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Art by the Waterfront – Frieze Takes On New York

KisaLala — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:12:53 +0000

Frieze New York art fair on Randall's Island, Manhattan. Photo by Linda Nylind. 4/5/2012.

Frieze New York has camped at Randall’s island with 180 contemporary galleries under its enormous white skeletal snakelike tent designed by SO-IL architects. The fair which is like a pop-up village also includes Frieze Projects, curated by Cecilia Alemani, with artists John Ahearn, Latifa Echakhch, writer Rick Moody and Tim Rollins & K.O.S. among others specially commissioned to create outdoor installations around this unique location.

There is also Frieze Sounds, which features audio works by artists Martin Creed and Rick Moody, and also a Frieze Sculpture Park with works by Christoph Büchel, Ernesto Neto and Tomás Saraceno – who is also on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art currently.

Nicholas Hlobo, 'Tail' Stevenson Gallery Frieze New York 2012

Detail from Damian Hirst's I Want You Too 1993 Melanine, Glass, Perspex, Fish and Formaldehyde 48x96x12 in. Showing at White Cube Gallery Booth at Frieze NY 2012

John Ahearn - Commissioned and produced by Frieze Projects New York 2012 Frieze New York 2012 Photograph by Linda Nylind Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ohne Titel, Triptikon - Galerie Francesca Pia Zurich at Frieze NY 2012

Mika Rottenberg and Jon Kessler - SEVEN - Nicole Klagsbrun at Frieze NY 2012

Frieze New York art fair on Randall's Island, Manhattan. Photo by Linda Nylind. 4/5/2012.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2012 (Karmer and Newman make sausage) Frieze New York 2012 Photograph by Linda Nylind Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze

Frieze New York 2012

Frieze New York 2012 has many pop-up cafes on the waterfront including a Soho House lounge for members and thirsty New Yorkers

Many galleries and exhibitions are coinciding with Frieze – notably:

PULSE New York, May 3 – 6, 2012 The Metropolitan Pavilion 125 West 18th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
NADA New York Chelsea Center 548, 548 West 22nd Street (May 4-7)
The New Museum is showing works by Phyllida Barlow and Tacita Dean among others. (May 6th)
Helmet Lang at 24 Washington Sq North, co-curated by Neville Wakefield and Mark Fletcher (May 5 ― June 15, 2012)
Jeremy Kost, Of an Instance, Presented by Hugo Boss in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum – 150 11th Avenue (May 4 – 31, 2012)
Kehinde Wiley at Sean Kelly Gallery ‘An Economy of Grace’, opening reception: May 5, 6-8pm (May 6 through June 16, 2012)
Storefront for Art and Architecture Capital C Performance/cabaret – 97 Kenmare Street – 6–9pm May 6
Shepard Fairey, Pace Prints – 521 West 26th Street, 3rd & 4th Floors Opening Saturday May 5, 12-8pm, (May 5-June 16 2012).
Chelsea Night block party – 26th Street will be closed to cars 6-9pm
The Clocktower Gallery 108 Leonard Street, 13th Floor with Mary Heilmann & Tony Oursler & Lawrence Weiner etc. Open studios and galleries Sunday May 6 6–9pm
Frieze Downtown Night Various Locations, 6:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. Sunday May 6

More information: Frieze New York Randall’s Island Park, New York, NY http://www.friezenewyork.com

Mapping Dark Matter

KisaLala — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:59:52 +0000

A landscape charted from the rise and fall of the stock market. Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes,' Hangseng-80-09, © Michael Najaar

Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes', Dow Jones 80-09, © Michael Najaar

Artists with access to data from the medical, financial worlds, astronomy labs, global weather stations and geo-tagging services are now mapping data to create visual representations that make us think of invisible dimensions in tangible ways. Michael Najjar is the first artist scheduled to go to outer space on the Virgin Galactic flights in 2013, and intends to work with NASA to collate data to create art projects based on space travel. Artist Katie Paterson has worked in conjunction with an astrophysics lab to create art based on the qualities of darkness in the universe.

