Hasta La Ideas

Shark teeth and pheasant feathers in work by a UK artist

50-million-year-old shark teeth and thousands of turkey, pheasant and coque feathers are just a few of the materials comprising the work of UK artist Louise Greenfield. “I’ve always been into making and designing things. Even when I was a little girl I was creating little outfits and packaging boxes. I loved the construction, pattern and color elements equally and was occupied for hours as a child,” laughs Greenfied in her North London studio. “I’d drive my maths teachers crazy day-dreaming about things I could make!”

This love affair with construction and design led London-born Greenfield to complete a 1st Class BA (Hons.) in Applied Art before being offered a chance to work with the jewelry team at Vivienne Westwood. “I’d always admired the incredible theatrical, flamboyant nature of her work,” says Greenfield. During her time there she felt fortunate to work with Wendy Ramshaw, CBE, the queen of British jewelry design. Inspired by what she calls the “execution and finish on her work which is always so incredibly precise and intricate,” Greenfield soaked up everything she could learn about materials—”be it precious metals, jewels, plastics, leather and fabrics”—and used the results to create large-scale installations as well as jewelry and art.

In 2010, Greenfield launched her own range, Targets—intricate and highly detailed wall art utilizing hundreds of pheasant, coque, turkey feathers—at London’s Origin and 100% Design festivals. The positive feedback led to global editorial coverage and the opportunity to collaborate with some of the UK’s top interior designers.

The following year, while visiting New York, Greenfield stumbled upon a 50-million-year-old shark’s tooth, an encounter that eventually led to her latest animal-inspired collection, Dancing Teeth. “I found the my first tooth at an amazing shop called Evolution, an artist’s treasure trove full of preserved butterflies, beetles, snake skeletons and spiders. I found it fascinating to imagine the history behind these items that were so old. The tooth inspired this alternative fairy-tale narrative; I simply wanted to make playful, bright, fresh objects with a static energy,” she says.

Attention to detail and an obsession with structure are at the core of everything Greenfield creates, resulting in breathtaking quality. For Targets and Flight, Greenfield first decides on colors and types of feather before measuring and drawing out the design onto blank canvas. Next, each feather is positioned onto steel pins and Greenfield drills into the board to affix them. “I guess the hardest part is making sure the size, color and patternation on the feathers works with the structural shape,” she explains. “When I’m producing a new piece, it’s very much about working with the design as the shape evolves so timescales vary hugely. Yes, it can be frustrating but also quite therapeutic too!” In Dancing Teeth—a collection Greenfield is currently evolving—each tooth is individually cast before being carefully built into the sculpture.

Despite the effort involved, Greenfield is overwhelmingly positive about her future. “When you’re working for yourself, the possibilities are endless and I think ultimately you get out what you put in. It’s exciting not knowing what’s coming next or what the next commission will involve. There’s nothing better than doing something you love and I’m excited to be indulging in my own creativity.”

Fusing photograms and cell phone snaps in an exhibition exploring the evolution of photography

In his current exhibition, “Neither Camera Nor Companion” at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver, Berlin-based artist Mark Soo has created a series of photographs which thoughtfully and cleverly take the viewer on a journey through photographic history. By drawing on his fascination with how culture and technology have continuously influenced photography, Soo manages to combine magnified digital noise, darkroom processing, and crisp photogram silhouettes with striking results.

Your recent photos are so visually complex it’s challenging to understand what’s going on. Can you explain how they’re made?

Very broadly, my work often begins by looking at the relationship between culture, technology and the ways they have influenced each other. So this series of works, originally titled “Madame Guillotine“, started with wanting to find a different way to juxtapose digital and analog photography in a way that blends both, rather than keeps them separate.

What I did was to make a photograph that literally fuses a technique dating from the earliest days of photography, the photogram, with something emblematic of the direction of photography today, which are digital photos taken with a cellphone. In the end, all these things ended up coming together in a traditional analog darkroom.

I started by taking a bunch of digital images of prints of the French Revolution with my low-res cellphone, and transferred them to a negative. I then took the negatives into the darkroom and printed them as traditional color photographs. In the printing process, I placed various objects on the photographic paper in order to produce a photogram on top of the printed image. In some sense you could say these works function as a condensed history of photographic technique. Partly what I liked was how the detailed organic shapes of the photograms contrasted with the grid of digital pixels in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.

You used images of the French Revolution as the foundation for these pictures. Why was that your starting point?

