Découverte du travail de Spider Tag, un street-artist qui aime utiliser des fils pour créer des oeuvres en les tendant sur des murs. Très intéressant, ces réalisations visuelles sont à découvrir dans la suite de l’article avec une série d’images et une vidéo.
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“Take your breathing people and scram,” weren’t the words used by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games when talking to artist Olafur Eliasson about a project he’d proposed, but rejection was the basic sentiment and it seemed like a good way to start a post. After being encouraged to submit a proposal by the Committee, Eliasson requested £1 million to put together a project called “Take a Deep Breath,” which the BBC describes as an “installation would have invited people to inhale and exhale on behalf of ‘a person, a movement or a cause’ and record it on a website in a personal ‘breath bubble.’” The Committee took a look and decided that not only was the project not “particularly attractive” but also “seemed very expensive.” So, to extend our opening to this post, the organizers were essentially saying “Take your overly expensive breathing people and scram.” But again, we’re putting words into mouths. The tragedy, of course, is that this rejection, however well reasoned, means that the world may never see a functioning “personal breath bubble” unless Eliasson finds someone else with the cash to build, assemble, or however one would go about making a “personal breath bubble” in this day and age.
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A Portland collector’s antique imagery and artifacts add new depth to a Swedish workwear label’s NYC shop
The seemingly surprising collaboration between Portland’s Ampersand Gallery and Swedish workwear company Dunderdon came about in a wholly organic fashion. Les Szabo, a long-time Portland resident and the owner of Dunderdon USA, walked into Ampersand one day and simply liked the way it looked.
“We started talking about a collaboration back in October, but it wasn’t until this spring that we began to formalize what was going to happen,” says Ampersand owner Myles Haselhorst. Last week, Haselhorst traveled from Portland to install an exclusive collection of books, images and artifacts for Dunderdon’s New York outpost.
The original intent was to give customers an edited glimpse of Ampersand‘s extensive collections, as well as an excuse to linger over Dunderdon’s wares. In keeping with Dunderdon’s focus on menswear, Haselhorst used the opportunity to contemplate themes of masculinity. “We wanted to explore certain elements, historically and currently, of what it means to be a man,” said Haselhorst.
Judging from what Haselhorst has found, the fundamentals haven’t changed too radically over time. Enlarged photographs from the 1910s show men riding bicycles and wearing bandanas, similar to what might be found on any bohemian city street today. Haselhorst also draws a connection to the current obsession with the American frontier in the U.S.—seen in the profusion of heritage and workwear-inspired fashion—with vintage cowboy images. “The photographs weren’t of actual cowboys,” he explains. “They were men off the street dressed and posed in studio settings.”
Also unique to the store is a small book of antique erotic photos Haselhorst published for the collaboration, titled “Women I Never Knew No. 1”. The anonymous subjects and their actions seem startlingly contemporary, striking the fine balance between lewd and alluring that’s so expertly negotiated by many contemporary designers.
“Maybe a certain type of man collects this type of imagery,” speculates Haselhorst. “But in the end, we just wanted people to enjoy looking at it.” The installation is the first in an ongoing series of collaborations between Ampersand Gallery and Dunderdon. To check it out, visit New York’s Dunderdon store.
25 Howard Street
New York, NY
10013
The infamous French artist creates an invisible installation of his dripping logos at the newest W Hotel
To celebrate the opening of their newest property, the W Paris Opéra, W Hotels brought in the best of young European artistic talent to interpret the spirit of their city. French artist ShoboShobo created a series of characters exercising with macarons, baguettes and wine props to decorate the hotel gym, while Dutch photographer Marcel van der Vlugt reinterpreted French icons into modern portraits of Paul Gauguin, the Marquis de Sade, Marie Antoinette and Louis Daguerre on pillows in each room.
However, not all of the installations are visible to the naked eye. Guests checking in to Suite 112 at the hotel are in for a special surprise that can only be seen with UV light. French artist Zevs, brought his trademark vision to the hotel with new work that is once again exploring not what is seen, but what is left to the imagination.
For the Suite 112 installation, Zevs worked with invisible ink that he created in a laboratory in New York City, mimicking the special red pigment used by police at crime scenes. “This red reminds you of the blood of a crime scene, but it’s also the most visible color, so I like the extreme aspect between the invisibility of the ink and the extreme visibility of the color,” he says.
