Photographs of Aurora, a giant marionette polar bear created to promote Greenpeace’s Save The Arctic campaign have been released, in advance of the bear’s ‘walk’ through London this Sunday…
CR previously reported on Aurora back in August, when the bear was still at design stage. A series of beautiful sketches of the puppet were released (and can be seen in the original article here), and we’re happy to report that the actual bear amply lives up to expectation, as these images show.
The puppet, which is designed by Christopher Kelly and has been specially commissioned for Greenpeace, is the size of a double-decker bus and weighs around three tonnes. She will require 15 puppeteers to operate on Sunday, alongside 20 volunteers to haul her through the streets. As she walks through the city she will emit gutteral rumblings, and her roar will be accompanied by the sound of ice breaking and animals bellowing. Following the bear will be thousands of supporters as well as a parade of “Arctic-inspired carnivalesque performers”.
Aurora is the focal piece of the UK leg of Greenpeace’s global day of action to protect the Arctic. The parade on Sunday will begin at 12pm at Victoria Tower Gardens, next to Parliament, and will finish at the Shell headquarters on Jubilee Gardens. For more info on the route and the day in general, visit the Greenpeace website here.
The unlikely gang of Johannes Vermeer, an inventor named Tim Jenison, and the magical double act of Penn & Teller got critics (and everyone else) buzzing at the recently wrapped Telluride Film Festival, where Tim’s Vermeer made its world premiere before heading north to the Toronto Film Festival, which runs through Sunday.
The documentary, directed by Teller and produced by Penn Jillette and Farley Ziegler, follows Texas-based Jenison who, after devouring David Hockney‘s 2001 book Secret Knowledge (which makes a case for the Old Masters’ use of camera-like devices), tries to adapt 17th-century technology for a DIY Vermeer. Part scientific investigation, part art historical mystery story, the film features appearances by Hockney, actor and artist Martin Mull, architect-turned-Vermeer expert Philip Steadman, and neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, who illuminates the optics and visual processing particulars. continued…
An Anti-Drone Scarf, part of a collection of “stealth wear” by Adam Harvey in collaboration with Johanna Bloomfield.
A temporary store for stuff designed to help users evade detection? Such is the lowdown pop-up now operating at New York’s New Museum, which has given over its ground-level selling space to the Privacy Gift Shop. Stop in through September 22 to stock up on clothing and accessories that protect against various methods of surveillance.
Designed by artist Adam Harvey and fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, the “stealth wear” on offer includes a metallized silk scarf (inspired by Muslim dress) that protects against thermal imaging surveillance, a dollar bill-sized wallet insert made of copper fabric to thwart would-be RFID skimmers, and an optical character recognition-resistant version of the iconic “I ♥ NY” t-shirt. continued…
Halsey McKay recently presented “Angel Error,” a solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Joseph Hart. (All images courtesy Halsey McKay Gallery)
Once upon a time, the East End of New York’s Long Island was an artistic refuge that drew the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to set up homes and studios. The region’s legendary light, charming potato fields, and shimmering views now command stratospheric prices that have priced all but the most successful artists out of the market, but there’s still plenty of art to see in the Hamptons, which last fall gained a powerhouse in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. We recently journeyed a bit further east to the town of East Hampton and left impressed by the assured exhibitions on view at Halsey McKay Gallery, founded in 2011 by sharp-eyed curator Hilary Schaffner and artist Ryan Wallace. In the wake of a supercharged summer of shows, including solo exhibitions of Joseph Hart, Anne-Lise Coste, Patrick Brennan, and Graham Collins, we asked Schaffner to tell us more about Halsey McKay, what exhibitions she’s looking forward to seeing this fall, and some other Hamptons must-sees.
1. What led you to open your gallery in East Hampton? It’s amazing to think that this all began with a conversation Ryan and I had one evening in 2011. We were both surprised and intrigued by the fact there were so few galleries on the East End focused on emerging artists. A place with such a rich art history presented a great opportunity to support our programming. We thought that we could be more accessible to collectors out here than if we were in New York City. Without all the distractions and competition of the city, we envisioned we could meet interesting people in a short amount of time and give our artists a great platform for being seen. It’s been rewarding to bring our generation of artists out East and introduce them to the to the area. For me, there was also this continuation of family history. The Halsey’s were one of the first families to settle out here in the 1640s. It feels significant to be working in a place with such strong familial and art historical ties.
