Hasta La Ideas

The Architectural Association has unveiled its latest Summer Pavilion: designed by third year Danecia Sibingo, its undulating form now sits outside the AA in London’s Bedford Square

This is the fourth year that the AA has challenged its students to create a temporary Summer Pavilion from sustainable timber – last year’s was a recent D&AD award-winner (see here).

Driftwood was designed by concept designer Danecia Sibingo, a 3rd year student, and her team of Lyn Hayek, Yoojin Kim, Taeyoung Lee, Suram Choi, Kyungtae Jung, Jerome Tsui, Feras El Attai, Rama Nshiewat, Camille Steyaert, Hisashi Kato and Ryan Phanphensophon. Apparently it “provides a thoughtful, provoking reminder of the UK’s inextricable link to the sea – its undulating form created by the motion of the water, carried by waves and coming to rest in busy central London”.

The opening of Driftwood coincides with the AA’s Projects Review that showcases its students’ work. More details here.

Driftwood is on show in Bedford Square until July 25.

Images © Valerie Bennett

Before we depart UnBeige HQ for a long weekend of fireworks, nationalistic cupcakes, and multiple viewings of Kieślowski‘s three colors trilogy, we wanted to leave you with something nice to look at: Fred Tomaselli‘s “Sept. 15, 2005” (2009), a gouache on printed watercolor paper. Think NYT on LSD. In her excellent feature on Tomaselli in the July issue of W, Julie Belcove describes the artist’s recent “hallucinatory treatments of front pages from The New York Times” as “bold juxtapositions of cold reality and formal abstraction.” For Tomaselli, they’re a way of “talking back at the news.”

The talking back began with doodling—on the Times‘ March 16, 2005 front-page photo of Bernard J. Ebbers, the disgraced former CEO of WorldCom, leaving a New York courthouse with his wife and a string of fraud convictions. “Even though he was a wretched man, I was touched by him holding hands with his wife,” explains Tomaselli in W. “This sort of Paradise Lost seemed to have the relationship to paradises involved with taking LSD.” The result was “Guilty” (2005), a trippy reimagining of the Ebbers’ exodus. See more of Tomaselli’s multilayered world next month, when the Aspen Art Museum mounts a mid-career survey of his two-dimensional works that will be on view through October 11 before traveling to Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

(Photo: Erma Estwick)

You can’t please everyone. If you’re Banksy, that’s likely the motto you live by. Following the opening of his largest exhibition to date in his home turf of Bristol, which you’ll remember was set up in secret due to the hosting museum’s concerns that the city council would axe the idea, it’s being reported that a someone has thrown paint all over another of his earlier pieces in that same city (one attached to real walls, not those in a gallery). Just a few months back, a group defaced one of his paintings as a protest against gentrification, and the latest paint attack happened earlier this week, with thick blue paint covering Banksy’s work — thus far no one has claimed responsibility. Fortunately, for Banksy fans, the owner of the building on which artist original chose as his canvas has taken to getting all this new paint removed in an attempt to erase all of the bad vandalism from their good vandalism.

Detail from one of Stanley Donwood’s pandemons, proving that goat + suit = quite frightening

El Chupacabra, the latest series of paintings from artist Stanley Donwood, opens at the Weapon of Choice Gallery in Bristol on 10 July. 13 horned  “pandemons” dressed in suits feature in the show, each daubed with streaks of paint. Something tells us that Donwood is not a fan of bankers… 

“I’ve got nothing against goats,” says Donwood of the new series. “I’ve just discovered that if I draw a goat, give it the mouth of a rapacious carnivore then dress it in the suit and tie of a disgraced banker or politician it looks fucking evil.”

“[These are] 13 spectres at the feast of the goat. Loitering on the blackened cliffs of free-market economics, cackling as they raise a glass to toast Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. Gallons of paint I’ve poured over them to drown their snickering. But still they laugh.”

Oh, and in case you were wondering, el chupacabra means “the goat sucker” in Spanish. 

El Chupacabra is at the Weapon of Choice Gallery, 14 St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, BS2 8DT from 10 July to 9 August

Dig this eco-friendly piece produced by Edina Tokodi. It is made entirely of living, breathing plants. The piece currently hangs on the rooftop of Green Spaces NY in Brooklyn, and will be relocated to a public space in the weeks to come.

Detail:

Detail 2

Detail 3

Detail Images courtesy of Robert Peters


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