We caught up with the artist at the opening night party, where a man dressed as a CSI expert shone a UV light slowly over the walls to reveal patterned Louis Vuitton wallpaper with Zevs’ signature dripping logos. “With the idea to place logos into a crime scene, I think simply the idea is to continue to investigate the territory of this fashion victim project I did last year,” he says, referring to a Sao Paolo Fashion Week event in which a naked model was “murdered” by a Louis Vuitton logo and Zevs outlined her body on the street in chalk.
Zevs works with existing objects, often in the advertising world and often playing on art and crime, adding a simple twist to make a big impact on passersby. In his infamous “Visual Kidnapping” piece, he demanded ransom after cutting out a giant image of a girl from a Lavazza billboard in Berlin. The stunt ended up netting a donation of half a million euros from the brand to the contemporary Parisian art institution Palais de Tokyo.
He began his “Visual Attacks” in the 1990s, painting advertisements as though they’d been hit by a bullet. The “Electric Shadows” series explored the idea of revealing the invisible by painting temporal shadows into permanent sidewalk fixtures. His “Liquidated Logos” work trademarked his drip technique to make any logo dissolve before the viewer’s eyes.
This summer in Paris, Zevs will reinvent his “Proper Graffiti” series, a technique he perfected in France in the ’90s, in which he erases existing graffiti to reveal a new fresco on a city wall.
Zevs’ playful use of logos is not so much an anti-branding message as a hint to onlookers to reexamine how they view and interact with logos so that it’s not such a passive relationship. Each invisible spot on the wall took on a new meaning when revealed at the Paris opening, as guests began to feel like investigators discovering essential clues in a case. Zevs also painted into van der Vlugt’s photographs, creating an eery aura throughout the room.
W Paris Opéra
4 rue Meyerbeer
75009 Paris
Intimacy and illusion in a range of contemporary photography seen at the show
Representing 120 galleries from 16 countries, the spring Art Paris Art Fair offers a prime opportunity to observe the latest tendencies in the modern and contemporary art markets. This year we found particular attention paid to photography, unveiling the intriguing progress of the exploration of intimacy.
The images that stood out to us traced a progression from a series of building facades taken in 2007 to today’s more revelatory shots exposing the private lives of those that inhabit such spaces. Some artists delved even deeper into the idea of home documentation with installations set up to peep through a keyhole.
Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf has built an enclosed booth, inviting visitors to sit on the chair in front of closed doors and look into the keyhole. As part of the PHPA 2011 project (Prix photo d’hôtel photo d’auteur—Hotel photos awards), Elene Usdin displayed the sketches she shot in hotel rooms through a peephole in the door of room 18 constructed for the exhibit.
As the camera pierces a sense of intimacy with the keyhole device, the practice of portraiture heads in the opposite direction as pictures seem to zoom in on the face, often depicting the subject blurred, heavily made up or disguised.
Korean artist Byung-Hun Min is gaining fame with his gray-tone “vanishing” portraits, questioning the ephemeral process of photography as well as the silence and simplicity characteristic of his culture.
Similarly focused on disappearing landscapes and backgrounds is the politically engaged series “Hide in the City” by the Chinese photographer Liu Bolin. Bolin uses his body as a medium of expression as he blends into the environment like a chameleon.
At the Italian Fabbrica Eos Gallery, Giuseppe Mastromatteo‘s photo series “Indepensense 2012” plays on truth and distortion by featuring nude bodies unnaturally intertwined to create vignettes opposing racial and cultural norms. Ruggero Rosfer & Shaokun also shakes up tradition by positing a new universal language that Eastern and Western worlds can share, both geographically and culturally, through the arts.
In a reverse approach from explicitly showing intimacy, the landscape itself becomes an intimate subject in a magical series by photographer Markus Henttonen. His photo of decorated trees in Manhattan marks a highlight in his recent body of work exploring relations between cities and their inhabitants.
Gerard Traquandi‘s beautifully dark photos feature organic details of twisted branches, bushwoods and transparent petals like nighttime-induced hallucinations. Their magical appeal is obtained by the technique of brushing resin pigments and wax into the photo, imprinting a photosensitive sheet.
The diptych and triptych style marked another recurring theme of this show. These two- or three-panel pictures result in a panoramic view responding to each other by echoing patterns and forcing the viewer to make the effort to mentally recompose the picture. This technique is brilliantly used by American artist Stephan Crasneanscki—founder of the soundwalk project—in his thoughtful landscapes like “The Woods of Schwarzwald—Martin Heidegger”.
