Makoto Azuma, a Japanese botanic artist, has joined up with Herman Miller to create an Aeron Chair covered in AstroTurf to be displayed this summer at the new Herman Miller store in Tokyo.
I’ve never been one to enjoy sitting blanketless on the grass, but this does look pretty cool.
via colossal
Vivian Chiu of Inception Chair fame, wrote us a nice email which included a link to another one of her chairs not on her site just yet, called the Limbo Chair. Another amazing feat by this very talented young designer.
Swedish designer, Alexander Lervik, created the installation Dimensions out of 1728 heads, 35,000 parts, and 24,000 LED lamps. The cube of heads is 3-meters squared and works as a 3D screen. Originally designed for the insurance company Skandia, the light bar sculpture was displayed at this year’s Stockholm Design Week.
All images are from LervikDesign. You can see more at their site.
Last month in Milan, as part of the Architettura Mutante exhibit by Interni magazine, lighting designer Ingo Maurer along with Axel Schmid created the fiery installation: ablaze – sentimento (s)travolgente (with the ‘s’ it means ‘contorted/twisted emotion’; without the ‘s’ it’s ‘overwhelming emotion’.)
Fire elicits extreme emotions, ranging from fear to amazement at its beauty and power. Here, the distorted house, stabilized by a rope, is lit up inside in an intense red with a floating pendulum slowly moving over a glowing green opening in the floor. The interior contrasts dramatically with the black, rough exterior. Click on images for better view.
You can see it in action in the video below:
I’d have to say that, for me, some of the most creative and interesting work at this year’s ICFF and its satellite shows came from design students. One of these is Vivian Chiu, a furniture design student at RISD. What first caught my eye was her Inception Chair at the Noho Design District show, then later I noticed her Fu Lei Zhi bench at ICFF as well, and have since visited her website to see a slew of interesting work.
Chiu seems fascinated by repetition and intricate pieces fitting together perfectly in a puzzle-like fashion. Together the pieces create a whole, yet separately, they function (to some degree) as well. In addition to the originality of the work, her craftsmanship is remarkable.
To see more of Vivian Chiu’s work visit her site.
On the eve of ICFF here in NYC I’d like to keep with the industrial design theme and present Synapse a modular lighting system by Francisco Gomez Paz, an Argentinean designer who lives in Milan. I don’t know whether these lamps will be at ICFF but if so, I certainly look forward to seeing them live. I think they’re beautiful. I can imagine these looking just as great in a private home as in a public space, whether office, hotel lobby, or store.
Each module is a smart cell that when combined with other smart cells creates illuminated surfaces of any size and composition. The use of advanced RGB LED technology allows the light to be white or colored. And the fact that they can be configured as desired, whether used as a single piece or a whole wall-ful makes each one a bit unique, no?
Manufactured and distributed by Luceplan.
via 90mas10
Composed of everyday found objects, Nari Ward’s dramatic sculptural installations examine issues of race, poverty, and consumer culture and the inherent meaning placed upon the discarded, as well as the treasured.
Currently, at MASS MoCA, visitors can view Ward’s latest large-scale installations taking over an entire floor of one of their buildings. The title of the exhibit, Sub Mirage Lignum, represents the three themes of the show: “sub, in the dual sense of “underneath” and “substitute for another (space)”; mirage, a false image produced by the refraction of light, subject to human interpretation; and lignum, derived from Lignum Vitae (“wood of life”), a tree whose bloom is the national flower of Jamaica.”
The centerpiece of the exhibit is Ward’s monumental work, Nu Colossus. The form of the sculpture comes from a small conical basket-woven fish trap, in which fish are lured in and ensnared. This duality of seduction and entrapment is at the center of Ward’s idea of mirage.
Born in St. Andrews, Jamaica, but living and working in New York since his teen years, Nari Ward became “particularly interested in Jamaican fishing villages as temporary spaces suggestive of both community and sustenance. Like in Ward’s work, these villages are made up of what the fishermen can find — old oil barrels dotting the shore and brightly painted, recycled plywood shacks. For Ward these villages go beyond the boundaries of the “Jamaican experience” and connect to the creative act itself, in both the utilization of reuse and in the wide net cast by both fishermen and artists, even though the outcome is unsure.”
Sub Mirage Lignum is now open at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. One of the many interesting exhibits going on there.
Look closely. Very, very closely. In fact, you might want to click on the image to enlarge it and get a good look at these photos. In each one there’s an invisible man, usually the artist Liu Bolin himself. No, these are not digitally modified photographs. No, this is not Photoshop mastery. Liu Bolin, from Shandong, China, camouflages himself in all kinds of surroundings, no matter how complex they may be. He carries this out by painting himself to blend in perfectly with whatever is behind him. Liu will work up to 10 hours at a time on a single photo to achieve the right effect.
The artist says his art is a protest against the actions of the Government who shut down his art studio in the past and persecute artists in general. It’s about not fitting into modern society.
More of these amazing photos here.
