If we exclude photographic books and classic essays, it’s difficult to find a truly interesting publication about fashion. This is not the case with “L’orizzonte degli Eventi,” or “The Event Horizon,” recently written by professor
British artist Robert Montgomery lights up Berlin with his haunting statement pieces
If designer James Victore is right and advertisers do think you’re stupid, artist Robert Montgomery shows where they’re missing out. His poetic text-based works—which he typically plasters across existing billboards—are hardly dumbed down or subliminal. Instead, Montgomery challenges the general public with eloquent statements on relevant topics spanning world politics to modern hipster aesthetic. This summer Montgomery is taking over Berlin with a new range of works at the unused Tempelhof Airport and beyond, in a citywide exhibition dubbed “Echoes Of Voices In High Towers.”
Working in what he calls “melancholic post-situationist tradition,” Montgomery creates his own black-and-white signs that tap into the collective conscious and shake it up with extensive thought-provoking assertions, which include sound bites like “Here comes the cabriolet edition of capitalism and the end of an empire you were too conceited to even protect.” His prose-like style feels like a Missed Connections ad addressed to the world passing by, reminding us of our potential while letting us know of opportunities lost.
Montgomery seemingly has a small fascination with light and the effect it can have on a person. Several of his works make mention of this in a series dubbed “Recycled Sunlight Pieces.” Still as potent as his socio-political works, these lyrical pieces—done in both billboard style and as neon installations—speak to the universal truth that we’re all human and no matter our religious beliefs or other differences, everyone has dreams, everybody hurts sometimes and essentially we’re all in this together.
Curated by Neue Berliner Räume, Montgomery’s first solo exhibition in Germany currently includes ten billboard poems around Berlin, five at the Tempelhof Airport (including two neon Light Poems) and more to come this September. “Echoes Of Voices In High Towers” runs through October 2012.
See more images in the slideshow below.
Exploring undiscovered art scenes in small towns around the globe
The first in a series of shows exposing smaller towns as undiscovered creative hubs, “My Winnipeg” highlights noteworthy artists inhabiting the world’s coldest city. Put on by Paris’ Maison Rouge Gallery, each exhibit is twofold, serving as both broad studies of the selected city’s overall culture and as work relevant to the international contemporary art scene.
My Winnipeg raises questions about how Winnipeg, Canada may have influenced each artist, in terms of climate, geography and history. Could its impossible weather— comprised of harsh, long winters, floods and mosquito-invaded summers—be behind the sleepy state-of-mind imprinting some of the work? Is its location in the middle of an Indian territory the key to many of the artists’ relationships with mythical spirits? Does the city’s former post as a cosmopolitan trading center influence its current surge of dynamic creativity?
Challenged with how to turn this ethnological approach into an art show, the gallery supplys meaningful background information while allowing the works to speak for themselves, devoid of local particularities. In the end, the artists appear to share similar concerns about society as their peers do in bigger metropolises.
Works by artists like Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Wanda Koop, Kent Monkman, Bonnie Marin and Diana Thorneycroft span all mediums—from painting to performance art—to create a definitive visual statement about their native town. Standing out among them is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s 2007 documentary, also dubbed “My Winnipeg.” The film taps Winnipeg’s folkloric history, featuring beautifully hallucinatory images, speaking to Maddin’s sentiment that cinema is a haunted media since it shows people and things which are not really present.
“My Winnipeg” is currently on view at Maison Rouge and runs through 25 September 2011.
Stunning explorations in physical interface design from an MIT Media Lab student
by Meghan Killeen
Boasting a list of innovations of sci-fi proportions, designer and researcher Marcelo Coelho paints a future that is both accessible and immediate. Referencing daily materials and human behavior, Coelho creates objects that feel technologically tailored and socially integrated. After completing his BFA in Computation Arts at Montreal’s Concordia University, Coelho relocated to Cambridge, MA, where he is currently a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab as a member of Fluid Interfaces Group. Focused on enhancing the human-computer relationship, Fluid designs interfaces that are as informational as they are experiential by seamlessly integrating digital content with the physical world.
Projects include luminary technology like Coelho’s magnetic lighting installation, “Six-Forty by Four-Eighty,” created in collaboration with studio partner (and co-creator behind the Rube Goldberg music video for OK Go) Jamie Zigelbaum for the 2010 Design Miami/Basel forum. The 220 pixel-tiles that comprise the installation are modified in color, wall placement and lighting speed, with the human touch serving as an inter-connective conduit between each tile. By bringing the pixels off the screen and on the wall, the focus is on “the materiality of computation itself”—an innovative concentration that earned Zigelbaum + Coelho the 2010 W Hotels Designer of the Future Award.
Merging the fundamentals of technology with edible essentials, Coelho (in collaboration with Amit Zoran) have pioneered the culinary futurism of “digital gastronomy” with a conceptual design called Cornucopia. Featuring four prototypes, the project examines the fusion of ingredients in harmony with new cooking modalities. “Cornucopia emerged from a desire to imagine what it would be like to cook with the aid of computer-controlled machines, which could not only help with the food manipulation process but also bring in massive amounts of information,” explains Coelho. Ranging from a customizing candy maker (The Digital Chocolatier) to a 3D food printer (The Digital Fabricator), each prototype encourages experimentation with food.