The 2012 World Press third prize winner Alexander Gronsky uses the diptych technique systematically in “Mental Landscapes”, an image enhanced by the dramatic dimensions of a military show in China. Another piece depicts mice spread on rocks in some misty military-occupied scenery, emphasizing contrast while using the same range of colors.
The Parisian-based La Galerie Particulière features diptych and triptych photography by David Hilliard, an artist who uses the technique to tell personal stories in the form of a diary made of sequential imagery. Also included are a series of diptychs by Anne-Lise Broyer that are reminiscent of illustrations in a book, and the Czech Republic’s Inda Gallery presentation of works by Marta Czene, whose stories flow from a similar perspective.
By using a combination of optical illusions and strategic photography, George Rousse creates graphic signs and geometric images within photographs. By playing visual games, his photos appear to feature huge colored frames and objects within the landscapes he shoots, producing a dizzying effect.
For more information about the 2102 Art Paris Art Fair including comprehensive artists and gallery lists and informative videos check Art Paris Art Fair online.
Challenging machismo through hypnotically vibrant thread installations
Growing up as a boy in Mexico, Gabriel Dawe was forbidden to explore the artistic elements of textiles and embroidery, an area thought to be reserved for women. Nevertheless, the color and intensity of Mexican culture began to appear in his artwork after moving to Montreal in 2000. Now based out of Texas, the mixed media artist has made a career out of the mind-bending thread installations that compose the “Plexus” series.
Citing artist Anish Kapoor as a major influence, Dawe creates complex, colorful and often vertigo-inducing spatial structures, which are meant to evoke the invisible forces that shape our existence—such as social norms and expectations—and to draw our attention to the invisible order amidst the chaos of life. On a much more superficial level, the installations are visually beautiful, and seem to make the intangible visible.
As he prepares for the solo show “The Density of Light” at Lot 10 in Brussels, we spoke to the artist about process, masculinity and the peculiarities of light.
My work consists of devising the arrangement of the structure I’m going to make with the thread. These installations are site-specific, which means that every new installation has to be created for that particular space. They also have to be done in the space itself, which means that I cannot create them in advance and then transport it.
The process begins with some sort of dialog with the space where the installation is going to be. Every room has particularities that offer possibilities and restrictions to what I can do. Once I decide where to put the wood structures that hold the hooks that serve as anchor points, I start to devise how and in what sequence I am going to link those anchor points, as well as what color progression I will use. It’s usually a lot of planning, so that when I get to the space I can execute my plan as seamlessly as possible.
The thread is regular sewing thread, 100% polyester, and it comes in a wide variety of colors, so I don’t do any of the dyeing myself. Usually each color is a unique long piece of thread, held in place by mere tension. Sometimes I use more than one spool of a certain color, but I just tie together the ends and continue with the installation. The color mixing really occurs in the space, a byproduct of the process. Plexus no. 9 has 5,000 meters of each color, a total of 60 kilometers, which comes to about 37 miles.
Because this work is not a studio practice and it relies on having to work in different spaces, every new installation offers the opportunity to try something new, or a different variation of something I’ve already tried. In this way, they are constantly evolving and changing. The particularities of Lot 10, (where 13 and 14 will be) allow me to revisit certain structures I’ve worked on in the past, but with a new variation that will give them a distinct look.
For Plexus no. 13, I’m doing three intersecting structures, similar to No. 6, but with three big differences: the proportions are much different; the placement of the wooden structures, which are at a different angles; and the color sequence. Plexus no. 14 will be a take on one of my very first ideas, which until now I hadn’t had a chance to try.
Very early on in the series, the idea of light became an intrinsic part of these installations. Because I use regular sewing thread on an architectural scale, the structures created are ethereal and diaphanous. I think of them as existing in a space between the material and the immaterial; or like some sort of alchemical experiment where I attempt to materialize light.
My challenge against machismo was much more obvious when I started to work with embroidery which was expressly forbidden to me as a boy. It is also very present in some of my work within the “Pain” series, where I deconstruct pieces of clothing and I cover them with pins. As my work has evolved, I’ve continued with that thought in mind, but in a more broader sense, exploring social constructs of gender and how we constantly deal with them on a day to day basis.
