Hasta La Ideas

Images and Reporting by Barbara Eldredge

The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show is a trade-only event and we were lucky enough to be able to attend and cover some of the newest design innovations from the category. Here’s a quick photo tour of some of the trends, ideas and innovations from 2012 (and don’t miss the timelapse of the show at the end!)

MEDIA DAY AT THE RANGE

The day before the SHOT Show opens its doors, Media Day at the Range provides a preview for that year’s best new products while giving members of the press an opportunity to shoot and test the best new products for the season.

Charter Arms Chic Lady – Several smaller handguns were released onto the market this year including this little revolver made by Charter Arms. Marketed specifically towards women, the “Chic Lady” could easily be slipped into a purse. However, I found the double-action trigger pull to be a little difficult and the recoil more powerful than expected. I question how many casual gun users would train with it to the degree it would take to become comfortable wielding such a gun. Cuteness isn’t everything.

Gatling Gun – An American invention, the Gatling Gun was the first successfully produced machine gun. It is a weapon that transformed the idea of automated mass production into automated mass killing. At the end of the 19th century, Gatlings were most often used to quell opposition to colonial expansion. This replica was brought to the SHOT Show by Colt as a promotional tool and was so popular they ran out of ammunition half way through the Media Day at the Range.

Graphic Gun Tattoo – The tattoos of this firearms company art director caught my eye.

Beretta Rifles – The middle firearm shown here has a rifle stock made of differently colored wood laminate that has been cut to emphasize contour. Its aesthetic is a long way from the stock of the military-esque injection-molded number on the front of the rack.

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Yesterday saw the opening of Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design, the Museum of Arts and Design’s latest exhibition in their ongoing examination of materials and process. As its title suggests, all of the works are composed of materials that are overlooked or otherwise ignored, if not eliminated altogether—unsavory scourges of sanitation that accrue over time, infinitesimal residues man-made and otherwise—dirt, dust, soot, ash, smoke and sand.

James Croak – The Persistence of Modernism

The smallest units of detritus have been gathered, organized and ultimately mastered in some two dozen artworks on display on the fifth floor of the museum. Chief Curator David McFadden noted that he’d initially expected to include works by a scant half dozen artists—sculptor James Croak and Zhang Huan, both of whom are in the show, came to mind—though the list eventually ballooned to 50 candidates, half of which are included in the exhibition. Indeed, the scope of the exhibition is more diverse than it is homogenous, featuring works in two dimensions and three, from representational (Vik Muniz) to abstract (Jim Denevan), with varying degrees of conceptual content behind the disparate approaches to visual execution.

Glithero – Burn Burn Burn

The ineluctable meaning of particulate matter—that from which we come and to which we will return, in so many words—was especially prominent in a few ephemeral works that are presented as photo or video documentation par excellence. Fuses burn with fearlessly self-destructive determination and tides rise with unsentimental predictability, leaving unmistakable scars (Glithero’s Burn Burn Burn, above) or effacing the work entirely (Andy Goldsworthy’s Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide, below)

Andy Goldsworthy – Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide

Cai Guo-Qiang – Black Ceremony

Nevertheless, the works in the exhibition are predominantly representational—even Cai Guo-Qiang’s Black Ceremony culminates with (spoiler alert) a puff of rainbow—and, in a couple cases, the artist is literally using dirt (or dust, ash, etc.) as a medium, i.e. for drawing or sculpture.

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Two exhibitions explore a legendary New York artist’s fight for linguistic liberation

The character of Rammellzee is one of the most compelling to emerge from the NYC street culture scene of the late 1970s and ’80s. The Queens native began his career tagging the side of A train cars in his home borough and later moved into the budding hip-hop scene, where he emerged as an influential lyricist. Rammellzee’s obsession with futurism and linguistics led him to establish the eponymous persona, at times referred to as “The Equation.” A duo of upcoming exhibitions at the MoMA and The Suzanne Geiss Company explore the work of the reclusive artist, his manifestos and the science fiction-influenced culture that he embodied.

Created over the course of 14 years, “The Letter Racers” sculptures are on view in NYC for the first time. They represent the artist’s manifestos “Iconoclast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism,” two works written in Rammellzee’s idiosyncratic language. The written and visual works explore the slavery and corruption of language and its liberation through the artist’s own work.

