Category Archives: Just Plain Cool

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Jess Dunn

Cool Art Installation by Jess DunnInstallation Art Human-to-Oil ProjectJess Dunn is a sculptor and installation-based visual artist and landscape designer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As stated on the alumni page of the University of New Mexico:

Her [Dunn’s] art focuses on ecological sustainability–generating conversations where the familiar opposition of nature and culture is reworked in fragile, hybrid, and intensely corporeal ways. Her three-dimensional and installation projects speak to how historically and culturally specific human populations intersect and transect natural worlds…She continues to create awareness about environmental sustainability through public art.

The top two images are from Dunn’s Diagram for Substance Transferal project, where the suits were created for the study of thermal depolymerization (the process by which any organic material can be turned into oil) in The Human-to-Oil Project (which is the project in the photos below it.) The instrument, in the latter, can be used to transform donated human organic matter into oil; faucets on the sides emit the liquefied matter into collection barrels paralleling the press.

The final project shown here are the Salt Preservation Skins. Designed to be grown over water canals, these suits serve a dual purpose: to preserve donated organic matter until a Human-to-Oil Press is ready for use; and to reserve processed, liquefied organic matter until needed for energy.

Apart from being conceptually intriguing, I find these projects visually interesting, if a little morbid. See more of Jess Dunn’s work here.

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Hans Kotter

Hans Kotter Light Sculptures The TunnelHans Kotter Light Sculptures LEDs Cool installationsClick to enlarge

Yes, it’s true. I’m consistently drawn to art that uses colored light, light bulbs, or LEDs. I’ve liked it for as long as I can remember. When I was younger the big attraction was neon, and I dreamed of having a neon sign on the wall of my room. Later, the discovery of Dan Flavin’s colored fluorescent bulb sculptures was very exciting and in the last ten years or so I’ve become a big fan of James Turrell’s work. So it’s not all that surprising that I should post about other artists working in the same medium as I come upon their work. And, just like paint, these artists all create quite different effects and artworks.

Hans Kotter, a German artist, falls in this group of light sculpture artists. Really nice work. It appears from his site that he will be exhibiting work next week at Design Miami Basel and he was recently a part of the Kinetica Art Fair in London where he exhibited his Tunnel View piece (top photo).

You can see more of Hans Kotter’s work here and here.

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Rolling Bridge: Heatherwick Studio

Heatherwick architects Rolling Bridge London Paddington BridgeHeatherwick Rolling Bridge Architecture Paddington BridgeHeatherwick Studio is probably best known, recently that is, for their spectacular Shanghai Expo UK Pavilion which, quite deservedly, received a lot of attention. We are also familiar with their impressive staircase at the Longchamps store in Soho, NY but, all their projects are worth checking out. The Rolling Bridge at the Paddington Basin in London is no exception.

Completed in 2004, Heatherwick’s challenge was to design a pedestrian bridge to span an inlet providing an access route for pedestrians while at the same time lifting to allow access for the boats in the inlet.

From the Heatherwick website:
The aim was to make the movement the extraordinary aspect of the bridge. A common approach to designing opening bridges is to have a single rigid element that fractures and lifts out of the way. Rolling Bridge opens by slowly and smoothly curling until it transforms from a conventional, straight bridge, into a circular sculpture which sits on the bank of the canal.
The structure opens using a series of hydraulic rams integrated into the balustrade. As it curls, each of its eight segments simultaneously lifts, causing it to roll until the two ends touch and form a circle. The bridge can be stopped at any point along its journey.

You can watch a video of the bridge in action here. To see it open live, you need to be there any Friday at midday.

via our buddy Nils!

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Rainbow City at the High Line

U P D A T E : See our post-visit post here for the latest on Rainbow City.

This looks like fun! Em just read about this upcoming event on the Friends With You  site (you may be familiar with their collaborations with KidRobot, among other things.) In celebration of the opening of the second section of the High Line, FriendsWithYou (sponsored by AOL) will be showcasing their forty piece installation Rainbow City.

FriendsWithYou presents a vibrant collection of mutable, air-filled sculptures. Inaugurating in the art district of Chelsea during the month of June, this will be FWY’s first large-scale installation in New York City. This happy city is made up of intensely colored balloon pieces, encouraging visitors to be active and explore the giant 16,000 square foot playground. Built for adults and children alike, the installation allows for interaction with each art object, making the experience unforgettable.