I traveled to France a few times over the last year and while there, I got interested in the guillotine and its history—gruesome stuff for sure, but definitely fascinating. I ended up taking photos with my phone of anything related to the guillotine, without thinking much about what exactly I was doing. So they were snaps of images in books mostly—pictures of pictures. Anyhow, I started to think about the guillotine blade, and how it resembled the shutter of a camera; this got me thinking about photography in relation to the French Revolution.

Then I started to see parallels between what was occurring on a political level during the French Revolution, with this tremendous shift in photography happening today—the digital revolution: in both instances people are moving from the perceived traditions and hierarchies of the old world toward something they feel is more democratic. As traditional photolabs are closing, places like Flickr and Instagram, or Google Images, are becoming more indispensable to how we consider image-making in general. I thought it was particularly interesting, on an abstract level at least, to draw comparisons between these two points in history.

“Neither Camera Nor Companion” is showing at Vancouver’s Blanket Gallery through 21 April 2012.

The magic-surreal, inflatable neo-dada work of a still life sculptor

Rachel de Joode is a Berlin-based sculptor who specializes in still lifes made from materials like a stack of Kraft singles, an oozing banana, a wooden club piercing a pile of white bread, wigs, people and a giant inflatable chicken foot. Her most recent work “Life is Very Long” is a part sculpture, part performance piece composed of tennis gravel, styrofoam and 60 frozen Dr. Oetker pizzas. She draws inspiration from history, philosophy, space travel and obscure scientific facts, which may help to explain why she classified the sculpture “A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole” as “magic-surreal inflatable neo-dada”. If that doesn’t clear things up, perhaps this explanation will shed some light:

“The elements displayed have individually symbolic meanings: the peanut metaphors evolution, primates and a mental condition, half a wild horse is a metaphor for amputation, restrainment and magic shows (box sawing trick). The burning cigarette is a metaphor for fire (the element), smoke (blurred vision) and the dawning of the end, the chicken foot is a voodoo charm which is symbolically used for the “scratching” of the vision of the future. The black disk is representing a black hole which is a symbol for the mighty unknown. Together these ingredients form an inflatable perspective of the future human condition, revealing the dawning of the end of the post-modern world.”

She continues her exploration of art, science, culture and nature as the photo editor and art director of META Magazine, which “traces the uncommon threads between common topics, presenting its readers with views into the abyss of visual information and with experiments in associative reading,” de Joode explains. “We have contributors such as Olaf Breuning, Tao Lin, Cai Guo-Qiang, Pieter Hugo, Jan Kempenaers and Alan Shapiro among other scientists, historians, artists, activists, occultists and theorists.”

She’s also the co-founder of De Joode & Kamutzki, a new auction house that aims to increase the accessibility of contemporary art. “We don’t see art as a luxury good that one might consider purchasing when they already have everything else that money can buy,” de Joode says. “Our mission is to inspire you to invest in great artwork not for the sake of its resale value, the status symbol attached to it or as a way to spend surplus money. We want people to buy art out of love, fascination and admiration. Because art is essential.”

Her work will be featured in two exhibitions in April: “tropico post – apocalyptic” at extra extra in Philadelphia and “Bad Girls of 2012” at Interstate Projects in NYC. Meanwhile, she’s working on a short film with dancers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot before she leaves for a two-month residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, all while Panama-based gallery Diablo Rosso prints an edition of her work for Zona Maco, the contemporary art fair in Mexcio City. I was lucky to catch up with her this week for a quick chat.

You studied time-based arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. What does that mean? What are time-based arts?

It means art which is somehow related or dependent on time—like film, web-based art or performance. Nevertheless, this department is a kind of free art meets conceptual art department. You could basically use every type of media you wanted, the focus was more on your idea, on your concept.

How do you select the materials for your sculptures? Is it an intuitive process or is there a lot of trial and error?

I choose objects which I find iconographic for the current human condition, objects which relate to the everyday, like pizzas, or computers, or coffee mugs, or remote controls. These objects are just “there” somehow. I am not constantly on the lookout. It’s more about opening your eyes. Like when I think of using a telephone in one of my works, all of a sudden I notice all these great telephones everywhere. In the end it’s either/or. Sometimes I have an image in my head and then I need to find a certain object. Sometimes the object comes to me and I get inspired to do something with it.

When I start to assemble an installation or still life I think a lot about the texture and the colors. Colors really work on the emotions and so you can do a lot with this. Mostly I color-code the objects or arrange them tone-on-tone. Setting up a still-life is like making a sculptural collage. It’s cutting and pasting, somehow it’s the same as photoshopping.

I have a table with objects (ingredients) lined up and then I just try to put them together until it works. I never use all the objects that I picked out in front. Then the hardest part is having things sit and stand together. Things always fall over. I scream and condemn the objects. Gravity is my worst enemy when I make an installation!