Michael Najjar’s art focuses on the ‘telematic society,’ mapping information technologies that invisibly drive societies. Using financial data from the fluctuations of stock markets, he’s created mountainscapes that reference the Dow Jones and Nikkei indices. The series simulates the development of global stock indices over the last 20-30 years integrated within the visual backdrop of the Argentinian landscape. He creates fictive realities and renders alternative utopias that may aid our imagination in envisioning new futures.

Immaterials - data between visibility and invisibility : Courtesy of Onformative.com

Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes,' Nasdaq 80-09, © Michael Najaar

Immaterials - data between visibility and invisibility : Courtesy of Onformative.com

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby create visual diagrams from abstract information ‘wafting through space,’ which they refer to as the immaterial universe. The designers think of electromagnetic fields as full of data, and they have constructed designs and charted data readily available from geospatial and location-based services.

Katie Paterson has visually mapped fields of dead stars (27,000 of them). Her art uses everyday objects to simulate events of great magnitude that are hard for us to imagine. Her project ‘100 Billion Suns’ captures a Gamma Ray burst, the brightest explosion in the universe, which is 100 billion times brighter than the sun, using explosions of paper confetti. In another project she writes a memoriam letter to commemorate the death of a star, (Dying Star letters) each time she receives notification from the astronomy lab when a star has exploded. She has also collaborated with Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea on a one-minute loop of a telescopic image of ancient darkness which was broadcast from a New York TV station. The image is of the darkness that existed at the time of the Big Bang, 13.2 billion years ago, at the furthest point of the observed universe.

Produced to accompany Katie Paterson’s project ‘100 Billion Suns’, which took place during the vernissage of the 54th Venice Biennale.

More information:

Fictional Radiospaces

Onformative Design group

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Kate Paterson at Haunch of Venison

Katie Paterson Website

Michael Najjar website

Interview: A Mind Safari with Stargazer Not Vital

KisaLala — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:14:52 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Artist Not Vital in Agadez, Niger - Mekafoni. Camel, 2003 - Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery New York

Raised on the dizzying slopes of the Engadine region in Switzerland, nomadic artist Not Vital takes delight in alighting on equally liminal perches on the new Pangaea of the 21^st century, peppering the planet with sculptural architecture from Patagonia to Agadez. Vital and I had a conversation about his migratory life while circling the artifacts of his recent peregrinations exhibited at Sperone Westwater gallery. Though his creations arise from emotional encounters and passionate collisions with other cultures, they are often born smooth and shiny in their egg-like perfection. Linked to Vital’s personal journeys, they become vehicles for an idea and transport one - which is the underlying root meaning of the word metaphor.

House to Protect Against the Wind, Agadez, Niger - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Cow Tongues

Vital has had an obsession with these after finding the severed organs in an Italian butcher shop. Since then, he has cast them in various sizes in bronze or steel, a signature element of his shows. The tallest to date at nearly 8 meters is a totemic and virile looking specimen of hand-beaten, smooth steel. Tongues are tools for tasting what’s tangible, but underappreciated as prehensile appendages. A cow’s tongue maybe an edible delicacy for some, but my own experience of being licked by a cow, a quick exploratory flick, was shock. Its unforeseen alien and erotic invisibility, hidden length and roughness in a creature of otherwise harmless bovine temperament, was an epiphany.

Presque vu, sequentially related to déjà vu, is to almost grasp, like something on the tip of the tongue – could be an attempt to describe Vital’s ever-probing steel antennae: a tongue that desires to taste that which can never be completely known.

Hangings and Weightings

White plaster sculptures hang slug-like on tenterhooks and seem to capture a state of uncertainty; all hang from a similar height. Vital tells me that his upbringing in the Engadine, with its backdrop of snowcapped mountains, had fixed his contemplative gaze at a certain height.

“When the sun goes up, the people in the Engadine are looking up,” explains Vital, gesturing above eye-level. “If you look at old people in Italy they look down. Growing up there – and we are formed very early – vision is always fixed up there. When I was in New York, my first apartment didn’t have much light, but it was the tallest I could get because if I had to concentrate on something, it would be up there… at 3m 30cm,” Vital recalls, his gaze fixed at the exact height of his reverie.

