Hasta La Ideas

Collages of cauliflower sunsets, horse gibberish and bikini babes

Piecing together scenes from dreams and reruns of Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone, Welsh collage and mixed-media artist Laura Redburn creates vibrant vignettes on paper under the moniker Cardboard Cities. Her portfolio flows like a nostalgic scrapbook tinted with just the slightest hint of patina, but pierced with bright colors to enhance the otherworldly scenes.

Part of the appeal of collage work lies in its reconfiguration of the banal, and Redburn’s process speaks to her ability to shift reality into something a bit more magical. “Often when I’m watching something,” she says, “I have trouble focusing on what’s happening because I’m so distracted by the scenery, or the colors in the shot, or just the way the shot has been composed.” As a result, we’re introduced to aerial cityscapes overlaid with geometric patterns, sunbathers with fried-egg heads, poshly dressed partygoers watching a cauliflower sunset over a mountain range, lavender horses rolled out in rows and chopped-up text spelling out an alien abduction.

Cardboard Cities prints are available online from $18. To see more of Redburn’s work and follow her blog, visit her website.

Our interview with the artist about sand-blasted books, ethereal paintings and a transcendental point of view

Examining evolution through the dual lens of spirituality and science, Montreal-based book sculptor Guy Laramée creates miniature landscapes from antiquated paperbacks. Drawing upon over three decades of experience as an interdisciplinary artist (including a start as a music composer) and an education in anthropology, Laramée carves out an existentialist parallel between the erosion of geography and the ephemeral nature of the printed word.

Laramée also evokes notes of nostalgia and the passing of time with his paintings of clouds and fog. A self-professed anachronist, Laramée takes inspirational cues from the age of Romanticism and the transcendentalism of Zen, exploring “not only what we think, but that we think.” Laramée’s distinct, conceptual medium and thematic study of change has involved him in such contemplative projects as the “Otherworldly” exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design and an impromptu collaboration with WIRED UK.

We caught up with Laramée during his recent exhibition, “Attacher les roches aux nuages” or “Tying Rocks to Clouds”, at Expression: Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte in Quebec, to learn more about his process and philosophy.

What inspired the ideas for your book sculptures and what is the process that is involved in creating them?

The bookwork came in the alignment of three things: a casual discovery, my undertaking of an MA in anthropology and the building of La Grande Bibliothèque du Québec. The undertaking of this grand library fascinated me because at that time (2000) I thought that the myth of the encyclopedia—having all of humanity’s knowledge at the same place—was long dead. I was, myself, going back to school to make sense of 15 years of professional practice and was, once more, confronted with my love/hate relationship with words. Then came this accident, so to speak. I was working in a metal shop, having received a commission for a theater set. In a corner of the shop was a sandblaster cabinet. Suddenly, I had the stupid idea of putting a book in there. And that was it. Within seconds, the whole project unfolded.

Please tell us a bit about your collaboration with Wired UK and creation of the Black Tides project.

Tom Cheshire, one of the associate editors of WIRED, wrote me one day, saying that he loved my work and inquiring about my future projects. Off the top of my head and half jokingly, I told him that I had the idea of doing a piece with a pile of their magazines (that was not true). He picked up on the idea and suddenly, a pile of magazines was being shipped to my studio. I had had a lot of offers for commissions—all involving my work with books—and I refused them all because they all made me so sad. People were trying to use my work to fit their agendas but the collaboration with WIRED truly inspired me because it fit perfectly with a project I had on my bench for a while, and for which I had found no outlet. The Great Black Tides project is the continuation of The Great Wall project. It gives flesh to a short story written in the mode of an archeology of the future.

The first piece that came out of this project is WIRELAND. It is both ironic and beyond irony. It is ironic that a high-tech magazine would include such a low-tech work in their pages—and foremost a type of work that looks so critically at the ideologies of progress. And it is beyond irony even, because the piece is beautiful. It is beautiful for mysterious reasons but I like to think that the way Tom Cheshire trusted me was a big factor in the success of the enterprise. So if there is a message in all this, I would like to think that it is this: never stop relating to people who defend worldviews, which seem to contradict yours. There is a common factor beyond all points of view.

In addition to your sculptures, you also paint. Please tell us a bit about your painting process and what inspires your fog series.

The 19th century painter and emblematic figure of Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, said, “The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.” That sums it up all very nicely. What is blurred and foggy attracts your eye because you want to know what is behind that veil. It is a dynamic prop to set you in motion.

Your work frequently explores themes of the ephemeral, surreal and nostalgic. What draws you to these themes and influences them?

