UK street artist Phlegm has been changing the face of Sheffield’s abandoned lots, transforming them into galleries of black and white murals.
Phlegm has a unique talent for adapting to the surfaces of his dilapidated surroundings, allowing his characters to evolve in situ; the walls appear to have been constructed just to inhabit his creatures.
In the above images Phlegm painted the walls at an abandoned school in Sheffield. “Spend a week on your own in there and you can literally watch nature eating it’s way through it, claiming it back,” says the artist of his experience of working at the school
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.
For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”
Book of Sanskrit Animal Fables (Panchatantra) India, Rajasthan Dated Samvat 1811/1754-5 AD Sanskrit manuscript on paper
There is a vast history of animal folklore in literature, and the Pancha Tantra is one of the most ancient. Here are some images from the original book, and Walton Ford’s anecdotal stories that relate to some of his drawings from his collection that takes after the ancient tome of the same name.
Artist Mariko Mori’sJourney to Seven Light Bay is a digital project that transports visitors to Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, where Mori has installed the first part of her monumental earthwork ‘Primal Rhythm’. The installation consists of a sun pillar and the egg-shaped ‘Tida Dome’ that changes colour with tidal movements.
Inspired by the caves of Okinawa in Japan, the digitally rendered ‘Tida Dome’ is a hollow shell through which light enters as it floats in the bay, shifting colour from red at low tide to blue at high tide, with many gradations in between. Mori has chosen exact coordinates such that at the moment of winter solstice, the lengthening shadow of the ‘sun pillar’ will penetrate the actual moonstone, once it is physically installed in the bay, uniting the celestial with the terrestrial, the masculine with the feminine.
Tomás Saraceno Observatory/Air-Port-City Hayward Gallery,London, 2008. Gesamthöhe: 9,6 m Courtesy: The artist and Andersen's Contemporary,Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, pinksummer contemporary art. Foto: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno
Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno
Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno’s visionary exhibition Cloud Cities at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is a hall of floating spheres and webs inspired by utopic visions of hanging settlements or cloud cities that can migrate across the globe.
Saraceno builds on his knowledge of architecture and astronomy to create artwork inspired by soap bubbles and the tensile configurations of spider webs. Viewers at the museum can interact and enter the bubbles to experience their translucent, trans-dimensional qualities. The Mother Bubble, features an undulating plastic base for visitors to lounge on.
Zander Olsen’s photo series is an intervention with the landscape, a bending of the line of the horizon to create an illusion of continuity.
Olsen wraps the trees with white fabric and photographs from the viewpoint where the elements come together in perfect unity. He has created these site-specific installations in forests in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales.
Olsen’s works suggests an inversion of emulating linear perspective in two-dimensional works of art, a technique developed by Renaissance artists using foreshortening – in this case Olsen redefines a three-dimensional environment by extending a flat line across it to create an illusion two-dimensional space. Take for example the works of Georges Rousse who paints walls of interiors, photographing them finally at a fixed perspective to create the affect of continuous graphical lines across the space.
A witty narrative of thwarted simian desire is the theme of Walton Ford’s new series of watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Ford’s obsession with King Kong, the super-sized movie monster came from his childhood viewings of the 1933 cinematic tale of abduction depicting the clash of the beastly brute Kong and delicate, blonde sophisticate, famously played by Faye Wray.
The story is less Beauty and the Beast, more unrequited love akin to Nabokov’sLolita in which Kong, the faux monster gorilla, is trapped by unnatural desire and vanity towards an act unacceptable to consummate.
In his other series, displayed like a comic strip narrative on the gallery walls, Ford returns to his earlier Audubon inspired style, depicting a scenario described in the naturalist’s journals about his pet parrot. I chatted to Ford about his new work and flipped through his past drawings in my old copy of Pancha Tantra, a collection inspired by the ancient Sanskrit book of animal fables, possibly the oldest on the planet.
I asked Ford about his inspiration behind the story of the dead parrot and masturbating monkey, and Ford explained that Audubon’s father was a ship’s Captain: “He used to bring exotic animals home to France,” recounted Ford, “Audubon himself was born out of wedlock: the Captain had a mistress in Haiti, and after Audubon was born from this mistress, the Captain brought the young boy home to his wife in France who raised Audubon.”
“The Earthscraper is the Skyscraper’s antagonist,” said a spokesman from BNKR Arquitectura describing their latest venture in densely packed Mexico City. Their proposal is to drill downwards, inverting a skyscraper that would extend 65 stories under ground, circumventing restrictive local laws that prevent building skywards higher than 8 stories.
Bosco Verticale - Architectural Design: BOERISTUDIO (Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca, Giovanni La Varra)
In his first solo show in New York entitled The PassionsMartin Wittfooth’s explores martyrdom and sainthood using animals as subjects to symbolically represent acts of violent self-sacrifice and destruction practiced on the basis of ideological or institutionalized beliefs.
The series also obliquely references the suicide bombings, acts of self-immolation, blind devotion and religious fervor prevalent even in modern societies – as exemplified by Islamic jihad and followers of biblical Rapture – practices which appear absurdly arcane, parochial and even ridiculous when distanced and abstracted through the satirical lens of an anthropomorphized species.
My favourite cover of Joy Division’sShe’s Lost Control by DJ Spoek Mathambo was shot by South African artist Pieter Hugo with what feels to me, a perfect parallel rendition of Ian Curtis’ epileptic dance moves.
Photographer Pieter Hugo’s lens couples the aesthetics of the bizarre and violent with an acceptance of the mundane. His large body of work depicts the tragic and abject lives in some of Africa’s major cities and rural townships while celebrating the wild styles and fetishes of the people.