According to the article in the New York Times, the installation is part of a “pop-up plaza” at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue. There will be a 350-seat bar run by Colicchio & Sons, as well as a variety of fashionable food trucks offering a range of edibles from lobster rolls to ice cream.

The installation and festivities open on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 and run through July 5th. Worth checking out for sure.

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SOFTlab

Click images to enlarge

In my next life, I want to work at SOFTlab. These guys look like they have a great time doing everything they do. And what they do is everything. For them “a good idea does not discriminate between any medium or any type of project, it just works for everything.” That includes design of furniture, a website, a brand, a video, a gallery installation, a store display, and pretty much anything else that can be designed. Their approach is to make design customizable; it should allow for change, or growth, and be adaptable.

Just visiting their site is an immensely entertaining experience beginning with the computer animated video on their home page. Unknowingly, I was already familiar with (and a fan of) some of their work such as the colorful taped projection mapping of the New Museum as part of Festival of Ideas for the New City.

Above are just four of SOFTlab’s projects.
From top to bottom: CHROMAtex.me, a site specific installation for the bridgegallery, LES, New York. Photos: Alan Tansey
(n)arcissus, a site specific installation for NODE10 at the Frankfurter Kunsteverein in Frankfurt, Germany. Photos: Marius Watz.
POLYP.lux, a hanging installation for School Nite, part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, NYC. Photos: Alan Tansey
CHROMAesthesiae, an installation for Devotion Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photos: Alan Tansey

There are plenty more interesting projects on their website.

via fourthfifthdesign

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Port Authority Bus Terminal Goes Graphic

Come the end of this month, the Port Authority Bus Terminal here in NYC will be covered with a 6,000 sq.ft. LED-embedded mesh which, from the interior is transparent, but from the exterior provides a fabric for high-resolution graphics wrapping around the corner façade. The MediaMesh appears opaque during the day (see rendering above).

Hopefully the façade will be used as a medium for art though, unfortunately, unlike the renderings, it’s likely that advertising will be displayed instead. It would be great to be wrong.

via notcot, via Architect’s Newspaper

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Leo Villareal

Click on images to enlarge

After seeing some of Leo Villareal’s work online, I went over to the Gering & Lopez gallery the other day to see his current show called Volume. The solo exhibit is mainly comprised of the pieces in the top two images: Cylinder and Cube. Cylinder takes up a whole room and is quite impressive, measuring 12ft tall and 9ft in diameter. Made up of white LEDs and mirror finished stainless steel, it’s like your own, personal (I was the only one in the gallery at the time) fireworks show contained within a cylinder. I realized later that he was also the man behind the sparkler-like windows at BAM two or three years ago that were very intriguing at the time.

As much as I liked the few works in the gallery, I would love to see one of his larger shows such as the one at the San Jose Museum of Art which, (based on the photos), looks like it included beautiful colored light panels that are the sort of pieces I imagine Rothko would have created had he had LEDs to play with. Really lovely work and probably even more so in person with the changes in lighting and movement; the complete experience.

Another big project (possibly one of his largest) is Multiverse (bottom left image) at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, through the Concourse walkway. You can see a video here.

All photos are from Gering & López’s site, as well as Leo Villareal’s and Conner Contemporary Art.

The exhibit Volume is up at Gering & Lopez through June 25, 2011.

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Origami Madness

An impressive collection of origami from different sources has been put together by Pavol Janovicek on Cruzine.

From top to bottom and left to right:
Blue Bar Pigeon by Seth Friedman (for Em)
Piggy by Roman Diaz
Onitsuka Tiger by Sopho Mabona; Gorilla by Black Scorpion
May the Autofocus be With You by straightfromthecask; Wall-E by Brian Chan
Tow Mater by Black Scorpion

See many more here.

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Adrián Navarro

(Click images to enlarge)

Nice work from Adrián Navarro, presently based in London. His Fragment Series paintings (up top) seem to be his most recent, followed by the Ring Series, and then the Sphere Series.

His paintings describe implosions of colour trapped inside virtual volumes that float weightlessly in the pictorial space.  Navarro´s work explores the paradox between the physical confinement and the expansive freedom inherent to the organic painting, and by extension to the human being.

I’d love to see these live.

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Sebastien Wierinck’s Tube Formations

(Click on images for larger view)

Not since the Blue Men have I seen such great use of tubes. Sebastien Wierinck (whose Panels02 Chair we posted about previously) is a designer based in Marseille, France. He has designed everything from domestic furniture to commercial, interior design to stage and exhibit design. Above are some of his installations for public spaces, restaurants, galleries and art festivals.

