Alchemy: Into Flesh.

Japan-based, Chinese designer Leonard Wong creates his latest collection and accompanying fashion video, both named Alchemy. In stark monochrome, the Alchemy video features ferrofluid-like orbs that morph and transform into human figures, namely performance artist Sylvia Lajbig and dancer duo AyaBambi.

Alchemy: Into Flesh:

A mesmerizing video, to say the least. For those of you at work, have a care, this opens with a nude person, however, it’s not graphic. After being mesmerized, I visited Leonard Wong’s site, and oh…well, if I could afford designer clothes, I’d find myself buying most of the lot, both from the collection, and the experimental – particularly the overthrowing tradition pieces. Fabulous! You can read more about Leonard Wong and this current collection at The Creators Project. If you do watch the video, I recommend full screen.

Balanced Art.

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There’s something beautifully surreal about seeing inanimate objects, be they playing cards or matches, precariously stacked on top of one another. Over the years, it’s actually been developing into its very own genre of art, “balanced art,” inspiring creative minds all over the world to start stacking. Artist Ishihana-Chitoku is but one of these creative minds who’s spent years working to imbue the serene sensation into his balanced rock sculptures. Chitoku’s catalogue is filled with mind boggling assemblages of stacked rocks that you won’t believe were made by human hands.

More at The Creators Project. Check out more rock sculptures from Ishihana-Chitoku on Instagram, and keep abreast of new projects on his website. I have been picking up rocks for decades. Now I’ll have to get them all out and play.

Los Angeles Launches City-Wide Exhibits on Water.

Geentanjal Khanna/Unsplash.

Geentanjal Khanna/Unsplash.

Los Angeles (and greater California) has a complicated relationship with water. Diminishing sources, droughts, and overuse have troubled the city since its inception. “Current: LA Water” seeks to address these issues through public art installations.

The project was born from a $1 million dollar grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, which, in June 2015, challenged cities across the country to create temporary public art projects that celebrated creativity, enhanced urban identity, encouraged public-private partnerships, and drove economic development. “Current LA: Water” was one of the projects selected.

[…]

“Los Angeles is the creative capital of the world, a place where we appreciate how art inspires us to see the world through new eyes,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti. “’Current: LA’ will make Angelenos rethink our relationship with water, and better understand how the L.A. River connects the diverse communities and cultures that make our city great.”

No. No, LA is not the creative capital of the world. American exceptionalism, it’s everywhere. And inside that exceptionalism, there’s state and city exceptionalism. Stop that.

Work will be available to view for one-month at 14 different sites throughout the city. “A narrative about our relationship to water and its allied systems will be demonstrated through the voice and visions of the ‘Current: LA’ artists, an exciting group of internationally recognized and emerging talents that are as culturally diverse as the inhabitants of Los Angeles themselves,” said Felicia Filer, DCA’s Public Art Division Director.

If you happen to be in this particular area of the world at the pertinent time, have a look. Via Out.

Cool Stuff Friday: Ebru Art.

Ebru Art, by Garip Ay. I am overwhelmed by the art work, as well as the skill and talent it takes to produce such intense beauty.

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History of Ebru Art

Ebru, which is generally known today as a decorative paper art, is one of the oldest Turkish arts, but exactly where or when it started remains unknown. Ebru is an art from the realms of history, presenting to us a beauty that is full of love. It can be described as painting on water. Patterns are formed on the surface of water which has had substances added to it to increase the viscosity; the patterns are then transferred to paper. The results of this process are unique and it is never possible to achieve the same design again.

Those who have traced the history claim that the many hued Ebru that we know today was born in Turkistan in Central Asia, a place that was the center for many cultures. From the 17th century on, it became known as Turkish Paper in Europe, and from here the art of Ebru reached the rest of the world.

The Turks started to make paper in the 15th century. With their sensitive souls and their mystic personalities they became very advanced in the art of paper decoration. Ebru paper, especially those of a fine design, was first used as the background to important official state papers, a variety of treaties and the records of important events. It was used as a means to prevent the alteration of the document. The same logic can be found in the use of complicated designs on banknotes, cheque books, deeds and bonds used today. In addition, the edges of commercial registers were decorated with Ebru in order to prevent the removal of pages. Ebru holds an important place in the history of Islamic art; it was used alongside calligraphy and in publishing. Moreover, its mystic nature, that is, “the search for religious beauty”, led to its being used in many tekkes as a reflection of sufi thought.

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The captions are easier to read at full screen, but if you’re like me, you’ll be busy gawking. And getting ideas.

And in wide-eyed awe…Van Gogh on Dark Water Animation.

I could watch his channel all day, but Verizon would punish me severely.

At least it isn’t 65 years. Yet.

I’ve been working in textiles for a while now, specifically, completely hand-made art quilts, with the main attraction being hand embroidery. Anyone who hand embroiders knows how time intensive it can be. For a while now, I’ve been so damn busy, I have not had time to work on the current project, the Tree Quilt. That ends up being a bit depressing, because I’d like to just be able to work on it and get finished. 65 years ago, a woman started an embroidery art piece, and has now finished it at age 90.

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Click for full size image. 90-year-old Priscilla Faulks stands by “My Jesus,” her 65-year embroidery project now displayed at Victoria’s Restaurant in Trotwood.