2. How would you describe the gallery’s program/artist roster? This was another aspect that evolved organically. We already had a community of mainly Brooklyn-based artists that ended up being the foundation of our program. I have a MFA in photography and Ryan went to RISD and is a painter, this has lead us to show a range of mediums. Our middle ground has ended up being abstraction. We have some great figurative artists in the mix, like Ben Blatt and Ryan Schneider but there is certainly a mutual interest in abstract works. We’ve also had a lot of fun doing two and three person shows with artists whose work might not be immediately associated together.
3. How did you choose the name Halsey McKay? Halsey is my grandmother’s maiden name and McKay is Ryan’s grandmother’s maiden name.
4. Tell us about your current show, “Ether Scrims, Dark Rooms, and Calculative Planes,” on view through Sunday. We were thinking about how space is rendered in an artist’s practice —the flattening of space and the creation of space. Photography, sculpture and painting are all represented here yet each artist has this underpinning of optical illusion in their work through combining virtual and analog interventions. Before the show was installed we were operating in this very conceptual space but after seeing it all hung, these wonderful formal relationships have sprung up. The geometry and patterning that each artist has come to, in very distinctive ways, feels quite unified. continued…
Inside Outside. From left, ready-to-color versions of “Oath of the Pond” by Koichiro Takagi and “Pizza Face” by Ohara Hale. (Photo: UnBeige)
It’s that time of year again, when even those who haven’t stepped inside a classroom for decades feel the unbearable urge to stock up on school supplies. Break out that fresh box of Crayolas—or Prismacolors or Copics—for Outside the Lines, out today from Perigee. This “artists’ coloring book for giant imaginations” is the brainchild of Souris Hong-Porretta, who gathered line drawings (most commissioned especially for this book) by the likes of Shepard Fairey, Exene Cervenka, Gary Baseman, Ryan McGinness, Jen Corace, and 100 other creative masterminds ranging from animators to video game artists. We asked Hong-Porretta, a self-desciribed “art enthusiast, idea enabler, and yay-maker” to tell us more about the colorful project.
What led you to create Outside the Lines? My daughter, Lulu! She has lots and lots of coloring books and I noticed that she had a preference for coloring books with illustrations by established artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. After watching her scribble outside the lines of a Moebius coloring book, I thought it’d be cool if she could color artwork by our creative cabal so I wrote a list of folks I knew and one by one asked them if they would contribute work for a coloring book. I had several dozen yeses in a short amount of time—enough to motivate me to write a book proposal. The rest came together rather quickly.
How did you select the artists whose work you wanted to include? Nearly all the artists included in the book are personal friends. Some very old, some newer. A few are friends of friends. But nearly every artist in the book has a relationship with me by way of previous projects or a social tie. Also, because I had once worked for a lifestyle magazine called, Tokion, I was able to call upon friends I had made from the ’90s, before they were rockstar photographers, illustrators, fine artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and much more. continued…
The London office of ad agency JWT is staging an exhibition of animated GIFs by some of the leading artists in the field who will be talking about their work at an event on September 11
The show, called Loop, will feature work from an international selection of artists (including Paolo Ceric, work shown top, and Robin Davey, work shown above), all of whom exploit the limitations of the animated GIFs to great effect. Their work will be presented as framed still images which visitors can bring to life using the Blippar augmented reality smartphone app. In fact, Blippar will work on the images on this blog post – just download it here and point your phone’s camera at the images on screen.
The show was put together by JWT creative Yoni Alter. “There’s some amazing talents creating GIFs on Tumblr and I thought that work deserves to be seen by everyone, besides it’ll be cool to get the GIFs out of the web into the real world,” he says. “But how do you exhibit GIFs in a gallery if you don’t have many screens? We worked on some projects with Blippar before and thought it would be good for that.”
“What I like about these GIFs is how they get the most out of the limiting format,” he says of the selection. “The repeating sequence in each GIF lasts for around one second but you can watch it for hours: One constant and hypnotising action.”
CR readers can attend an evening event at JWT in London on September 11 when several of the artists will be talking about their work. All you have to do is Blipp this invitation and follow the instructions to RSVP
Psychologists have studied vandalism for years and found that boredom, peer pressure and revenge are often the cause. But it’s often overlooked that it’s also kinda fun! Just ask Banksy! This picture frame concept, Vadalijst, allows you to insert your favorite photos and vandalize them by doodling silly things with a whiteboard marker. Mustaches, monocles, capes and more… the options are endless!