Marbled Landscapes

Growing up in lands bleached of colour, Vital’s work is largely monochromatic and sensitive to the nuances of white; he argues with assistants who cannot see the subtleties of something incompletely white. “Half the year, it’s 2 meters of snow – your eyes become sensitive to light. If I was in Brazil and India, my work would be much more colourful.”

Excavated from Dali, in Yunnan district of China, Dali marble, which might as well be named after the Surrealist, is sliced to reveal hidden landscapes that mysteriously mirror both the terrain from which they are taken and the landscape of Vital’s birthplace. Finding the right rock and cutting the marble is an intuitive task and tensed with unpredictability; one must sense when to stop, or the stone crumbles. One takes a gamble and may find there is nothing inside.

A Cave Dweller in Patagonia

Vital tells me that four years ago he came across an island in a remote part of Patagonia in Chile, which he purchased. “The entire island is white marble. It is beautiful but you could not build anything on top… so I had to come up with something else, by going inside it. What I did was to tunnel inside 50m, with an opening in the west; the whole floor is one piece of marble.”

He named the island NotOna after himself and the naked natives that once lived there. It recalls the simplest, ‘primitive’ dwellings of the troglodytes who were masterful cave architects.

Rendering of island in Patagonia 'NotOna' with excavated entrance and exit, 2011 - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Makaranta School, Agadez, Niger - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Architecture for Sky-Watchers

On a whim, the artist went to the desert city of Agadez in Niger and built a house there to watch the sunset. The sky is an endlessly fascinating substitute for TV in the desert where stars are used to orient one self. “The concept was to build a house to watch the sunset in the poorest country in the world; at four storeys high, it is the biggest building in adobe in the whole region; it was a big challenge.”

Then he built a school: “The Tuaregs – the nomadic people of the region, were very much against the school because they believed if children learned to read and do mathematics, they would not be able to read the stars anymore.”

The Tuaregs now have towns and are only semi nomadic, but I was curious as to how they got around national borders when roaming the desert. “They go over them…but the borders are completely wrong,” said Vital with frustration. “They are [vertical], so insensitive. The Tuaregs move East-West, and the borders are cut North-South. So you have to go from Niger to Burkina Faso to Mali to Senegal, instead of in a flow.”

Death and the Tuaregs

Sensing his wanderings cultivated a detachment for material things, I asked Vital whether he had any philosophies guiding his understanding of death.

“I have experienced how a mother can lose a child, and two hours later it is buried and forgotten. Not forgotten, but she has moved on. You show a photograph of the daughter and she laughs, she smiles, and that is something that shows strength, that you can really learn from. Of course I am not a Tuareg…If you have nothing you have nothing to lose. With these accumulations that we have in the west, it is never enough, and much more difficult to leave; It makes the prospect of dying much more difficult.”

Bedroom, Agadez, Niger residence - Mekafoni © Not Vital. Courtesy of artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Luggage for the Nomad

Though his family had been in the Engadine for many generations, Vital grew up close to the earth, valuing commonsense, with farmers as neighbours, and animals in the cellars to heat up the house. Hunting and forestry were the natural way of life.

“Even though we had very little information and no TV from being too high in the mountains,” Vital tells me, “we had 5 months of vacation: From April to the beginning of October we didn’t have school. During this time, as children, we had to do something with our time – so that we weren’t bored. At six years of age we were on our own and wanted to be on our own. We would go into the woods and survive in this harsh environment – and it was done with enormous passion. Afterwards, I read Italo Calvino’s Baron on the trees, and felt, I had done that.”

I said to Vital, that I recalled that the desert traveler, Wilfred Thesiger used to say that possessions made one weak.

“Yes, love him. He is a great wonderful writer and photographer. I wanted to go to Oman just because of him. I never met him, he just died; Of course I wanted to. Some time back I got another book of his from Richard Long’s girlfriend.”

