To coincide with London’s Frieze Art Week, Lisson Gallery has opened a major exhibition new of work by one of the UK’s greatest living artists, Anish Kapoor. Just when it seemed that Kapoor had reached the limits of the art world’s highest echelons, perhaps quite literally with the Olympic…
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Photography by Sam Dunne & Perrin Drumm for Core77
Every year the London Design Festival grows in scale and this year was no exception—celebrating it’s tenth anniversary—the city was overrun with hundreds of exhibitions, events, installations, and workshops. Designjunction was hands-down one of the most popular destinations packed with some really great work presented in an awesome industrial setting.
One recurring theme this year was the use of wood in conjunction with metals like copper and bronze, and there was an overwhelming amount of lighting concepts proportional to other furnishing items. A big digital presence was felt with the V&A Prism, Philips Lighting, BE Open Sound Portal, Google Web Labs, and Nokia getting in on the action at Designjunction.
The presentation of Lee Broom’s Crystal Bulb Shop was incredible and also of note was a little townhouse in the Brompton Design District showcasing new designs from some really talented and experimental young designers. Catch all the highlights in our gallery and checkout more LDF goodness in the links below.
Related Coverage
» Journey of a Drop by Rolf Sachs
» Established & Sons Present ‘Bench Years’
» The Crystal Bulb Shop by Lee Broom
» 100% Design – La Boite Concept’s Hi-Fi Desk
» Live Vertically with the Magnetic ‘Magic Wall’ at 100% Design
» Wonder Cabinets of Europe
» Celebrating 50 years of Arne Jacobson’s Oxford Chair
» Keiichi Matsuda’s “Prism” at the V&A Museum
» Field Guide’s Happiness Machine
» Google Web Labs
» Nendo ‘Mimicry Chairs’ at V&A
» Tom Dixon On How To Design a Vibrator
» 100% Norway
» Designjunction
» Swarovski’s “Digital Crystal” at Design Museum London
» Kopiaste
» A ‘Living’ Credenza with a Hidden Plant Feature at 100% Design
» Design Fund New Acquisitions
Drawings of daily chaos on Canal Street in Jason Polan’s latest solo show
Specializing in the unconventional and often overlooked, NYC’s Boo-Hooray Gallery and 6 Decades Books present “A Slow Walk,” a solo exhibit of illustrator Jason Polan. Opening today, 5 October, the show centers on a new, previously unseen letterpress renditions of 10 sketches of Canal Street done over a 10-day…
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British artist Tim Braden’s first solo show evokes the dreamy spirit of travel
Tim Braden’s first solo show at Ambach and Rice gallery in LA is like a dreamy, nostalgic trip to somewhere that’s always sunny. Aptly named “Agence de Voyage” or “Travel Agency,” the British artist uses friends’ snapshots to create paintings as a sort of casual anthropological study. The locations…
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Photography by Jessica Charlesworth for Core77
Jessica Charlesworth joined nomadic design studio Unknown Fields Division (UFD) on their trip to the Burning Man Festival in a modified school bus built to survive off-the-grid with solar panels and deep cell batteries. Follow her journey into the Black Rock Desert in our latest photo gallery and check out some of the elaborate camps, insane vehicles, sculptures and installations seen this year—our favorite of course—the torching of a life-sized Wall St replica that cost $100K to make with buildings labeled “Bank of Un-America,” “Merrill Lynched,” “Goldman Sucks,” and “Chaos Manhattan.”
Unknown Fields Division Does Burning Man 2012
» Prepping the Solar Bus
» Survival Gear
» Walking Pod, Mechanical Beest Vehicle
» Building the Off-Grid Solar Bus
Our interview with Rose Apodaca and Andy Griffith about their new design gallery and growing inventory
Rose Apodaca and Andy Griffith of A+R are on a mission to fill the world with their favorite designs from around the globe, from the Japanese Lucano stepladder to JumpFromPaper’s Cheese! Satchel. Their mission began with combing the world both literally and virtually, scouring design sites and boutiques for…
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Our interview with the proprietors of Portland’s first pop-up shop and gallery space highlighting Maine-made goods
A hybrid between a retail and gallery space, Seawall is home to Portland, Maine’s first pop-up shop and also its newest clothing line. Founders Daniel Pepice, Sara Lemieux, Thom Rhoads and Brook Delorme opened Seawall this spring with the hope to open people’s eyes to talented Maine designers. Housed…
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Photography by Sam Dunne for Core77
The latest installment at the Wellcome Collection in London ‘Superhuman’ explores the extraordinary ways people have attempted to improve, adapt and enhance their body’s performance throughout history. Ethical debates around the augmentation of our bodies are becoming as widespread in everyday life as they are in sports. By including objects such as spectacles and false teeth, the curators of ‘Superhuman’ reflect on how technologically enhanced our lives already are, thereby drawing our societies fears of technology into question.