A blissful August weekend brought an attentively curated line-up of sights and sounds, to a glorious northern location, for the arty, musical haven of Beacons festival. With an atmosphere bursting with positive vibes and creative passion, it soon became clear that Beacons was the type of place where you are just as likely to have a chat with a stranger about the who’s who of 2013 need-to-know bands as you are about the what’s what of the latest and greatest design studios.
With the rise of the independent festival scene, and boutique festivals evolving and diversifying to incorporate an increasingly varied bill of creative acts, more festivals are also beginning to place emphasis on a sharper arts programme running alongside the music. Just three years in, with a washout first attempt after severe flooding, Beacons is already starting to establish itself as a frontrunner on the small festival circuit, with an impressive, eclectic bill of art and music, curated with several fingers to the pulse of local, national and international talent.
The compact site on Heslaker Farm, near Skipton in the beautiful rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales, attracted local creative folk and hipster city types alike. And for four predominantly sunny days, Beacons offered a dreamy, arty alternative festival experience to the mainstream branded big guns on offer the same weekend.
With an arts programme that combined artists and organisations from Yorkshire and beyond, The Space Between was home to a variety of projects and creatives, with films, performance, exhibition space, workshops, demos, talks, and design focused stands, along with other attractions and installations around the festival site.
A enticing selection of handmade products from Yorkshire based artists – including screenprinted posters and cards, bespoke t-shirts and illustrated badges – were on offer at The Pop Up Box (below), a retail project developed by Leeds based creative agency Temp Studio. The project stems from an earlier venture, Retail Ready People, a pop-up creative retail space in Leeds city centre, offering volunteers a chance to ‘redesign their high street’, with a training programme helping develop skills in marketing, retail design and visual merchandising.
The project, a partnership with charities vInspired, Retail Trust and The Empty Shops Network, mixed work from young designers and artists based in Yorkshire with more established local designers, acting both as a shop and social space, with a café and performances from local bands.
The Pop Up Box built on this idea, with a giant handmade wooden box housing projects from young local designers, providing access for emerging brands to sell in a physical space, rather than just online. Beacons was the first stop for the box, and all the profits – after designers have their cut on a sale or return basis – will go into the next space.
As we see a growth in similar projects in Leeds and other cities, despite the need to engage creatives and communities outside of a city’s cultural quarters and in more rural regions, supporting independent retailers and actively encouraging regeneration through creative partnerships in inner city areas still remains integral to projects such as these.
‘We’re still fighting against too much empty space, sky-high rents and the dominance of the usual big retail players,’ says Isla Brown, director of Temp Studio. ‘We just want to help both young people and young designers not to have to knock doors down to get their products noticed and into customers hands.’ Through this portable project, work can be trialled with new audiences and reach a wider market, whilst hopefully sparking some discussion over the temporal nature of many creative spaces.
New for this year, Dawson’s Arthash House, was a space for festival goers to kick back and enjoy independent films, digital art and animation, along with work from local designers and crafts people such as Tony Wright (above), from Oldfield Press, a letterpress workhop based at Altered Egos gallery in Haworth. The stand offered a chance to press your own Beacons poster from a set of woodcut blocks, including a pointing finger dating back more than one hundred years, alongside letterpress prints from local artists.
Wright, (incidentally also Terrorvision’s frontman), had turned his hand from painting to printing, aiming to create work that was still individual and handmade, but ‘easier to let go of’, creating posters and other commissions from greetings cards to labels for chilli sauce. He has also experimented with less conventional letterpress techniques, including creating prints by etching designs onto vinyl records and running them through a mangle.
Having also been involved in a pop-up creative space in Skipton – Derdlab Press, a traditional Victorian printshop and exhibition – the work stands testament to a growing popularity in ‘hands-on art’, as Wright calls it, as despite a demand for cheap, fast, mass-produced print, networks of craft-led design is finding support from local communities, councils and charities.
From woodcut printing to wood carved portaiture with Kyle Bean (below) in the Things to Make and Do Tent, with a drop-in workshop using reclaimed wood to create portraits of icons linking to the festival theme, ‘Visions of the Future’. Bean’s imaginative work as an artist and designer, with clients including Selfridges and the Design Museum, often reappropriates everyday materials and rethinks handcrafted techniques. The portraits were originally a commission for Wallpaper*, when Bean was approached by the magazine and asked to illustrate the contributors for the Handmade issue.