Meditations on Black Mountains of Coal

Vital had selected whole chunks of coal from batches shipped in from Mongolia that are slices of Chinese landscapes like Shen Shui paintings. Vital described them as riddles… from carved rock. These inflammable rocks seemed to inspire something similar to the Daoist contemplation of landscape, intended not for the eye, which is concerned with appearances but for the viewer’s mind, a physical bridge that transcends one to a metaphysical place.

“That’s good,” Vital says to me, “I wanted to put two chairs here…Last week I went to see the Rothko Chapel. I was there for 3 hours…”

I told him about Alain de Botton’s plan for a Temple to Aetheism, and he said that incidentally, de Botton’s father had lived in the Engadine, and been a collector of his artworks.

Though a polyglot and master of seven European languages, including his mother tongue of Romansh, Vital still chooses to live around people who do not speak them…Now that he has settled into his studio in Beijing’s 798 Zone, he has bought another house to renovate in Rio. But it’s not always about being a wanderer he claims, sometimes it’s about engaging people. In Beijing he has even started painting, “I have much more time, I see all these people…and with all these assistants, you can just live, and not go out.”

I asked if he felt attached to his homes. “I am asked why I have so many houses? These areas are just places I visit and like to stay in even for a night. I would have a house to watch the sunset even if I could only spend one night there. Next day it could have crumbled, and it would have been fine, because I had this one night of an experience….”

Artist Not Vital standing in front of his Cow Tongue sculpture at Sperone Westwater, 2012 photo: Kisa Lala

The show entitled 十五 – fifteen – written in Chinese characters – refers to the number of works in the current show.
Not Vital: 十五 3-31 March 2012, Sperone Westwater Gallery 257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

Shopping for Earthly Delights

KisaLala — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:10:23 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Original Sin, By Alex Gross - 2012 -Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery

Corporate brands are quickly assimilated across global cultures and divide the world into consumerist tribes. The more coveted luxury brands elicit elitist loyalties. The Dior painting below is from the series ‘Product Placement‘ in Alex Gross’ recent exhibition, drawing heavily on brands in an exploration of modern global landscapes, with Coca-cola, Fendi, Dior and Chanel prominently featured in his paintings.

Alex Gross, Dior, Product Placement, oil on canvas, 2012 Courtesy of Jonathan Levine gallery

Fashion shoot originally published in US Marie Claire December, 2006 Photographer: Neil Kirk, Fashion editor: Eric Nicholson

Western corporate brands like Coke and Disney had a slight imperial edge in colonizing Asia and the Middle East before their Asian counterparts infiltrated the West with greater infectious speed. The ubiquity of advertising and its penetration of urban landscapes begs the question whether paid advertising has become part of our subconscious terrain and can therefore be claimed as common cultural property for artistic appropriation.

Alex Gross Product Placement oil on canvas 32 x 34 inches Courtesy of Jonathan Levine gallery

Alex Gross, Fendi, Product Placement, oil on canvas 32 x 34 inches Courtesy of Jonathan Levine gallery

Fashion shoot originally published in US Marie Claire December, 2006 Photographer: Neil Kirk, Fashion editor: Eric Nicholson

Gross’ paintings create a dystopian scenario of disconnected realities with floating references. His product placements do not recontextualize brands as boldly as Tom Sachs does with his Chanel Guillotine and Prada Toilet, or as Wim Delvoye did when tattooing live pigs with LVMH logos, but they retain the nostalgic retro aesthetic of hand-painted Indian billboards and sultry B-movie posters. They are the absurd confluences of channel-surfed realities.

Prada Toilet ('97) made from original Prada packaging, Chanel Guillotine (Breakfast Nook '98) © Tom Sachs

Wim Delvoye Louise, 2004 Stuffed tattooed pig 23 x 14 x 45 in./9.1 x 5.5 x 17.7 cm Courtesy the artist; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami; and Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York © Wim Delvoye

View more paintings by Alex Gross
Alex Gross’ exhibition ‘Product Placement’ can be viewed at Jonathan Levine gallery.
Jonathan Levine Gallery | 529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor | New York, NY 10011

Sheffield Gets a Facelift with Street Artist Phlegm

KisaLala — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:35:52 +0000

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

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.