TROTWOOD — During the two years Cincinnati native Priscilla Faulks studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy, her medium was painting and her favored subjects were nature and portraits. But, after returning to her grandmother’s house at 25 in 1950, she was inspired to start a life-sized Jesus — which she finally completed in January, just a few weeks after her 90th birthday.

Now, the framed embroidered “My Jesus” is on display at Victoria’s Restaurant at West Third and Union Road in Trotwood.

“I wasn’t religious, but my grandmother, who raised me, was a highly Christian woman, and I was living with her when I was inspired to draw Jesus,” Faulks said. “Grandmother had saved government potato sacks from the Depression, and I asked her to sew them together to make me a large canvas that we tacked to the wall.

“I drew the Jesus, and she was elated. Both she and my mother were seamstresses, and they taught me. I made all my own doll clothes. I decided to use embroidery on the piece.”

Faulks began the work, then got married and had two children. She rolled up her Jesus and worked on it when she had time. Her first husband, injured in WWII, eventually died of his injuries, and she returned to school at Wilberforce until she re-married and had two more children. She was widowed a second time two years ago.

Hired as secretary for McLin Funeral Home by then-Ohio House Rep. C.J. McLin, “I’d take Jesus to work, and when I wasn’t busy, I’d work on him,” she said. “At night, I worked on him to relax, then roll him up and put him away. The more I worked, the more I wanted to finish him.”

Finally, on Jan. 5, she completed “My Jesus,” and approached various places to have it displayed, but was told that, at 4-feet-by-6-feet, it was too large for most spaces.

[…]

Faulks is thrilled that her Jesus is finally finished and now has a space where it’s appreciated, with an accompanying explanation of her long-term project.

“I’m happy, elated and relieved,” she said. “It took so long, just one stitch in, one stitch out, for 65 years.”

That is a seriously impressive piece of work. I think I better get back to work. I don’t have 65 years.

Full story here.

Bilyk Nazar.

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Rain. 2010 h-187см. bronze, glass.

Bilyk Nazar has an absolutely stunning body of work. This sculpture is called Rain.

The bronze sculpture features a nondescript man looking upward, a giant glass raindrop positioned over his face. This orb of translucent glass seems to balance perfectly, a sort of calm communing happening between the droplet and the solitary figure.

“The raindrop is a symbol of the dialogue which connects a man with a whole diversity of life forms,” Bilyk told My Modern Met. “The figure has a loose and porous structure and relates to dry land, which absorbs water. In this work I play with scale, making a raindrop large enough to compare a man with an insect, considering that man is a part of nature. Moreover, this work concerns the question of interaction and difficulties in coexistence of man with environment.”

There’s much more to explore at Nazar’s site, and Nazar at Behance.

Via Colossal Art.

No One Is Safe.

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ChadMichael Morrisette’s art installation “No One Is Safe.” (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Each victim has a different face.

It’s a small, but vital, detail in ChadMichael Morrisette’s art installation, “No One Is Safe,” a response to Sunday’s deadly mass-shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

Morrisette spent four hours Sunday placing 50 distinct mannequins on the roof of his home near the intersection of Fountain and Fairfax avenues in West Hollywood, a visceral representation of the 50 people, the gunman among them, slain in Orlando.

“I’m not celebrating today. I’m not going to Pride,” Morrisette texted his boyfriend, after waking Sunday morning, his 36th birthday, and watching the reported death toll from the tragedy rise. “Instead, I started working.”

It took the visual artist, who also operates his own business as a brand consultant, four hours to put together the roof display, with the help of a few friends, who Morrisette called “loving enough to come and celebrate that way.”

The process was intense, even beyond the effort needed to get the mannequins in position.

“It was emotional stepping over the bodies, laying them out,” Morrisette said, each time reminded of what those on-site at the crime scene must have experienced.

The faces weren’t the only things that differentiated these mannequins from the rest in Morrisette’s collection.

While the mannequins used in Morrisette’s business are pristine, the models that found their way to his roof were flawed, not yet receiving the care needed to patch their missing eyes or fingers.

“Some have damage you can’t see from a distance. Pulling them from a pile of broken bodies, it began to make it a little bit more real,” Morrisette quietly explained. “It wasn’t beauty being represented. It was shattered and broken.”

Mannequins from ChadMichael Morrisette's art installation "No One Is Safe." (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Mannequins from ChadMichael Morrisette’s art installation “No One Is Safe.” (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Mannequins from ChadMichael Morrisette's art installation "No One Is Safe." (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Mannequins from ChadMichael Morrisette’s art installation “No One Is Safe.” (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Response to the display has been immediate and powerful. Morrisette admits hiding behind his privacy hedge to watch people’s faces as they take in the message being communicated by his work.

“People are moved. They stop and get out of their vehicles. They do U-turns. One person just bowed to me as they walked by, out of respect,” Morrisette said. “Stopped cars sit at the light and have a moment to reflect, and those are the faces I like to watch. That’s when I know I’ve actually caused someone to think about something.”

Artist ChadMichael Morrisette sits on the roof of his West Hollywood home where he has placed 50 mannequins, as a way of dealing with his grief and expressing his feelings over the mass killing in Orlando. (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Artist ChadMichael Morrisette sits on the roof of his West Hollywood home where he has placed 50 mannequins, as a way of dealing with his grief and expressing his feelings over the mass killing in Orlando. (Mark Boster/ Los Angeles Times)

Full Story Here. Hat tip to Morgan.