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
Click to enlargeMoscow 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.
Click to enlargeThe two street artist brothers Icy and Sot from Tabriz, Iran, create stencil art and graffiti about peace, war, love, hate, despair, human rights, children and Iranian culture.
You can see much more of their work on their website and flickr including this uncharacteristic large-scale Coke can.
via artinfo
Click to enlargeChilean-born, New York-based artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz definitely has a provocative sense of humor with his heart and brain in the right place. Smack in the middle of one of the aisles at Pier 92 of the Armory Show this past weekend, in a prime rest/lounge area, were his Occupy Chairs. Targeting the art-collecting 1%, Errazuriz invited them to purchase these white folding chairs painted with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogans, to raise money in support of the 99% as well as integrating the messages of the larger group into the homes of the smaller one. In essence, transporting the movement’s placards into private lives of those they are protesting. Political statement, general awareness, and a fundraiser all rolled into one. Genius if they actually sold at $2,500 a piece!
There are eight Occupy Chair designs with 10 of each slogan all available through the Cristina Grajales Gallery.
Click to enlargeI came upon these impressive photo collage pop-up books at the Volta art show here in NYC last Friday. Swedish artist Andreas Johansson has been drawn to industrial and desolate areas ever since his youth as a skateboarder in Vaxjo. Working in collage, cutting apart photographs and then building up new environments of the abandoned industrial kind has been something Johansson has done for a while. In his solo exhibit titled From Where the Sun Now Stands, he has taken these ‘sets’ and created a series of oversized pop-up books with 6 pages each, showing different perspectives of the same vacant lot. Turning these large pages and seeing these pages come to life was an interesting departure from the pop-up books (that I loved) of my youth. You can see the pages being flipped at the bottom of this page here.
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
Click to enlargeGuatemalen artist Dario Escobar is known for his sculptural installations which explore the recontextualization of objects, particularly sports-related ones. From chopped bats to rooms filled with serpentile bicycle tires, or hanging sculptures of worn soccer balls to reconfigured skateboards, Escobar’s work takes the ordinary object and metamorphosizes their form and meaning.
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:
Click to enlargeNot 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.
via @mrfidalgo
Click to enlargeYes, there’s been a bit of a Russian theme this week after perusing many a Russian gallery site into the wee hours the other night, but this is the last of it for now, and it’s a fun one, at least I think so.
The Red People project, created by Andrey Lublinskiy and Maria Zaborovskaya of the Pprofessors art group, is a modular system used to assemble an anthropomorphous character, sometimes large, other times small, out of 13 wooden blocks. Working in practically any context and integrated therein, these Red Men have become a sort of viral phenomenon around Moscow and its environs. So much so, that they have become stars of comics and political debates, and are slowly making their way across the world.
With inspiration from, and a nod to, cult artists such as Malevich, Rodchenko, Bruskin, Giacometti, Haring and Gormley, the Pprofessors have made these red contemporary icons pop up in the most unexpected of places, including sitting by a park fountain, scootering around the streets of Moscow, or sitting in the middle of a shopping center. After their exhibit in 2010 at the Gridchinhall Gallery, a few of the men have become permanent fixtures on the grounds, with one sitting atop the gallery’s building entrance.
The Pprofessors also created a toy-like kit of the Red People, where each child (or adult) can manipulate the elements of the composition using the basic red blocks included in the kit.
All in all, a very fun project that I could see taking off in NYC.
via artguide
Click to enlargeOriginally from Alicante, Spain, photographer Marie Bovo now lives and works in Marseille. I really like her ‘Cour Intérieure’ (interior courtyard) series of photographs. Despite its consistent theme, each one has its own personality and color scheme, with clotheslines varying in direction, capturing that particular aspect of many Mediterranean towns and cities. Such a cool perspective, too; a bottom-of-the-well sensation.
via kamel mennour
Lithuanian designer Gogelmogel has a humorous take on most things from street art to facebook icons. His clever concepts made me smile.
You can see much more on his website, and flickr.
Thanks Lukas!
Click to enlargeVirgin 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.
Click to enlargeRussian artist Alexey Morosov creates sculptures, paintings and drawings combining the influence of famous masterpieces by sculptors of Ancient Greece and Rome with the contemporary cultural experience of modern man. His recent solo exhibition at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg was titled Antologia and included over 48 of Morosov’s works. From the museum’s press release:
The contrast of these Hellenic nymphs on their super-rugged segways cracks me up. You can see more of Morosov’s work on his website.
Click to enlargeMoscow-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
If you’re in New York City tomorrow (March 6th) you may notice a double-size golden statue of David being hauled around town from 11am through the early afternoon on a lowboy trailer. This would be the work of Turkish conceptual artist Serkan Özkaya, whose golden replica of Michelangelo’s David was initially created for the Istanbul Biennial in 2005. Özkaya’s work typically deals with the concepts of appropriation and reproduction. Apparently, the sculpture collapsed shortly after its installation, then was restored and two replicas were cast. One remains in Turkey and the other was acquired by 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
So, tomorrow the museum, in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture, will tour the David around town arriving at the Storefront Gallery on Kenmare Street in the early afternoon where it will be parked outside on display until 9pm. The gallery will be running a Manifesto Series titled Double, which will include a live staging of manifestos on the topic of doubling, replicating or copying, by a panel of artists, architects, critics and historians.
You can follow David (inspired by Michelangelo) on twitter @storefrontnyc #doubledavid to keep up with its whereabouts or visit the gallery’s website for details on the event.
Click to enlargeI 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
CollabCubed 