Hasta La Ideas The Adventures of Star Wars Figurines in Nature Archives

Apr 21

Chicago Going Wall Out for Tony Smith

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If good fences make good neighbors, then just think of the possibilities where chunky steel walls are concerned. Chicagoans are about to reap the benefits, as Valerie Carberry Gallery and Wright have teamed up to present “Wall,” Tony Smith‘s monumental work of 1964. The 18-foot-long, black-painted slab goes on view May 6 at Wright and marks the the first presentation of a major work by Smith in Chicago in over 40 years. And as if that weren’t enough Wright-related excitement for one day, the auction house is hosting a May 3 reception to kick off the first annual Architecture and Design Film Festival in Chicago. At said bash, they’ll be showing artist Sarah Morris‘s Points on a Line, a stunning film (in fact, the best one we saw in 2010) in which she explores the Farnsworth House and the Glass House, Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (including a peek inside the latter architect’s Rolodex, preserved for posterity), and the role of the architect and curator. Among the 39 films to be screened at the festival itself are Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee And The Spirit Of The Rural Studio, Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight, Eye Over Prague, and Visual Acoustics, Eric Bricker‘s portrait of Julius Shulman.

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Apr 21

Good Reviews But Mixed Messages Plague LA MOCA’s ‘Art in the Street’ Exhibition, Artist ‘Space Invader’ Arrested

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Despite all of the negative press Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art received after deciding to paint over the mural it had commissioned, it appears that the street art exhibition at the center of it all has finally gotten Jeffrey Deitch, whose exhibition of actor Dennis Hopper‘s photographs last fall didn’t fare so well, his first positive reviews as the still-relatively-new head of the museum. It also landed the museum a few dozen more headaches. While the press likes the exhibition, it has also created some mixed social messages, a la “street art is beautiful and Art-with-an-A when it’s off the street, but more trouble when it’s in its native form.” The LA Times has reported that the launch of the exhibition this past weekend has created a flood of graffiti around the museum, which the MoCA has vowed to clean up. It’s also spawned several arrests of street artists and taggers, most notably, the hunt for and likely capture of French artist Space Invader, who obtained additionally notoriety after appearing in the Oscar-nominated Banksy film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. So it’s a mixed bag from all fronts. We think ArtInfo‘s headline about it all sums it up great: “To Mark Opening of ‘Art in the Street,’ MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch Pledges to Eradicate Actual Street Art.”

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Apr 20

New Museum Readies Rem Koolhaas Exhibition

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Say it with us now: “Cronocaos.” This vaguely Flinstonian term is in fact a Koolhaas-ism and the subject of an exhibition by the architect and his firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), that will open May 7 at the New Museum. Visitors will get an OMA’s-eye-view of architectural and urban preservation. “Through our respect for the past, heritage is becoming more and more the dominant metaphor for our lives today—a situation we call Cronocaos,” says Rem Koolhaas, who first presented the exhibition at the 2010 Venice Biennale. “We are trying to find what the future of our memory will look like. Our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory.” The c(h)aos part comes in the collapsing boundaries between preservation, construction, and demolition, which poses certain challenges from an exhibition design perspective. The New Museum has just the thing: a 3,600-square-foot, partially renovated, ground-floor space just down the street from its SANAA-designed HQ. The former restaurant-supply space will be visually transformed, with one side remaining “preserved” as it was while inhabited by the restaurant supply store while the the other will be minimally renovated. Displayed throughout the bifurcated space will be historic objects and photographs that trace the growth of preserved urban and natural territories along with a timeline of OMA projects that have confronted the issue of preservation. And with all this talk about memory, there will be plenty of souvenirs: each project within the OMA timeline will take the form of a postcard for visitors to peel off the wall and take home.

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Apr 20

Kuuki’s LUMIA: art/light/motion Exhibition at State Library of Queensland

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Queensland-based art, design and media studio Kuuki is currently showing Lumia: art/light/motion at the State Library of Queensland. The exhibition features a series of new media sculptures that lie squarely at the intersection of art, science and technology, a veritable menagerie of interactive critters—or, more broadly, organic forms.

Lumia addresses a broad range of biological and ecological themes, from “e. Menura supurba” (pictured at top), a robot lyrebird that learns behaviors through mimesis, to “Flower Animals” (above), which provide an abstracted real-time visualization of water temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef.

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Apr 19

The Way We See It

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Subjects-turned-photographers exhibit powerful images of the lives of women in post-earthquake Haiti

In contrast to traditional photojournalism, an upcoming exhibit about life in post-earthquake Haiti offers a powerful look inside the lives of women by putting cameras in their hands. “The Way We See It” is a collection of photographs shot by 30 Haitian women living in a devastated nation where privacy and security are nearly nonexistent. Spearheaded by Abby Goldberg of Digital Democracy, the program started with the mission of shedding light on the issue of gender-based violence, which has become increasingly prevalent in the camp lifestyle resulting from the 2010 natural disaster.

After teaching the women how to use digital cameras, co-curators Erin Kornfeld and Erica Leone of Elk Studios narrowed down the thousands of images with the help of participants to a total of 48. The resulting collection is a striking portrait of the women’s daily life, documenting communities as they survive day to day in tents, plywood lean-tos and the other makeshift shelters that make up neighborhoods in the wake of the destruction.

Not just an example of raising awareness, The Way We See It sets a progressive example of how marginalized individuals can express themselves when given the right tools. As one of the photographers and Women Victims for Victims co-founder Marie Eramithe Delva explains, through photography they can “capture concretely what has happened and what continues to happen,” offering a far truer depiction than one most documentarians can provide. Exhibitions like this (the similar 2010 “Campaign to stop Violence against Women in Eastern Congo” photo essay by Francois Vaxelaire comes to mind) demonstrates how powerful a humanitarian tool photography can be.

The one-night-only exhibition and auction will take place 28 April 2011 at NYC’s Splashlight Studios. All proceeds from sales of the photos and the corresponding catalog will directly benefit the women who took the photos, and the continued work of Digital Democracy.

See more images in the gallery.

Apr 19

Seems Like Old Times: Protestors Destroy Andres Serrano’s Photographs

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In fairly recent days, the French have publicly expressed their distaste for Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, and
“>Frank Gehry, among others. We’re generalizing of course, but this writer is a boorish American tourist and that’s what we do. Besides, it was the only segue we could think of to talk about this past weekend’s destruction of artist Andres Serrano‘s controversial piece, Piss Christ, in Avignon. You’ve likely heard about the piece, as it’s been the the focus of unbridled outrage since it first appeared in 1987, depicting a crucifix sitting inside a jar of the artist’s urine. Though it had previously been shown in France before without incident, this weekend marked a large protest at the gallery it was being held at. The Guardian reports that those angered by the piece managed to overpower the gallery guards and a member of the crowd smashed Serrano’s work with a hammer and a screwdriver or ice pick, destroying another photograph as well. As is always par for the course for this sort of thing, the exhibition will likely now received ten times the attention and as the gallery’s director has said that he will leave the damage intact for the remainder of its run (“so people can see what barbarians can do”), meaning it will do the protestors’ image far fewer favors than had they just ignored the whole thing and not exposed so many more people to the thing they hate.

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Apr 16