The complex theory behind “The Letter Racers” has to do with the freedom of language from its historical fetters. As Rammellzee writes, “In the 14th century the monks ornamented and illustrated the manuscripts of letters. In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation know as THE RAMMELLZEE.”

Playing with metaphysical concepts in the physical world, Rammellzee used found objects from the city streets to create the sculptures. A collection of perfume caps, spray can triggers and other small detritus comprise 52 “letter racers,” armed for linguistic and galactic warfare. Witnessing the series as a whole lends insight into the man behind Rammellzee’s self-made masks as well as the impact of street culture on the American dialect.

Two years after his premature death, The Suzanne Geiss Company is exhibiting “Rammellzee: The Equation, The Letter Racers” from 8 March to 21 April 2012. At the same time, the MoMA will present a few pieces from “The Letter Racers” as part of the “Print/Out” exhibition starting 19 February 2012.

The French photographer Lise Sarfati’s latest series explores feminine identity in everyday life

French photographer Lise Sarfati‘s new series “She” captures a striking sense of melancholy in intense portraits shot over a span of four years between 2005 and 2009. To explore the ideas of duplicity and identity, the body of work focuses on four women in an American family, with sisters Sloane and Sasha at the center, styled in wigs and heavy makeup that often make it hard to tell them apart.

She opens today at London’s Brancolini Grimaldi gallery. As a part-time U.S. resident since 2003, Sarfati shot the series in four locations across California and Arizona. When it comes to choosing her subjects, Safarti says, “I like doubles, like mothers and daughters, or sisters or reflections. This represents my research into women’s identity… I am interested in fixing that instability.”

Beyond exploring the female persona, the series coaxes the viewer to consider social norms by juxtaposing the subjects’ tattoos and severe makeup with the banality of everyday life in America. Despite the seemingly bland settings, the images emanate with mystery, offering a vaguely haunting reminder that we never know what those around us are up to as we go about our own days.

All images courtesy of Brancolini Grimaldi. See more in the slideshow below.

She

3 February – 17 March 2012

Brancolini Grimaldi

43-44 Albemarle Street

London W1S 4JJ

Milton Glaser’s latest book shows adaptation as a mechanism for learning

Over the past five years, the highly influential graphic designer Milton Glaser has designed rugs, sculptures, posters and interior spaces for a variety of independent projects. In the forthcoming book based on the 2010 AIGA exhibition of the same name, “In Search Of The Miraculous or One Thing Leads To Another“, Glaser shows how the concepts for these works relate to each other as a continuous evolution of ideas.

Glaser began studying Kundalini yoga in the 1960s from a spiritual leader named Rudi, who believed that your consciousness grows by layering past lives—whether that was the past life of yesterday or long ago. The cover art Glaser did for Rudi’s book, “Spiritual Cannibalism“, not only opens this book, but the guru’s teachings serve as a metaphor for the natural progression of Glaser’s work into new designs born from past ideas.

As design consultant Ralph Caplan explains in the foreword, you can see traces of the book jacket design for “Spiritual Cannibalism” in the identity of Glaser’s graphic design for NYC’s Tibet-focused Rubin Museum of Art in 2004. Glaser was asked to create interior works, including a series of patterned silkscreen prints and a massive gilded copper wall panel inspired by his drawings of Tibetan clouds. Glaser explains in the book that these projects inspired a new interest in pattern design—from there, the unexpected opportunity to make rugs based on the patterns gave new purpose to the work he was doing, eventually giving rise to several new poster designs, and an important study on light and dark.

Another example of Glaser’s penchant for perpetual revision lies in his series of Shakespeare portraits created for the Theater for a New Audience. The various looks Glaser gives the legendary bard not only demonstrate his ability to see something from several different perspectives, but they also served as inspiration for the theater’s annual award, which is an iridescent bust sprayed with automotive paint that changes color depending on how you’re looking at it.

Glaser was once again inspired to experiment with patterns and portraits, which led him to develop a new series in which he explores the point where the image becomes visible through the pattern, like a more thoughtful and visually compelling version of Magic Eye posters.

In an interview with Anna Carnick for her book “Design Voices“, Glaser neatly explains his process of refining and reflection. “The work itself becomes a mechanism for learning,” he says. “And that is the most highly desirable aspect of design or anything else for that matter.”

Glaser will be at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena for a discussion and book signing 16 February 2012. Pick up a copy there or pre-order from Amazon for $20.