tidbits

Three different projects here in NYC have recently come to my attention, so rather than do three separate posts, I’ve decided to group them together in one. You can click on most of the images to see them larger.

First up, The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 have announced this year’s winner of the Young Architects Program. HWKN (HollwichKushner) will construct their entry for the annual outdoor summer installation in PS1’s courtyard in Queens this summer. The winning proposal, titled Wendy, will consist of a large scaffold containing an oversized blue nylon starburst-like structure that will clean the air while offering shade, wind, rain and music. Looks like quite a departure from the past couple of years in that it looks more self-contained. I’m really looking forward to seeing it built in June.

Images courtesy HWKN
via archdaily

Next, right now through February 29, 2012, there’s a 10-foot-tall BIG ❤ NYC sculpture/light installation in Times Square designed by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) Architects in honor of Valentine’s Day. The public art installation is located in Duffy Square at the foot of the TKTS steps/seats. Consisting of 400 transparent acrylic tubes (lit by LEDs) that form a cube around a suspended red heart whose beat and color intensity directly correlate to how many people touch the “Touch Me” heart pad on a circular stand close by.

Flatcut fabricated the rods, Silman Associates were the structural engineers and Zumtobel provided LED technology.

You might also want to check out BIG’s winning entry for Wave Pier in St. Petersburg which looks spectacular!

Photos courtesy Times Square Alliance

Lastly, this Greenwich Village townhouse has had us puzzled for the past couple of months on our daily walks past it. In the storefront of what used to be a hair salon now sit two mirrored benches; one a swing the other static. I imagined some sort of new age church or meeting house with funky pews, or some sort of cool, minimalist art gallery, but a few weeks ago I finally had the opportunity to ask a neighbor as she entered her building if she knew what the mirrored benches were all about. Turns out that it’s a private home and the mirrored room (floor, ceiling, walls as well as bench/swing) are all part of the playroom/guest room. This is not your childhood playroom. I’ve been sort of stalking the place (not really, but I do pass by often on my way to and from home) and was able to catch a glimpse of the open guest room, (with its orange mattresses), as well as the super-cool multicolor striped stairs that lead up to the rest of the house. The architects behind the project are Solomonoff Architecture Studio and professional photos of the entire project are due out in an undisclosed architecture periodical shortly, which should look a lot better than these (the reflective space is especially difficult to photograph.) I’m curious to see what the rest of the house looks like…

Photos: collabcubed

February 9, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

The James Turrell Museum in Argentina

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Well, this is certainly news to me. Definitely will be placed on a must-see list next time I visit my relatives in Argentina. The James Turrell Museum opened a couple of years ago within Estancia Colomé and its winery in northern Argentina, near Salta. The museum belongs to the Hess Art Collection and is fully devoted to Turrell’s work; all light and space. Fifty years worth of work are exhibited in nine rooms within a 1,700-meter space.

A winery and a James Turrell museum in one location? Sounds like a nice combination, to me.

More Turrell here and here

Photos: Welcome Argentina; Wallpaper; Florian Holzherr, WSJ

via welcome argentina

February 7, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Glow by We Make Carpets

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We Make Carpets (previously here and here) the Dutch collective that creates contemporary interpretations of the centuries-old medium, recently put together a Glow Carpet for the Glow Festival in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Consisting of 750 kilogram glow-in-the-dark pebble stones, the carpet was charged with bright light for five minutes every ten so that when the lights were turned off, the luminescent carpet, well…glowed!

February 7, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Preservation is Life: Bryan McCormack

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Continuing with the escalator theme, here’s an installation by Irish artist Bryan McCormack that was at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a couple of months back. Preservation of Life: Les sons de la vie—as the sound and light installation was called—started at the museum’s façade and continued up its famous 6-floor escalator as part of the art center’s AIDS annual fundraising campaign. 80,000 condom covered light bulbs in different colors, with hues changing on every floor, were used to form a condom tapestry. Accompanying the dramatic tunnel visuals was audio of a human heartbeat, with the pulse changing along with the colors, starting at the base with the cardiac rhythm of a fetus in the womb and progressing at every level, to a newborn baby’s heartbeat and, finally, to the artist’s own heartbeat on the top floor.

Though I didn’t see it written anywhere, I’m pretty sure that the title is a pun. In French, and in Spanish, preservatif, and preservativo, mean condom.

You can buy one of the condom bulbs here.

Photos courtesy of the artist; Bertrand Guay/AFP; and Xinhua

via coolhunting via notcot

February 6, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Tiger & Turtle – Magic Mountain

This seems to have made the rounds a couple of months back, but I hadn’t seen it till now. Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain is a site-specific, large-scale, walkable rollercoaster designed by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth positioned at the highest peak of the Heinrich-Hildebrand-Höhe in Duisburg, Germany. Visitors are invited to walk up the zinc-plated steel sculpture, which soars to 21 meters at its highest point, and, add to that the height of the artificial mountain that it sits upon, and a person gets a view of the Rhine from 45 meters above the landscape. Unfortunately, for the more adventurous types, you can’t actually climb on the center loop past a certain point.

Mutter and Genthe collaborated with Arnold Walz who did the parametric 3-D planning and stairway system, as well as Prof. Micahel Staffa who did the planning of structural framework, and architects Sonja Becker and Rudiger Karzel of bk2a architecture.

The interactive sculpture is lit up by LEDs under the handrails at night, making it accessible in the dark as well. My kind of rollercoaster.