Gabriel Dawe’s next installation “The Density of Light” will be shown at Lot 10 Galerie in Brussels from April 12 to June 9.
Images courtesy of the artist, Kevin Todora (Plexus no. 4, no. 3), Mike Metcalfe (Plexus no. 5), and Carlos Aleman (Plexus no.12).
Lot 10 Galerie
15 rue Lanfray
1050 Brussels, BE
Fifty artists design 50 coffins for the Portland leg of a traveling art show
by Hunter Hess
Seattle-based design firm Electric Coffin will be taking their annual show Boxes of Death on the road this year for the third time. What began with 20 artists exhibiting in the cramped basement of a hotel has quickly grown into a touring collection featuring more than 50 top artists, as well as lesser-known local designers and some very talented friends.
Creator Patrick “Duffy” De Armas, who runs Electric Coffin with his partner Justin Elder, describes the inspiration for the show as coming from two seemingly unlikely sources. “When I first moved to Seattle I went to a clock show,” he says. “Everyone’s clock was different, but they were all clocks. I was just so infatuated with the idea of the obvious comparison of different art styles on the same canvas. The second inspiration was studying Kane Quaye—who is most famous for his Mercedes Benz coffins.”
The show features 50 miniature coffins from artists all over the country including pieces by wood block artist Dennis McNett and ceramics designer Charles Krafft. While each individual piece follows a common theme, the personality and taste of each artist is vibrantly apparent. De Armas explains, “The idea of using the coffin as a personalized vessel to showcase who a person was as opposed just a box made me think, ‘Why not give other artists a chance to see what a coffin means to them?'”
The growth of Boxes of Death in just two years has De Armas and Elder looking forward to the future, and with a touring show and a book to be released later this year, they have plenty to be excited about. The Portland stop opens tonight, 6 April 2012, at Nemo Design and closes the following night. If you can’t make it catch the final showing at LA’s The Holding Company on 12 April 2012.
Photography by Hunter Hess
Collaborative art revives a century-old former nursing home estate
Originally conceived as a white-glove retirement home for elderly who had lost their fortunes during the Great Depression, the once decadent Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx itself fell from grace in the 30 years since it closed its doors. The grand manor had succumbed to natural decay until local arts initiative No Longer Empty reclaimed the property, inviting 32 artists to participate in This Side of Paradise, a site-specific public art exhibition that has transformed the space and brought the building back to the community.
Spanning an entire Bronx city block, the estate’s cavernous hallways lead to a grand ballroom, mahogany-lined library and countless boarding rooms, all of which have been bequeathed to the artists as a three-dimensional canvas to do with what they please. Paintings, installations, film, sculpture and photography fill the home, encouraging guests to wander the halls and take in all the home and art have to offer.
While some artists chose to work within the site’s own physical makeup, others like Justen Ladda channel its former inhabitants. His “Like Money Like Water” installation creates a scene where Ladda’s skeletons quite literally piss their money away—a legacy that haunted many former Freedman Home residents to the end—addressing the illusion of money’s worth and the real value of life.
Two of the more unconventional works came from graffiti artists HOW and NOSM and muralist Sofia Maldonando. The honeycomb textures and giant prisms of HOW and NOSM’s “Reflections” create an otherworldly experience that really switches gears as you roam through the show. Maldonando chose the kitchen as the home’s heart, where her street-influenced art is paired with a personally prepared dish made with ingredients sourced from local food vendors to “make something for the community and make something that will last,” she says.
This Side of Paradise will run through 5 June 2012. Numerous community-focused events will also run concurrently in the space,
including La Cocina—a cooking workshop on 21 April, held in the the estate’s kitchen, which now features a mural by artist Sofia Maldonando. For more images of This Side of Paradise see the gallery below.
Lorsque 2 artistes talentueux décident de faire une collaboration, cela donne évidemment un résultat très intéressant. JR et Lui Bolin ont combiné leurs talents pour faire un collage puis une peinture du colleur français par l’artiste chinois. Un projet très réussi à découvrir dans la suite.
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David Keochkerian utilise une caméra avec une vitesse d’obturation lente pour capturer les lumières mobiles qui viennent brûlent dans le cadre. Ce procédé permet d’obtenir des visuels très réussis. Plus d’images de ce photographe français à découvrir dans la suite.
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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.
