Hasta La Ideas

Regular readers of CR might recall the Song Map we featured on the Hi-Res page our January 2012 issue and which was later adapted to create the sleeve for St Etienne’s recent album. Now its creator, Dorothy, has created a Film Map, on which every street and feature is from a film title…

Loosely based on a vintage Los Angeles street map, Film Map features over 900 film titles including, as you can see, Jurassic Park, Lake Placid, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Temple of Doom and The Two Towers. And that’s just in one tiny section of the map.

“It has its own Hollywood Boulevard and includes districts dedicated to Hitchcock and cult British horror,” says Dorothy’s Ali Johnson. “Like most cities, it even has its own red light district,” she adds. An A-Z key along the base of the map lists all the films featured along with director names and release dates.

Open edition prints of the Film Map cost £25 plus postage and packaging. A limited edition signed and stamped print is also available for £100 plus p+p. Both are available (as is Dorothy’s Song Map) from wearedorothy.com/shop.

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The July issue of Creative Review features a piece exploring the past and future of the dingbat. Plus a look at the potential of paper electronics and printed apps, how a new generation of documentary filmmakers is making use of the web, current logo trends, a review of MoMA New York’s group show on art and type, thoughts on how design may help save Greece and much more. Also, in Monograph this month we showcase a host of rejected design work put together by two Kingston students.

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Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has made these small solar-powered lamps for people who have limited access to reliable energy – almost a quarter of the world’s population (+ movie).

Little Sun can produce five hours of light when charged in the sun for five hours.

Above image is by Little Sun

Eliasson hopes to bring light to people in remote locations and reduce their reliance on hazardous kerosene lanterns.

Above image is by Merklit Mersha

The artist, who is best known for his Weather Project installation at Tate Modern in 2003, worked with solar engineer Frederik Ottesen on the project.

Above image is by Michael Tsegaye

The Little Sun lamps will also be used at a series of ‘Tate Blackouts’ at the Tate Modern gallery in London this summer, where visitors will be invited to look at works of art in the dark.

Above image is by Mihret Kebede

Tate Blackouts will take place between 10pm and midnight on 28 July, 4 August, 11 August and 18 August. The events are free with the purchase of a Little Sun.

Above image is by Tomas Gislason

The gallery will also host an exhibition about the Little Sun project from 28 July to 23 September.

Above image is by Andy Paradise

The movies are by Tomas Gislason.

Above image is by Andy Paradise

See all our stories about Olafur Eliasson »
See all our stories on green technology »

Here’s some more information from Tate Modern:

As part of Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun at Tate Modern, to be launched on 28 July 2012, visitors will be invited to look at works of art in the dark using only the light of Eliasson’s Little Sun solar-powered lamps. The presentation at Tate Modern has been developed for the London 2012 Festival that runs across the UK until 9 September 2012.

Olafur Eliasson is probably best-known for his highly successful The weather project (2003), part of the Unilever Series in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which drew over 2 million visitors during its five-month installation.

The artist has developed the Little Sun solar-powered lamp with the engineer Frederik Ottesen to focus attention on the power of solar light to improve lives. Around 1.6 billion people worldwide live without access to mains electricity. Many of them rely on kerosene lanterns for lighting, which is both expensive and a health hazard. Little Sun brings light to people in off-grid locations, enabling them to work, reduce household expenses and improve the quality of life.

Starting on 28 July, people will be invited to participate in Tate Blackouts on Saturday nights after ordinary museum hours. For two hours, the lights will go off in the former power station and visitors can look at the works of art in the suite of galleries devoted to Tate Modern’s Surrealist collection using only the light of Little Sun lamps. This echoes the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galérie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where Man Ray (as ‘Master of Light’) supplied the visitors with torches to explore the labyrinthine galleries.

Beyond the Tate Blackout events, Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun will feature in a space on the third floor of the gallery from 28 July to 23 September, where visitors can learn about solar power, the global energy challenge, light and its importance in and for life. It will also include a special set-up for people to do light graffiti using the Little Sun and offer the opportunity to buy a lamp for £16.50 (€22). In off-grid areas the price will be reduced to about half that amount.

Little Sun produces 5 hours of light when it is charged in the sun for 5 hours. It facilitates the creation of small businesses to sell the lamp and, by concentrating profits at the point of need, it aims to promote economic growth in regions of the world where electricity is not available, reliable, affordable, or sustainable. Little Sun is light for studying, sharing, cooking, and earning. It is light for life.

Little Sun events in September will include a seminar and the premiere of 16 short films on light, life, and Little Sun by filmmakers from off-grid areas around the world.

Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun
Tate Modern
28 July – 23 September 2012

Tate Blackouts will take place on the following dates from 22.00 to Midnight:

28 July
4 August
11 August
18 August

The events are free with the purchase of a Little Sun.

The post Little Sun by
Olafur Eliasson appeared first on Dezeen.

Photos: Martin Grant (top), Corinne Arndt Girouard (inset)

Visitors to the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, New Hampshire will no longer need to ask directions to the Hopkins Center for the Arts. They can simply scan the horizon for the rainbow that was added to the building’s eastern facade this week. The five aluminum rectangles—each measuring approximately 22 feet high and 5.5 feet wide—are the work of Ellsworth Kelly, who created “Dartmouth Panels” for the site and was present for its installation.

Dartmouth alum Leon Black (who earlier this year paid $120 million for Edvard Munch‘s “The Scream” at Sotheby’s) commissioned the wall sculpture, which will be dedicated on September 14 along with the new Black Family Visual Arts Center. Designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates, the 105,000-square-foot building will house the school’s departments of studio art, film and media studies, and the nascent digital humanities program. A plaza with a formal lawn and hardscape sculpture terrace will connect the new center with the Hopkins Center and the Hood Museum of Art. “We are actively pursuing extended loans of public sculpture, as well as commissions of significant new works for the dynamic space where the Black Family Visual Arts Center, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and the Hood Museum of Art intersect,” said Michael Taylor, director of the Hood Museum, in a statement issued earlier this year.

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The artist’s latest print series blends graphite drawing with 3D digital sculpture

Haunting curvilinear forms dominate the work of Sougwen Chung, an artist with international roots and a flair for outspoken minimalism. Her most recent series—produced as a limited-edition print run for Ghostly International—portrays four natural phenomena with subtle coloration and high contrast. The individual members of “Étude Op. 2 No.1-4” take the names “Flight”, “High Tide”, “Cocoon” and “Bloom”, and lie somewhere between representation and theory. Viewed together, they communicate a congruent narrative and aesthetic in spite of their abstract form.

“The form and composition of each piece are informed by textures and elements within an original series of graphite drawings,” Chung tells CH when asked about the process. “Elements are deconstructed and then sculpted in a 3D digital environment. The final pieces are a result of a multi-disciplinary approach to improvisation and experimentation.” Ultimately, the blend of mediums and abilities brings about sci-fi worthy, otherworldly shapes.

A departure from her previous print series for Ghostly “Étude Op. 1”, “Op. 2” rejects the minimalist, hand-drawn look for “darker palettes and more iconic motifs.” “‘Op. 1’ was deliberately austere and minimal, celebrating pure form and visual rhythm in the way only black and white images can,” Chung explains. Both series showcase Chung’s talent for visual edginess and slick dynamism—which goes a long way towards explaining her commercial successes. If Chung’s look is minimalist, then it is a minimalism in crisis, full of movement, transition and graphic energy.

“Étude Op. 2” and the earlier series “Op. 1” are available from the Ghostly online store starting at $60. See more images of the two series in our slideshow.

Attendance won’t be spotty for the Yayoi Kusama retrospective, which opens today at the Whitney Museum following a Tuesday evening fete that abounded with polka dots, disembodied tentacles, and enough red mylar balloons to send the diminutive artist herself aloft (alas, she was not in attendance). “She might be a small woman, but she’s one hell of a powerful one,” said Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg at a press preview for the exhibition, which was organized with Tate Modern and made previous stops in Madrid, Paris, and London. “This historic retrospective brings her back to the city where, as she said, ‘Kusama has become Kusama.’ Some of the most important developments in her life and work happened here.”

The Whitney installation, overseen by curator David Kiehl, unfolds chronologically over a series of rooms devoted to her distinct artistic phases, including early paintings, sculptural installations, and a group of collages from the 1970s that evoke the work of an undersea Joseph Cornell and Max Ernst on the moon. And don’t be put off by the line to spend a minute alone inside Kusama’s “Fireflies on the Water” (2002), a darkened dazzle chamber that is installed on the museum’s lobby level. While you wait, transform your favorite photos into constellations of dots or waves with the Louis Vuitton Kusama Studio app (a free iTunes download). The fashion house, a major sponsor of the Whitney exhibition, is further fueling Kusama-mania with a limited-edition range of accessories and apparel covered in the artist’s signature spots. But do avoid the pieces that mix red-and-white dots with black, lest you resemble another plucky octogenarian. “Reminds me of Minnie Mouse,” commented one shopper at the Louis Vuitton flagship on 57th Street, which earlier this week unveiled windows devoted to the work of Kusama.

(Photo at top courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio, Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro Gallery, and Gagosian Gallery; inset photo courtesy Louis Vuitton)

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