For “A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole,” how did you fabricate the inflatables? Why use inflatable objects as opposed to another sculptural form?

In 2010, I was invited by the Oslo-based artists Sverre Strandberg and Anna Daniell to make an inflatable piece. They organized and curated the show “Giant Ball”, an exhibition of inflatable art pieces held in Oslo’s football stadium.

It was very natural to design this still-life. The piece was produced in Korea. The concept, design and the high-res images I delivered for the print on the inflatable material are mine. The curation and production are Sverre Strandberg and Anna Daniell.

The cool thing about it is that I could make something like “Half a Horse” which would be very hard to make in reality! The sculpture definitely turned out great and it is so small to carry around, which is a big bonus! I just need to built the structure which it stands on.

You’ve said work addresses “the nature of humanity and questions who we are and why we’re here.” Has your work led you closer to answering these questions? What have you discovered about our humanity through your work?

Actually, I think I will never find out. It’s so ridiculous! It is really so ridiculous that we are alive. It confuses me a lot. I guess we need to simply do some funny and nice things, things we want to do and do them right enough to also be able to enjoy them. People are very strange, what they do, how they live, what they want from life. The only realization I made is that we are all very similar. All humans want things, they desire things.

All images courtesy of Rachel de Joode.

New works from Adel Abdessemed feature scorched fur and razorwire crucifixions

A collection of new works opens today at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City, showcasing the creative talents of Adel Abdessemed. The Algerian-born artist tackles a range of materials and mediums in a collection focusing on themes of violence, war and spectatorship. The namesake piece “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” is built to the dimensions of Picasso’s “Guernica,” and is made from a mass of taxidermic animals. Abdessemed has scorched the fur to achieve a blackened effect, a process that actually fills gallery space with a distinct sulfuric smell.

The stunning series “Décor” is inspired by the crucified figure from Matthias Grünewald’s 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece. The violent expression is achieved through the manipulation and welding of razor wire, which also yields a rainbow discoloration from the heating process. Floating alone without the support of a cross, the three figures are built to anatomical scale.

“Hope” takes a marooned boat from the Gulf Coast and transplants it into the gallery space. The cavity has been filled with sculptural objects that resemble garbage bags, representing both the people and the possessions that have been transported across the waters. Abdessemed’s experience immigrating to France informs his focus on the immigrant experience and the risks that migrant peoples undertake.

The resin sculpture “Coup de tête” channels a historic moment of broadcast violence as French footballer Zinedine Zidane headbutts Italy’s Marco Materazzi. “L’avenir c’est aux fantômes” (“The Future Belongs to Ghosts”) is a reference to Derrida’s concept of phenomena, the title pulled from the philosopher’s own writing. The gorgeous hand-blown sculptures are raised well above eye-level, heightening their spectral appearance as they are framed against the gallery’s skylights.

Also on display is a collection of crude sketches of animals bearing dynamite, which intentionally resemble cave drawings. A looped video shows a baboon spelling out in magnetic letters the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” This is a reference to the two conflicting factions of the Rwandan genocide, and continues Abdessemed’s recurring theme of violence. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” marks the build-up to Abdessemed’s major upcoming exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which opens October 2012.

See more images of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” in our slideshow of the exhibitition.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

17 February through 17 March 2012

David Zwirner Gallery

525 West 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

Magical situations dominate the Dutch photographer’s unlikely landscapes

Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland chooses to produce work in remote locations where the inhabitants have been forced to adapt to the natural conditions rather than the other way around. For her it is not about being where only very few people have been before, but about discovering authenticity in a space, which often means that beauty and wonder simply drop into her lap.

It is all about magic: the magic of the location, the inhabitants and the living conditions. In her extensive travels, she creates site-specific installations inspired by local traditions and materials.

“I am filled with nostalgia for places where people are very close to nature,” says Graafland. “Places where people have barely interfered with nature. The wonder of nostalgia for places you have never been to. The wonder of creating situations that have never existed before and will probably never exist again. Situations that are possible but very unlikely to occur again. Magic realism.”

Hooft Graafland sometimes spends months on the edges of the world waiting for “it” to happen. That “it” is a moment when dreams and fantasies mix with reality: Bolivian women wave sticks of candyfloss on salt pans, the entrails of polar bears trace out a palm tree at the North Pole, dromedaries with pigment-tinted humps shuffle across the desert, a stuffed blue reindeer stands out amidst thousands of its living fellows.

Once an exceptional location has demonstrated its magical capabilities, and has been captured in a photographic image, it is time to leave. The magic found in the final image could never have been conceived beforehand.