From top to bottom, left to right:
Le Centquatre, Paris (top two photos); INSTANT Exhibit, Brussels (x2); Bed Supperclub, Bangkok; Light detail, Bed Supperclub; Brazil-Brazil Exhibit, Marseille (x2); Gallery Into Art & Furniture, Berlin; Tokyo Eat Restaurant, Paris; Design City, Luxembourg

Apart from being fun and amazing, these constructions are made of polyethylene plastic (plastic bottle waste) so it’s recycling at its finest. The tubes, usually used for water, gas and electrical distribution, are strong, flexible and readily available in multiple colors and sizes. It’s win-win all the way.

You can visit Sebastien Wierinck’s site for more info, and there are more photos on flickr.

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James Clar: Art Futures

I just came across James Clar’s work. After reading this Dubai-based American artist’s bio, it seems that I’m a bit late to the party with exhibits at The New Museum, Chelsea Museum, Chanel Mobile Art Exhibit in Tokyo, and many more under his belt. I found every piece showcased on Traffic’s site  interesting. There’s a lot of play with light and technology, but also very powerful statements with strong anti-war and political criticism undertones, well, maybe not so “under”, maybe more in-your-face, in a good way. This from the site:

While his early work dealt with analyzing how technology and media work, a move to the Middle East in 2007 has seen his focus shift to how technology and media affect. As an American living in Dubai, his art work has progressed towards deeper conceptual themes. These include nationalism, globalism, and popular culture in the age of mass information, and often analyses the discrepancy in information between Western media and Middle Eastern media along with its effects on people.

Briefly, a few captions from some of these works:

Friendly Fire (2nd row, right): A small soldier sits on a rotating platform in a mirror box. His motion is nervous as he constantly spins trying to find a target while only aiming at himself.
The Difference Between Me and You (3rd row, right): Two TV screens face each other, one playing Fox News and the other Al Jazeera. In between them is a diffused piece of acrylic that takes the light from the two screens and mixes them together.
Pop Culture (bottom left): a gun that James Clar, an American, and Rami Farook, an Emirati, took to the desert, fired, and then cast in candy.

There are many more works with interesting captions here. It’s worth a look if you like the small sampling in this post.

James Clar will be exhibiting as a part of Art Futures at the Art HK11 in Hong Kong from May 26-29, 2011.

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Lighter Than Air in Boston

Lighter Than Air_SHIFTboston_RachelyRotem_PhuHoangLighter Than Air, by Rachely Rotem Studio and Phu Hoang Office, is the winning entry for SHIFTboston’s Barge 2011 Competition and scheduled to be unveiled on Boston’s waterfront as a “pop-up” public space in September 2012.

Comprised of bright pink camouflage netting, helium balloons, and stationery bikes, the “camovapor” climate system (as the designers like to call it) will float over the barge with the interactive help of visitors who can generate power by pedaling the bikes that will inflate additional weather balloons, transforming water to vapor. As the vapor condenses on the pink nets, the 3D perforations will hold the water which then, combined with the natural harbor breeze, will create a cool area and an “interactive atmospheric phenomenon.”

Looks like a trip to Boston that fall will be in order.

via Architects Newspaper

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Ryoji Ikeda: The Transfinite (follow-up)

Ryoji Ikeda The Transfinite Park Ave ArmoryThe Transfinite Ryoji Ikeda Park Ave Armory(Click on the images to enlarge and check out our toes close up)

We had been eagerly awaiting this exhibit (see previous post) and headed uptown yesterday to check it out. The Transfinite, an interactive installation by Ryoji Ikeda (Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist),  is not only very cool, but surprisingly, an incredibly soothing experience. One would think that the test pattern visuals along with the loud electronic sounds and strobes might have the opposite effect but, at least for us, and seemingly, those around us, it was almost hypnotically relaxing. People were lying on the floor for long stretches completely entranced by the spectacle and immersed in the moment.

It is important to note that the show is made up of three parts: test pattern; data.tron; and data.scan. We almost missed the two data sections which were on the other side of the test pattern wall. Below are some short videos to get a sense of the show, but it definitely is more one of those you-had-to-be-there situations.




Just to clarify, Em and Dan’s chatter in that last clip is not part of Ikeda’s soundtrack… If you have sound issues with the video clips, try watching full-screen.


The Transfinite is at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC through June 11, 2011. The admission is a bit pricey at $12, but if you stay a while and take it all in, we think (though it would be more palatable at half the price) it’s still worth it.