To create the portraits, a black and white contrast image of the face is printed onto carbon paper and traced onto reclaimed wood, and highlights are then carved out with varying sizes of chisels and knives. Carving into the dark weathered surface to reveal light fresh wood underneath creates a stencilled, contrast effect from a distance, with lots of interesting twists and scratches close up. Inviting festival goers to ‘take a tactile approach to making the portraits’, Bean’s alternative illustration workshop gave participants a taster of his inventive handcrafted techniques.
A collective of zine makers from Yorkshire, Loosely Bound, brought zine making workshops to Beacons, sharing techniques on how to create various styles of the self-published books/pamphlets, and recording memories of the festival. The collective are supported by Fabric, a charitable organisation for artistic development in Bradford and the surrounding areas, where the group originally met at an artist networking dinner event. Coming together to share, swap and learn from each other, the group both create new collaborative zines and organise events and workshops to engage a wider audience of people in zine making.
Their name highlights the diversity of zines that members produce, from perzines (personal zines), to photography led, graphic art inspired, written or drawn, with both lo-fi and handmade methods and digital online zines, and covering a huge range of subjects. Take a look at the video below of the workshop in action …
Other attractions and creative activities included DIY t-shirt screen-printing in the tearoom, a series of films including shorts from Aesthetica magazine’s short film festival, and projection bombing across the site with animation and videos from local, national and international artists. Featured in several locations, 12 Months of Neon Love by Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater, a sequence of lyrical statements from well-known songs recreated in red neon signage, accented the festival with a nod towards amalgamating the artistic and musical elements.
The support for small arts organisations and emerging businesses, from festivals such as Beacons, is acknowledged by those involved as a significant opportunity to engage people in projects that they may not otherwise have contact with, and build sustainable networks, whilst providing exposure for creative projects in environments that test the boundaries of products and practices beyond online shops and traditional workshops and studios.
Although the arts field may be in its infancy aesthetically, and could perhaps do with a rethink in terms of location – currently situated away from the main arena, to one end of the campsite – Beacons is off to an impressive start when it comes to programming a more progressive and design-focused bill of creative projects and arts attractions, with unfamiliar forms of visual communication, process-led work and digital arts, rather than simply falling back on more traditional festival crafts.
The interest in the arts side of the festival was strong, and with the incredibly friendly vibe, chatting with various festival goers, amongst the indie-electro buzz band fans, underground music lovers and beatheads, there was a substantial rep from arty types, designers, directors and other creative professionals. In the temporary environment of a festival such as Beacons, those attending are often looking for an experience of escapism that is more than just a party, and the demand for a different type of arts programme like this is growing. The arts bill no longer acts merely as a sideshow to the main musical event, but with considered arts partnerships and well curated work, festivals such as Beacons will continue to flourish into cultural hotbeds of creative energy.
Armed with bubbles, ice, and Sexy Sex Man, Jamie Isenstein emerged triumphant in Creative Time’s artist sandcastle competition, held earlier this month in Far Rockaway, Queens and judged by an esteemed panel that included Shelley Fox Aarons, Waris Ahluwalia, and Klaus Biesenbach. Isenstein’s “Disappearing Sculptures,” which positioned a live saxophonic nod to the world’s favorite careless whisperer and other ephemeral delights (bubbles, ice) atop three plinths of sand, bested the creations of competing artists such as David Brooks, Sebastian Errazuriz, Ghost of a Dream (Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom), and Natalie Jeremijenko to take home a “gold” shovel and $500. Rounding out the top three were Esperanza Mayobre, who hoisted the silver shovel for her sculpted raft (an oblique commentary on immigration), while Duke Riley bagged bronze for a replica of a White Castle drive-through that may have made it to the top of the list by virtue of the free White Castle burgers provided to hungry judges. continued…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
The unlikely gang of Johannes Vermeer, an inventor named Tim Jenison, and the magical double act of Penn & Teller got critics (and everyone else) buzzing at the recently wrapped 
A temporary store for stuff designed to help users evade detection? Such is the lowdown pop-up now operating at New York’s 
4. Tell us about your current show, “
It’s that time of year again, when even those who haven’t stepped inside a classroom for decades feel the unbearable urge to stock up on school supplies. Break out that fresh box of Crayolas—or Prismacolors or Copics—for 
