Posts Tagged ‘London’
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
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.”
Read more on Alain De Botton’s temple
Tags: Alain De Botton, Architecture, Christopher Hitchens, Living Architecture, London, Peter Zumthor, Proust, Religion, Richard Dawkins, Sculpture
Posted in Architecture, Design, Environment, Publishing, Sculpture | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
By Kiša Lala
© Shane Vincent, Stay Connected, from 'Stand in Line' 2011
© Shane Vincent, All Directions, from 'Stand in Line' 2011
Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.
The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.
© Shane Vincent, Change Direction, from 'Stand in Line' 2011
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Tags: Kisa Lala, London, Photography, Shane Vincent
Posted in Architecture, Art, Interview, Photography | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Jake and Dinos Chapman - Detail from - One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved
Jake and Dinos Chapman recently showed at White Cube in London in their first ‘non-collaborative’ show, where each worked separately on works isolated in their studios bringing their art together in the final stage of the exhibition: much like the working method of ‘exquisite corpse’ – the Surrealist game where each contributor adds his part to a drawing without revealing his artistic input to the other.
Their interest in shocking their audiences with puerile and playful provocations against bourgeois culture is evident in their sticking genitals on childrens’ and adults’ bodies in inappropriate places: In an interview with curator Norman Rosenthal at 92Y, Jake Chapman said, “Victoria Miro [their gallerist at the time] was a lovely demure bourgeois woman… Our interest was stimulation…we learned that if we called a sculpture ‘fuckface,’ it attained value – you could hear Victoria on the phone talking to some collector saying, “Yes, I can do you a fuckface, or a two-faced cunt.” We were interested in how far we could affect, invade bourgeois language…”
© Jake & Dinos Chapman – God does not love you O.M.F.G., White Cube gallery
Artist Jake Chapman, © Kisa Lala
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Tags: 92 Y, 92Y, Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jake Chapman, Kisa Lala, London, new york, PJ Harvey, Sir Norman Rosenthal, White Cube, Will Self
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Sculpteur de Nourissons - detail © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus
Sculpteur de Nourissons © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus
A retrospective of handmade miniature interiors by
Charles Matton is on exhibit in London’s
All Visual Arts gallery. Matton, who died in 2008 of lung cancer, built ‘Boxes,’ that recreated artist studios and mise-en-scènes, emotive still-frames of inhabited interiors, empty hotel hallways, lonesome ateliers and imaginary boîtes. Poking one’s head inside one of Matton’s enclosures is being Gulliver trespassing into another reality and expecting the room’s lilliputian occupants to return any moment.
The fascination with doll’s houses is that we glorify our need for tidying and collecting objects with imperial strokes and a make-belief sense of omniscience. Replicating the world exactly had been Matton’s passions, and his artistic journey began with painting hyperreal interiors that he eventually extrapolated into three-dimensions, creating rooms with walls exactly as he would have painted them on canvas, drawing cracks on the patina, filtering sun and shade on the furniture, miniaturizing the effects of light itself.
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Tags: Alberto Giacometti, Baudrillard, Charles Matton, Francis Bacon, Jean Baudrillard, Kisa Lala, London, new york, Sigmund Freud, Sylvie Matton
Posted in Architecture, Art, Design, Sculpture | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2011
Alastair Mackie. Detail from sphere showing mouse skulls. Photo Tessa Angus
Alastair Mackie’s art builds correlations between the realm of human culture and the natural world. In his exhibition “I was there in Arcadia” he shows four spherical bone sculptures displayed under glass. The spheres are composed of hundreds of intricately connected mouse skulls. The bones had been collected from ‘regurgitated barn owl pellets’ found around the artist’s family farm. Mackie also photographs the completed spheres in situ, at the place where he found the skulls.
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Tags: Alastair Mackie, All Visual Arts, London, pertwee anderson gold
Posted in Art, Environment, Sculpture | Comments Off
Monday, May 30th, 2011
Still from Wim Wenders Film PINA - based on Pina Bausch's life
Director Wim Wenders has a new 3D film PINA that captures the work of his friend the artist and choreographer Pina Bausch who died in 2009 of cancer.
Pina Bausch photographed by Donata Wenders (2004)
Tags: Dance, Film, London, Pina Bausch, Wim Wenders
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Monday, April 25th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Lovebird, 2005, Taxidermy lovebird, Taxidermy mouse skin, Brass, Metal, Glass, Wood, 30 x 20 cm @ Polly Morgan
Interview continued with Polly Morgan Part 2 (Read Part 1)
Morgan grew up in the country, “It wasn’t a farm. [My dad] was an eccentric character. He used to start businesses up, generally importing and exporting of animals, but then he would get sentimentally attached to them, and never let them go. They were never killed. We had Angora goats, llamas, ostriches, chickens for a while.”
