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 28, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Highlights from the RISD Senior ID Show

A couple of weeks ago we stopped in at the RISD Senior Industrial Design Show. All the work was impressive, but due to limited space, here are just a few of the projects that caught our attention. Above, Natalie Murrow created a Modular Bench and Shelving system that’s very clever with multiple uses.

Below, Brett Newman’s Magazine Bench works as both a seat and a magazine rack, convenient for easy access to periodicals and stylish to boot.

Oliver Henderson’s Personal Nano Speakers in maple are compact and nicely designed (above) and Owen Read’s Annex iPhone Tripod Mount (below) with suction cups that attach to your iPhone is elegant and smart.

All of these designers have other interesting work, so be sure to click on their names to visit their websites and see much more.

Product photos: courtesy of each designer. Show photos: collabcubed

March 27, 2012 by collabcubed - 3 Comments

Empty Sky: Jersey City 9/11 Memorial

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Though I haven’t yet visited the 9/11 Memorial down at the World Trade Center, it has been so thoroughly documented that I am not only aware of its existence, but also have a reasonably good idea of what to expect when I do finally go in person. The same cannot be said of the New Jersey memorial, Empty Sky, on the other side of the Hudson River, honoring the 744 victims from New Jersey who lost their lives at the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. That is until now, that I’ve come across its existence.

This simple yet striking memorial, designed by Frederic Schwartz Architects, consists of twin cement and stainless steel walls, 12 feet apart, 30 feet high and 210 feet long, that reflect the changing light of day creating a halo effect at dusk and dawn as the sun hits the parallel walls. The corridor created by these two walls dramatically draws the eye to the vacant (empty) space where the towers once stood. Working with graphic designer Alexander Isley, it was decided to engrave the names of the victims in ITC Bodoni 12 in a larger size than is usual in memorials, using a cap height of 3.6 inches, spacing the names out so that none of them are broken, and allowing for the families of the victims to easily create rubbings of their names, if they so choose. Other consultants on the project include Ove Arup & Partners Structural Engineers and Arnold Associates as the landscape architects.

The project was unveiled this past September. I’ll have to pay a visit to this memorial in addition to the inverted fountains downtown.

Photos and images courtesy of the architects; Ari Burling Photography; David Sundberg/Esto; and Moniza’s flickr

via sedg

March 27, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Jenny Holzer: Endgame

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The best thing for me about the day I went to the Whitney Biennial, a few weeks back, was when my friend and I took a half-hour break (we were waiting to see some of the Biennial films), and went to the Starstedt Gallery where Jenny Holzer’s exhibit Endgame awaited us. Another word about the disappointing Biennial though: one of the few works that I did enjoy was Portal by the band Red Krayola, an interactive piece hidden on the 5th floor mezzanine where one of the Red Krayola members is skyped in at all times available to converse with the viewers if they have any questions about the large sketchbook in front of them, in which everyone is invited to contribute. It was fresh, fun and cracked me up, especially since most of the time Mayo Thompson (the Red Krayola who was there when I visited) was flipping through his newspaper, making it unclear if what we were watching was a video or live until he started chatting. Here’s the only photo I was able to find, unfortunately the seat is empty in the photo.

But, back to the subject of this post: Endgame. Holzer, known best for her wonderful LED word sculptures, continues with her redacted government document series, but many of these include color and have a slicker finish to the geometric shapes created by the censoring. She has made these into beautiful abstract paintings that exacerbate how much one is blocked from seeing. There is a Constructivist quality to these paintings that could suggest a social purpose, while the lighter colors and chromatic fades might suggest a hopefulness and optimism.

What I know, without doubt, is that walking into the gallery, a lovely house in itself, was a breath of fresh air and a confirmation that wonderful art is alive and well, even if not at the Biennial.

Jenny Holzer’s Endgame is on view at the Skarstedt Gallery in NYC through April 7th, 2012.

All images courtesy of the Skarstedt Gallery.

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 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

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.

Julie Dodd: Paper Sculptor

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English artist Julie Dodd usually works with paper creating books, installations, sculptural pieces and even recycling it to make new paper. Inspired by the patterns and shapes found in nature, Dodd tends to work in multiples mimicking life in its growth and regeneration.

What first drew me to Dodd’s work were her Paper Eggs where she used recycled magazine pages glued in layers to revert them into a wood-like material. It’s very hard to believe that those eggs are made from paper! Julie Dodd’s choice of eggs was done as a commentary on the decline of migrating birds to Europe due to loss of habitat and climate change all stemming back to the loss of trees. The fleeting nature of magazines converted into a permanent and significant object.

Also shown above are Dodd’s Forest: Lungs of the World and Illegal Logging installations, but there is plenty more to see on her website including beautiful paper cut books and her Human Nature installation.

via saatchi online

March 21, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

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 21, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Adriano Zumbo Pâtissier

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This is a fun design for a bakery! Adriano Zumbo, who has four locations in Australia, creates desserts that are unique in concept and execution, and so it would seem that designers Luchetti Krelle (Stuart Krelle and Rachel Luchetti) set out to design a space unique in concept and execution as well for Zumbo’s latest location at the Star Casino in Pyrmont. Full of humor from the windmill boots in the window to the dessert conveyer belt and the “In Case of Emergency Break Glass” cases of French Macarons, the space is sure to lure in any passersby.

Photos by Murray Fredericks and Adriano Zumbo’s website.

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 19, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Rat Race Park Project: Yuken Teruya

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There aren’t many things that gross me out more than rats. Seeing them around town occasionally, especially in the subway, is one of the few downers about living in NYC. Artist Yuken Teruya (previously here) has a crazy concept of turning the subway platforms and tracks in New York into a Rat Race Park. His Rat Race Park Project envisions similar play equipment to that sold in pet stores for hamsters and gerbils but, instead, placed on the subway tracks. There would be special lighting equipment with the tracks painted in bright colors similar to those often seen in playgrounds, and, of course, water bottles along the base of the platform for a quick pick-me-up and refresher for the active rodents working up a sweat. Teruya’s goal behind this plan? “…to reconsider the underground life of rats at the subway station and to thus share a feeling of larger community in New York City.” Umm…I think my community is large enough, thank you.