With artifacts ranging from mechanical limbs to sports equipment, and a winning mix of historical, technological and artistic perspectives, the exhibition had plenty of ID eye candy for the design-inclined and, for the equally philosophical, a delightfully constructed exploration of what it means to be a human in an age of ‘transhumanism.’
Superhuman
Through October 16th, 2012
Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE
Lisa Kereszi’s photographic book on family and what’s been thrown away
Photographer Lisa Kereszi has released “Joe’s Junk Yard,” a new photography book about her family’s junk business. In a documentary style similar to her Governor’s Island project, Kereszi records the final years of Joe’s Junk Yard, a business started by her grandfather, Joe Kereszi, in 1949. Located in southeastern Pennsylvania, the yard was a museum for American detritus. Reflecting on her father’s livelihood and her mother’s antique business, Kereszi writes, “I was surrounded by junk.”
The book starts with Kereszi’s grandfather in the form of his collected scrapbooks. Repurposing various materials to create his work, Kereszi explains that her grandfather’s obsession represents a person coming to grips with injustice in the world. “My grandfather’s scrapbooks were something else entirely, works that clearly fall into the category of outsider art,” Kereszi writes. “The loose, tattered books were made of supermarket-bought adhesive-bound pads of multi-colored construction paper.” Beyond the scraps, Joe’s Junk Yard chronologically tracks Kereszi’s documentation of the operation from her high school days through graduate school.
Photographer Larry Fink introduces the book, writing, “A junkyard is not an end run for matter; it is the beginning of a new condition for the curious, cultured and coincidental mind.” For Kereszi, the aesthetic of the yard started with people. Photographing her family around the yard with a student’s 35mm camera, Kereszi began the long process of documenting Joe’s Junk Yard. As the project evolved, Kereszi focused more on still objects and the iconic materials.
“Later, the work starts to get more still and centered on these things that I’m finding and pointing to as things of importance,” Kereszi tells CH. “An engine that looks like a heart or a transmission on the ground that starts to look like an elephant’s trunk—things that start to turn into something else by me focusing in on them.” Part of her motivation for recording the junkyard had to do with the failing business and her uncle’s suicide, with the physical objects acting as a manifestation of this loss.
It would be a disservice to dismiss Kereszi’s work as merely deadpan glimpses at a familiar subject, with a promient narrative of changing values and the abandoment of the DIY lifestyle shining through the documentation. “It was a part of life that you don’t throw stuff away when you’re done with it. You reuse it, and you fix it. Whereas today, we live in a much more disposable culture,” says Kereszi.
Kereszi wraps up her essay on Joe’s Junk Yard with a reflection on objects and inheritance: “I’ve inherited a lot from the place, from the hood ornaments pried from cars and signage stripped from walls to the ritual of hiding baseball bats behind doorjambs. But I’ve also inherited the passion for scavenging, for collecting, photographically and otherwise, and a constant need to feel that rare moment of discovery of treasure among the trash, or better, of true meaning and transcendence amid the chaos, pain, and banality of life.”
“Joe’s Junk Yard” is available from Artbook and on Amazon. See more images of the book as well as image credits after the jump.
Images courtesy of the artist and the Yancy Richardson Gallery
(from top)
The Office, 2002
Joe Jr.’s girlfriend Patty and Evans with truck bed, 1998
Wise man figure in junk car, 1993
Eloyse and Joe Jr. smoking, 1999
Joe Jr. and Patty in emptied-out office, last week open, summer, 2003
“Yard Sale” sign with junk, Media, PA, 2009
War-torn cities, dinosaur fossils and destroyed art inspire thoughtful ceramics
Sculpting work based on images from conflict-ravaged cities, British ceramist Mary-Jane Evans presents adaptations that somehow resonate with the same sense of destruction as war itself. Inspired by places like Beirut that are seen every day on local news bulletins, she started creating these individual buildings—entitled “Cities” and “Ruins”—that eventually develop into large-scale pieces. Evans’ most recent work “Ruins” is currently being presented in the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London .
According to Evans she begins each piece intuitively to allow the structures to evolve and develop on their own throughout her process. To create a burnt effect she multi-fires the ceramic at 1,300 degrees Celsius and adds corrosive materials such as copper and oxides. Evans’ violently affected ceramics compel observers to look beyond the physical appearance of her pieces in order to contemplate the inevitable destruction of war.
For “Coast Series” Evans drew inspiration from the fossils littering the coastline of Dorset in the South West of England where she grew up, crafting wall-mounted pieces she created from her own photographs of the beach treasures. The same Jurassic inspiration carried over to the site-specific installation “Trails,” which, explains Evans, “evolved and grew and finally ended in destruction.
Evans recently ventured into creating smaller pieces of art that double as one-of-a-kind jewelry. The ceramic necklaces, buttons, and rings appear to be shards of a greater piece of art or destroyed structure, allowing the owner to be connected to the artist’s original mission.
Evan teaches many of her personal ceramic techniques in workshops run in her studio, as well as in a course at Kingswood School in Bath. The Summer Exhibition containing Evans’ work will run until 12 August. For more information on Evans and her work visit her website.
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