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

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

Phlegm at Work © Romany WG

Phelgm in Sheffield, UK photo: © Romany WG

“This big robot is painted on the back of some abandoned substation just outside Sheffield,” says Phlegm

Falling - Phlegm, Sheffield, UK, February 2012

This above mural is part of a brilliant series of falling men in which Phlegm’s enigmatic creatures are suspended mid-motion in the act of falling. It recalls Georg Baselitz’s inverted paintings in which the world seems temporarily disrupted and turned upside down.

Phlegm, Outside Sheffield, UK. 2011 - from unurth.com

Phelgm Zombies, Sheffield, UK 2011

Phlegm painted this wall while they were filming a zombie movie at the location.

Phlegm paints a Telescope or Eyeglass at an abandoned site in Sheffield, UK

Phlegm paints a warehouse in Sheffield, UK December 2011

Harnessing of the Giant Squids Sheffield, UK

Read more:
Phlegm Website
Photographer Romany WG

A Temple to Godlessness

KisaLala — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:31:50 +0000

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.”

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists - Image courtesy of Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The Secular Retreat designed by Peter Zumthor, in South Devon for Living Architecture concept for 2012

De Botton has said that he finds Richard Dawkins‘ and Christopher Hitchens’ approach to atheism too aggressive and destructive, and not positively persuasive to people who are just not that interested in religion but not aggressively opposed to it.

He believes that a temple for atheists fits into a tradition of secular places such as Rothko’s chapel. De Botton also manages Living Architecture, which is an organization that invites people to rent and holiday at some of the most innovative spaces designed by contemporary architects, and recently Peter Zumthor has designed a new building for Living Architecture, “Secular Retreat” which will be available to renters later in 2012

Alain de Botton - researching airports

The Balancing Barn, Alain De Botton, Living Architecture

Alain De Botton has a new book out, Religion for Atheists, which poses the idea of whether religions are neither all true or all nonsense – http://www.alaindebotton.com/religion.asp

Fabulous Fables

KisaLala — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:28:34 +0000

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.

In the first place, the story of the external soul is told, in various forms, by all the Aryan peoples of Hindoostan to the Hebrides…In another Hindoo tale an ogre is asked by his daughter, “Papa, where do you keep your soul?”
“Sixteen miles from this place” he said, “is a tree. Round the tree are tigers, and bears and scorpions, and snakes; on top of the tree is a very great fat snake; on his head is a little cage; in the cage is a bird; and my soul is in that bird.” From Sir James George Frazer “The external Soul in Folk Tales” from The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, 1890. MacMilan. [Taken from WF:Pancha Tantra: Published by Taschen]

Soon after reaching the Uganda Protectorate at the end of 1899, I came in contact with a large party of dwarfs who had been kidnapped by a too enterprising German impressario, who had decided to show them at the Paris exhibition. As the Belgians objected to this procedure, I released the dwarfs from their kidnapper, and retained them with me for some months in Uganda, until I was able personally to escort them back to their homes in the Congo forest….As son as I could make the dwarfs understand me by way of an interpreter, I questioned them regarding the existence of this horse-like creature i their forests. They at once understood what I meant, and pointing to a zebra-skin and a live mule, they informed me that the creature in question, which was called OKAPI…” British explorer Sir Harry Johnston (1858 – 1927). [Taken from WF:Pancha Tantra: Published by Taschen]

Though Johnston was credited with introducing the Okapi to the western world, the creature is now in danger of extinction from the war-faring tribes of the Congo, who from starvation and strife, are killing these animals out of hunger, desperation and profiteering. The Wild Oak conservation group in Florida run an Okapi Conservation Program in the Congo to save these beautiful creatures.