I don’t know if it was my “Philosophy of Art” class trip to a Vito Acconci exhibit in high school, or a visit to a John Baldessari exhibit later on, or maybe the first time I saw a sketch of a Christo-wrapped building, but somewhere along the way I came to really enjoy and appreciate Conceptual Art. So it’s not a surprise that coming across Cristina Garrido’s work recently, was a nice surprise.
Garrido’s work explores the idea of “visual removal of information through the appropriation of objects and images,” slightly reminiscent of Jennie Holzer’s Redaction Paintings though the target of criticism here is capitalism or materialism rather than the military and government censorship. In her series Removals, Cristina Garrido filmed her subject at an Ikea store in Madrid, covering up all the furniture in a living room display with white bed linens from the store, transforming the space into that of an uninhabited house. In addition to the video, Garrido took Ikea information flyers and veiled (or wrapped) the furniture in the flyers with white-out, forcing the reader to speculate based on the written description what is under the white-out. These, in effect, worked as publicity for her performance piece in the store as well. She continues these white-out “removals” in other catalogues as well, not exclusively Ikea.
Another related series of Garrido’s is called Próximamente (Coming Soon). (See bottom two images; click to enlarge.)
Coming Soon is a project of public intervention which consists in placing several big format billboards on the façades next to demolished buildings in the city of Madrid.
You can see more of Cristina Garrido’s work on her site.
d˚light Bubbles are soft, cool to the touch and squeezable silicone bubbles that can be made into concave shapes by pressing in on them. They can be hung on a hook, or bunched up on the floor, or any other arrangement you might prefer. Designed by Diana Lin Design and available on her site.
Yes. I am officially a fan. In addition to his wonderful Operaciones series (see previous post), Marlon de Azambuja has large-scale projects as well, some of which would fall under the category of Street Art. Two of these series are: Potencial Escultórico (Sculptural Potential) in which he wraps street furniture/objects in colored duct tape; and Metaesquema (Meta Diagram) where he uses permanent marker to draw out diagrams encompassing the street manhole covers and grates. Both of these series of works appeared in the streets of Madrid.
“…For the last three years, Marlon de Azambuja has marked out urban spaces with adhesive tape, interventions that have the finality of highlighting or, even better, allowing the discovery of aspects that have always existed but that we have never imagined. Marlon de Azambuja is part of a constructive culture’s memory that finds its forebears in Brazilian Concretism….”
Very cool.
This immense structure entitled “Metaphorical Horizons” was created by industrial designer Lene Rønsholt Wille, in Amsterdam, over a 6-week period, using 270,000 white LEGO bricks. Wille says that the sculptural object “functions partly as a bench, a desk, a wall and as an entire space”
The project was sponsored by LEGO. More detailed construction photos here.
via colossal
As a nod to today’s Royal Wedding, here are some fabulous hats by Jess Collett, the London milliner who was initially to design the mother-of-the-bride’s hat, until, apparently, there was a change of dress plans last week, when the hat was no longer necessary. Nevertheless, these wooden hats by Collett, likely to be a departure from the unveiled royal-ish design, are really spectacular. Sculptural works of art!
The 365 Knitting Clock was designed by Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, a Norwegian designer based in Germany. She just graduated with a degree in Industrial Design in 2010 and has already won several awards for her creative work. Her aim is to “make design with personality and humour…” as well as offer a new kind of interaction between man and his surroundings.
“The 365 Knitting Clock was made to measure and register time in a three-dimensional form to visualize the otherwise invisible time factor that connects us all. Instead of showing time in numbers…the knitting clock aims the philosophical point of the ongoing process of time….Every passing half hour is marked by the knitting of a mesh, a full day is registered as one round around the clock and a year results in a 2-meter long scarf…The year that has past is this year’s scarf. And the coming year is the thread still unknitted.”
Wilhelmsen‘s humor is evident in the labeling of the yarn: “More Time”.
via Yatzer
Busy day in Manhattan… but there’s always time for the paper.
Having a daughter who was generously gifted a Nooka wristwatch, we know what a conversation piece they can be…even if not the quickest way to tell time. Now Nooka has designed a series of wall clocks that look great…that red one in the top photo is just beautiful! Nooka is asking for support to make these a reality. You can read more about the project and contribute here.
via Yanko Design
Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese sound and visual artist who lives and works in Paris, will soon unveil The Transfinite; “an immersive sonic and visual environment that subsumes visitors within abstract expressions of digital information and binary code. Breathtakingly provocative black and white projections keyed to a tightly synchronized musical composition explore how data defines the world we live in. Known for large-scale installations and public artworks around the world that push the limits of digital technology, Ikeda creates his most ambitious installation to date with The Transfinite.”
“In choreographing vast amounts of digital information, Ikeda conjures up a transformative environment in which visitors confront data on a scale that defies comprehension, experiencing the infinite. This installation includes strobe effects and high volume.”
The Transfinite opens May 20th and runs through June 11th 2011, here in NYC at the Park Avenue Armory. Tickets here.
Looking forward to checking it out!
UPDATE: See our follow-up post here.
CollabCubed 