Coelho proves that the discerning palate isn’t just relegated to cooking with his Art-O-Meter prototype, a device that evaluates the artistic taste of an attending audience at an art exhibition. Using a sensor, the Art-O-Meter records the amount of time that the viewer stands in front of the artwork, which is measured against the total length of time for the exhibition. Despite the ingenuity of the product, Coelho indicates that the response was divided into two camps—”the people who loved it because now they could finally tell the good art from the bad art, and people who hated it because they believed that now science was able to measure the quality of an artwork in a quantitative way.”
Again mixing organic materials with scientific application, Coelho creates computers out of a substrate of paper and circuit boards using a method dubbed “pulp-based computing” Coelho says this project “shows how we can create artifacts that behave in computational ways but still carry with them the physical and cultural qualities that we normally associate with paper.” He envisions this method as manifesting in the potential forms of self-updating boarding passes or digital newspapers that mimic the texture and behavior of the printed format.
Coelho continues to explore human interaction with technology through kinetic clothing designs created in conjunction with electronic textile studio, XS Labs. “Developing a new kind of kinetic fabric was a way to create a textile display that looked and felt like fabric, rather than an LED screen,” states Coelho. The designs display anthropomorphic functions like body heat activated coloration and a floral accent that blooms every 15 seconds.
Looking towards the future, Coelho observes, “Technology plays an incredible role at reconfiguring how we experience the world and the really exciting part is that the human-computer chapter has barely started.”
Coelho’s luminescent installation project, “Six-Forty by Four-Eighty” will be on display at the W Hotels St. Petersburg Premiere Event and then at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. in June 2011.
The Audi Icons series, inspired by the all-new Audi A7, showcases 16 leading figures united by their dedication to innovation and design.
South African hair culture and communities in a vivid book of photos
Like so many underdeveloped places, South Africa’s townships (often written off by tourists as undesirable and dangerous) have long been rich sources of legendary music and culture. As explored in British photographer Simon Weller‘s beautiful new book “South African Township Barbershops & Salons,” proprietors take great pride in designing their businesses, which function as much more than a place to get a haircut—in spite of their humble surroundings.
Signage alone speaks to a tradition of sign painting. Weller—with help from revered South African designer and book contributor Garth Walker—shows the effort put into personalizing salons, from the homemade graphics to a signature style of cut.
From “Judgment Day” to “Boys II Men” salons and those tucked behind the doors of shipping containers, Weller’s bright portraits sheds light on a rarely-seen side of the country, a testament to the hopeful spirit that remains in these communities even as they continue to suffer the effects of apartheid.
Interviews with store owners, sign makers and customers help flesh out the story, positioning the spaces as not just salons and barber shops, but as community centers for socializing, gossip, networking and other connection-making.
“South African Township Barbershops & Salons” sells from Mark Batty and Amazon.
A Parisian photographer’s objective take on small towns in a dual retrospective
by Isabelle Doal
Upon first glance Eric Tabuchi‘s photographs merely feature disgraceful gas stations lost in no man’s land, Chinese restaurants in improbable settings and skate parks where dull gray tones consume the entire landscape. His subjects seem like superfluous outcasts with to no real place in in the world. His curiosity instead explores the metaphorical confines of belonging to nature, by portraying these humble, fading buildings and objects he reveals realities about our surroundings with new eyes—as a foreigner would do—showing how the outskirts may tell something about the center.
Influenced by the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German photography duo known for their depictions of industrial buildings as typology, Tabuchi—who formally studied sociology—draws attention to the tiny signs located in the margin of normality. He demonstrates how eventually, if not on purpose, things end up looking like each other through instinctive use of the same symbols and aesthetic.
An echo to each photo’s outstanding simplicity and stark surroundings, the neutral positioning of his subjects tells about Tabuchi’s point of view and approach, which is to remain objective and refrain from creating any amount of melancholy within the picture. He feels the best place for a picture is in a magazine, where it is printed, seen and thrown away. For Tabuchi, pictures are nothing but common everyday life items.
As a delayed secondary effect, the loneliness of these oft-abandoned remnants reaches the observer with their familiar shapes, like how going back home would do. For that reason, when Tabuchi exhibits his photos he always tries to merge them among other objects and forms so that it, as an overall picture, makes a new landscape and in the end a new picture.
The French photographer is also known for his books—most notably for “Alphabet Truck” and his interpretation of Ed Ruscha’s “Twentysix Gasoline Stations.” With both books and all of his works, Tabuchi did extensive traveling, documenting what looks a lot like America but is actually all shot “within a 250-km radius from Paris.”
Tabuchi’s extensive repertoire is on view at two galleries in Strasbourg, France. Creating one unified retrospective, “Mini Golf” opens at La Chambre 11 March 2011 and runs through 8 May 2011 while “Indoor Land” is currently on display at Le Maillon and runs through 29 April 2011.
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