The Great Nostalgia is my main resource. It is not nostalgia about a lost golden age (which never existed). It is the nostalgia, here and now, of the missing half. We live between two contradictory and simultaneous worldviews: the participant and the observer. I work along the thesis that all of humanity’s joy and sorrow come out of this basic schism, something most of the great religions (Buddhism, Sufism, etc.) evoke abundantly.

My work is existential. It may depict landscapes that inspire serenity, but this is the serenity that you arrive at after traversing life crisis. You can paint a flower as a hobby, but you can also paint a flower as you come back from war. The same flower, apparently, but not really the same.

Could you please share your thoughts on the theme of the Guan Yin project and how it manifested in the exhibited pieces?

Originally the project was a commission for a local biennale here in Quebec, an event that celebrates linen. The theme of that biennale was “Touch”. I started with used rags, the ones that are used by mechanics and that are called “wipers”. I started by sowing them together without really knowing what I was doing. I was attracted to the different shades of these rags. They are all of a different grey, due to the numerous exposures to grease and the subsequent washings but meanwhile, my mother died. I was with her when she gave her last breath. Needless to say, that gave the project a totally different color.

So, I decided that this project would help me pass through the mourning of this loss. I decided against all reason—you don’t do that in contemporary art— that I would carve a statue of Guan Yin, the Chinese name for the Bodhisattva of compassion in Buddhist lore. It took me four months. I had never carved a statue in wood. Finally, the statue came out of a syncretic version of the original. It is still faithful to one of the avatars of these icons but there is a bit of the Virgin Mary in there. Then, I built an altar over the statue and put the altar on this 16×16 feet tablecloth made of 500 used rags. The piece was first shown in an historic Catholic church which was almost a statement about the possibility of an inter-faith dialogue—even if that was far from my concern at the time when I put it up there. To me, these rags, with the hands of these women over them, became the metaphor of our human condition. As a Japanese proverb says, “The best words are the ones you did not say.”

“Attacher les roches aux nuages” will run through 12 August 2012 at the Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte.

Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte

495, Avenue Saint-Simon

Saint-Hyacinthe (Quebec), J2S 5C3

Diesel fuel, tobacco, damp dirt and pine tree perfume from Portland, OR

Perfumer Heather Sielaff hand-blends idiosyncratic, mostly masculine scents for her label OLO Fragrance in her apartment in north Portland. “I’m not really girly,” she admits, and her perfumes tend to be intriguing rather than sweetly attractive. For example, Forêt’s notes of pine and vetiver recall the scent of earth and damp northwestern trees, while Victory Wolf’s birch tar, cedar and tobacco evoke nights spent camping beside an open fire.

Sielaff recently had a commission to create the smell of diesel fuel, which succeeded but had some unexpected consequences: “[The client] turned out to be allergic,” she says.

“Years of practical use allowed me to get to know the individual essential oils quite intimately,” says Sielaff, who trained as a neuromuscular therapist and studied aromatherapy on the side. “The thought finally occurred to me that making perfume would give me the opportunity to utilize my knowledge in a more creative way. It was initially just a hobby and I’m still a little surprised OLO took off the way it did,” she says.

Undoubtedly one of the most significant elements to OLO’s appeal is Sielaff’s sense of humor. Diesel-based perfumes aren’t the only unconventional product that she’s attempted—the limited edition Make Deux room spray—interpret the pun in order to deduce its intended usage—asks the would-be customer, with tongue firmly in cheek, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a smell?”

Sielaff’s intimate knowledge of scents keeps her perfumes multi-layered, personal and complex. Many of her projects stay local and never make it out of Portland.”Some perfumes are limited edition or created for special events,” she says. One such side project was a fragrance created for the Portland-based band YACHT, called Shangri-La, that blends more than a half-dozen scents into one moody, floral concoction. She also created a limited edition art bottle and box series with Portland glass artist Andy Paiko and Portland woodworker Jason Rens.

OLO fragrances are available online or at selected retailers. For more information on Sielaff’s upcoming projects, check her blog.

Shark teeth and pheasant feathers in work by a UK artist

50-million-year-old shark teeth and thousands of turkey, pheasant and coque feathers are just a few of the materials comprising the work of UK artist Louise Greenfield. “I’ve always been into making and designing things. Even when I was a little girl I was creating little outfits and packaging boxes. I loved the construction, pattern and color elements equally and was occupied for hours as a child,” laughs Greenfied in her North London studio. “I’d drive my maths teachers crazy day-dreaming about things I could make!”