Still, Morgan prefers small creatures than large mammals for her art. The largest has been the white-back vultures, which took a good year from concept to finish. She works with a 3D computer modeler to visualize relative sizes. “I try not to be set on the birds…because I could go for years without finding enough…so the flying machine was a variety of birds… I made a smaller one with bright orange finches and canaries to look like flames but it’s impossible to find enough, so I had to experiment in dying feathers with hair dye.”
When she finally visited Deyrolle in Paris, she was, “Underwhelmed really – so many people mentioned it, I had built it up to be an incredible mecca I had to go to. I spent hours looking for it, so I was knackered when I got there, and half their stock was gone – since the fire. The taxidermy was very badly done – and I’m not just being a taxidermy snob!” she laughs.
In Polly Morgan's fridge: Fox and Magpie. Photo: Kisa Lala
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Tags: Berlin, Birds, Interview, Kisa Lala, London, Me Collectors Room, Polly Morgan, Stuart Hall, taxidermy, Thomas Olbricht
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Friday, April 22nd, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Atrial Flutter: Taxidermy Cardinal in Ribcage - Portrait of Polly Morgan by Stuart Hall for Spread ArtCulture © Stuart Hall 2010
I walked into Polly Morgan’s studio in East London with the wild hope that it might be a dungeon of dripping carcasses or a Madame Tussaud’s of stuffed cadavers. That turned out to be fanciful thinking as instead I found myself in a warm and cheerful place with assistants hard at work and a kettle on the boil, and if there was a funny smell it was, Polly assured me, just her lamb stew at lunch, not the waft of an odorous beast she’d flayed.
There was a fox in the fridge snuggled in its bushy tail, looking more cosy than dead: It was a good place to guard against moths in the afterlife. I sat near an old ruptured coffin with a plague of quail chicks oozing from its cracks while an assistant picked over a bird skinned, drawn and quartered on an old newspaper, but nothing out of the ordinary. Morgan’s dogs, Trotsky and Tony sniffed and scratched around as we chatted, too civilized to snack on anything other than tinned food.
Reciever © Polly Morgan
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Tags: Birds, Interview, Kisa Lala, London, Polly Morgan, Stuart Hall, taxidermy
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Friday, March 18th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Made of soap: © Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view of vases made of soap, on display at Haunch of Venison, London. Photo: Kisa Lala
One thing made clear during the recent Japanese deluge was that the earth does not discriminate, and all human-made objects were equally subject to the forces of destruction. The substances we choose to build with are measured in reference to human scale: Objects are hard enough only to withstand our own needs for toughness. They are as tall, soft or as resilient enough to meet only our own standards for what is optimum. Though we may build things to last several human lifetimes, they are ephemeral gestures in time as demonstrated by the waves that washed away, with a mere tide-swing of the pendulum, centuries of human toil.
The Korean artist Meekyoung Shin mimics precious Chinese porcelain vases and vaunted classical sculptures – and remodels them out of soap. Her replicas seem to mock the value of the original and their illusion of authenticity. Everything pictured is made of soap…
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Tags: Haunch of Venison, Kisa Lala, London, Meekyoung Shin
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Friday, March 11th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
John Stezaker, Marriage - 2006 Collage 23.5 x 28.5 cm (Photo courtesy of: saatchi-gallery.co.uk)
The British artist John Stezaker has a retrospective of his photographic collages in London at the Whitechapel Gallery and newly commissioned works on display at the Louis Vuitton Maison. Stezaker appropriates iconic imagery from the past, landscapes, vintage studio headshots of forgotten film stars, those that show up in old shoe boxes in antique shops collecting dust along with nostalgic memorabilia, waiting to be picked through, rediscovered.
What is unusual in Stezaker’s use of these images for his collages, is that his manipulation of them is minimal – often a single incision slices and splices two photographs creating uncanny symphony. Or a composite of just two images, a poster shot of a generic waterfall placed over a face, creates a window of such powerful reflection, that the simplicity in technique seems astonishing in the context of today’s excessive digital doctoring.
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Tags: John Stezaker, Kisa Lala, London, Louis Vuitton Maison, LVMH, Shepard Fairey, Whitechapel Gallery
Posted in Art, Books, Photography | No Comments »