“There was a road, and everyone who traveled on it died. Some people said they were killed by a snake, others said by a scorpion, but somehow they all died.
Once a very old man was traveling long the road. When he got tired, he sat down on a stone, and suddenly he saw in front of him a huge scorpion. It was as big as a rooster and even as he was looking at it, it changed into a snake and glided away. Wonderstruck, he decided to follow it at a little distance and find out what it really was. The snake glided here and there, day and night, and behind it followed the old man like a shadow. Once it went into an inn and killed several travelers; another time it slid into a palace and killed the king himself. It crept up the waterspout to the queen’s quarters and killed her youngest daughters. So it passed on, and wherever it went there was soon the sound of weeping, and the old man followed it, silent as a shadow.” Folktales From India by A.K.Rmanujan, Pantehon Books [Taken from WF:Pancha Tantra: Published by Taschen]

Jack on His Deathbed © Walton Ford - 'The battles between him and my Boy Gaetano when he is naked and going into the Sea with me in the morning are really curious. He never bites him but plays him all sorts of trick, his favourite one is to pull him by his (testicles) and then he always smells his fingers;' Excerpted from Fields of Fire: A life of Sire William Hamilton

Excerpts from Sir William Hamilton’s diaries while he was British ambassador to Naples from 1764 to 1800. He was the husband of Emma Hamilton, who was later mistress of Lord Nelson.

Book of Sanskrit Animal Fables (Panchatantra) India, Rajasthan Dated Samvat 1811/1754-5 AD 49 miniatures, 114 folios 24.2 x 17cm; Sanskrit manuscript on paper

Making Celestial Waves: Artist Mariko Mori

KisaLala — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:36:02 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Artist Mariko Mori’s Journey 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.

Mariko Mori - Tida Dome, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Mori intends the site of this symbolic work to be a place for future performances that will engage viewers to participate in the surrounding environment. This installation, like many of her earlier works, integrates art, technology and Buddhism, engages circadian patterns, and celebrates the primary rhythms of the universe, which urban life largely erases from our consciousness.

Mariko Mori, Série "Present" (détail), Times Square, New York, 1997

The art world often sidelines humanist works for their accessibility and for their campaigns of universal mantras, but Mori has a history of meshing modern technology with ancient practices in a way that engenders contemplation for our place in the natural world. Predating Lady Gaga by many years, her pod performances in Times Square and other landscapes around the world, engaged public awareness using grand spectacles. Her Lucite stone circles were inspired by earthworks of the Jomon period in Japan, drawing on the astronomical wisdoms of the ancients to create connections that transcend time and cultural differences.

The Japanese born artist, commutes between her homes in Tokyo and New York for her projects, and also heads a non-profit organization, the Faou Foundation with a mandate to create a series of site-specific earthworks across six continents to engage local communities and enhance public interactions with the natural environment.

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO, 1999-2002, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Mariko Mori - Oneness, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

A virtual demo of the installation of the Tida Dome, entitled ‘Journey to Seven Light Bay’ can be viewed at Adobe Museum of Digital Media site.

Faou Foundation

Video Courtesy of Ministry of Culture

Clouds and Cobwebs

KisaLala — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:23:48 +0000

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.

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno Biosphere, Installationsansicht Statens Museum for Kunst, Kopenhagen, Dänemark, 2009 Foto: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno, Produced by National Gallery of Denmark 2009

In an interview, Saraceno explained his project of creating cities like mobile platforms or habitable cels that float in the air. “These change form and join together like clouds.” His ideas of nomadic architecture are inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller. The artist explained his vision, “Up in the sky there will be this cloud, a habitable platform that floats in the air, changing form and merging with other platforms just as clouds do. It will fly through the atmosphere pushed by the winds, both local and global, in an attempt to equalise the (social) temperature and differences in pressure. It will be a sustainable and mobile migration. These aerial cities will be in a permanent state of transformation, similar to nomadic cities. After all, gypsies never go back to the same place simply because the place is constantly changing.”

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Cloud Cities runs until February 9 2012.

Painting the Horizon

KisaLala — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:11:35 +0000

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.

For more information: Zander Olsen
Waterhouse & Dodd: Georges Rousse