This love affair with construction and design led London-born Greenfield to complete a 1st Class BA (Hons.) in Applied Art before being offered a chance to work with the jewelry team at Vivienne Westwood. “I’d always admired the incredible theatrical, flamboyant nature of her work,” says Greenfield. During her time there she felt fortunate to work with Wendy Ramshaw, CBE, the queen of British jewelry design. Inspired by what she calls the “execution and finish on her work which is always so incredibly precise and intricate,” Greenfield soaked up everything she could learn about materials—”be it precious metals, jewels, plastics, leather and fabrics”—and used the results to create large-scale installations as well as jewelry and art.

In 2010, Greenfield launched her own range, Targets—intricate and highly detailed wall art utilizing hundreds of pheasant, coque, turkey feathers—at London’s Origin and 100% Design festivals. The positive feedback led to global editorial coverage and the opportunity to collaborate with some of the UK’s top interior designers.

The following year, while visiting New York, Greenfield stumbled upon a 50-million-year-old shark’s tooth, an encounter that eventually led to her latest animal-inspired collection, Dancing Teeth. “I found the my first tooth at an amazing shop called Evolution, an artist’s treasure trove full of preserved butterflies, beetles, snake skeletons and spiders. I found it fascinating to imagine the history behind these items that were so old. The tooth inspired this alternative fairy-tale narrative; I simply wanted to make playful, bright, fresh objects with a static energy,” she says.

Attention to detail and an obsession with structure are at the core of everything Greenfield creates, resulting in breathtaking quality. For Targets and Flight, Greenfield first decides on colors and types of feather before measuring and drawing out the design onto blank canvas. Next, each feather is positioned onto steel pins and Greenfield drills into the board to affix them. “I guess the hardest part is making sure the size, color and patternation on the feathers works with the structural shape,” she explains. “When I’m producing a new piece, it’s very much about working with the design as the shape evolves so timescales vary hugely. Yes, it can be frustrating but also quite therapeutic too!” In Dancing Teeth—a collection Greenfield is currently evolving—each tooth is individually cast before being carefully built into the sculpture.

Despite the effort involved, Greenfield is overwhelmingly positive about her future. “When you’re working for yourself, the possibilities are endless and I think ultimately you get out what you put in. It’s exciting not knowing what’s coming next or what the next commission will involve. There’s nothing better than doing something you love and I’m excited to be indulging in my own creativity.”

Blast off with Tom Sachs’ impressively detailed NASA-inspired mission

Most artists are obsessed—their fixation serving as a driving force for creative action—but Tom Sachs takes his to new heights with his interest in space exploration. His newly launched NYC exhibition, “Space Program: Mars“, is a love letter to NASA in his signature bricolage style, and not one detail of the mission’s extensive flight plan has been spared the Tom Sachs treatment. From a golf cart turned into a Mars Excursion Roving Vehicle (MERV) to the “interlocking system of systems” comprising the Landing Excursion Module (LEM), Sachs has created a charmingly kitschy and impressively thorough rendition of a mission to Mars.

Opening night visitors to Sachs’ massive tongue-in-cheek Park Avenue Armory installation sipped on “Vader Piss” and “Astronaut Sunrise” cocktails as they made their way from an upgraded Mission Control (stocked with Stoli vodka and an “expanded musical selection”) at the entrance to the Indoctrination Station on the opposite end of the 55,000-square-foot space.

Berms made from plywood—one of Sachs’ favorite materials—make up the terrain of the Mars Yard, where astronauts secure samples from Mars’ surface in a process called “The Dig”. Using discarded objects like a boombox, solar cells, an umbrella, a broom and more, Sachs created a set of tools to help with the scientific analysis, which include a Phonkey, an Indoctrination Fridge, a MILF Fridge, a Floor Raper, The Sun, a poppy-producing Biolab, a Hand Tool Carrier (HTC) and the MERV.

Sachs focuses on a seemingly insane number of details with ingenuity to match, simultaneously proving his prowess as both a leading contemporary artist and NASA expert. The world he has created at the Armory is one that children will relish in exploring, and adults will wish they had had as a learning tool while growing up. While his Mars exhibition presents space travel in an easily digestible and ultra entertaining form, his intention is more serious and far-reaching. The project’s official description explains that with the end of the space shuttle program last year, Sachs aims to provoke “reflection on the haves and have-nots, utopian follies and dystopian realities, while asking barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation”.

Sachs and his 13-person team will be in residency during the month-long exhibition giving artist talks and demonstrations. While the show is undoubtedly one to see in person, those outside of NYC (or who missed the 2007 “Space Program” show at the Gagosian in LA) can still get in on the action—200 Space Program Zines are available in the online gift shop, and fans can pick up his extensive book (to which Buzz Aldrin contributed) or wear one of the items from Sachs’ capsule collection that he developed with Nike.

“Space Program: Mars” runs through 17 June 2012 at the Park Avenue Armory.