Beautiful Salt: Univers’sel

motoi yamamoto's Floating Garden.

Motoi Yamamoto’s Floating Garden. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Inside the medieval castle tower at aigues-mortes, a 13th century walled city in southern france, japanese artist motoi yamamoto has completed two monumental installations made of salt. ‘Floating garden’ and ‘labyrinth’ form part of the exhibition ‘univers’ sel‘ on from now until november 30, 2016, which celebrates creative interpretations of the natural element.

‘Floating garden’ comprises a circular form filled with a lacework of carefully-placed grains of salt. The installation is housed within the castle tower at Aigues-Mortes. In its realization, the artist sits down in a small space where no particles are laid, simultaneously moving a container of salt in a particular rhythm, a subtle movement which creates tiny cells that mimic bubble-like patterns. Each of these thin salt ribbons symbolizes pieces of memories and fragments of time. The swirling, hurricane-like pattern is used as a motif used throughout East Asia to represent life and death, resurrection, rebirth and vitality. The ephemeral artwork was realized in 45 hours over the course of five days.

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The installation ‘labyrinth’ is housed within the castle’s ramparts.

The installation ‘labyrinth’ is housed within the castle’s ramparts.

Via Designboom, where there are many more photos.

Jesus Tree Giving Up The Ghost.

The tree that hides Jesus in better days.

The tree that hides Jesus in better days.

The Jesus in question exposed.

The Jesus in question exposed.

SOUTH PORTLAND — The pine tree planted to hide what some call the googly-eyed Jesus may be dying.

The long, green needles of the Austrian pine, which obscures a controversial mural of Jesus Christ on the bell tower of Holy Cross Catholic Church on Cottage Road, have mysteriously turned brown in recent weeks.

[…]

“I think pollution is doing a number on it,” Roberts said Tuesday. “It’s got something going on.”

Roberts, who is a church member, said the tree also appeared to be dead a couple of years ago, but it rebounded after he applied a fertilizer and insecticide. Now, road salt and other pollution may be taking a toll once again.

“This time it may be gone,” Roberts said. “It may have to come out.”

[…]

On April 17, the Maine Sunday Telegram published a story about the tree and its strategic placement in front of the mural. At that time, the needles on the tree were green. In that story, Henchal said parishioners didn’t talk much about the mural, though the hidden Jesus is something of a legend among children who attend the parochial school next door.

At the high-traffic intersection of Broadway and Cottage Road, the enamel-on-steel mural was installed in 1980 to replace a deteriorating tile facade on the church, which was built in 1950. Titled “Spirit of the Matter: A Christian Triptych,” the mural was designed by Damariscotta artist John Janii Laberge at the direction of a church committee.

In the April story, Laberge admitted that he has often thought of cutting the tree down with a chainsaw to expose his artwork. On Monday, Laberge said he had noticed the tree’s failing condition last week when he was dog-sitting for a friend in South Portland, but he was quick to deflect any suspicion that he is responsible.

“I didn’t poison it,” Laberge volunteered. “It may not be dead. I’ve seen it that way before and it came back. It’s probably just going through its seasonal changes.”

The response to the mural has been mixed from the start, especially to the whites of the eyes, which stare woefully toward heaven in a pose suggesting medieval religious art. While some say it’s an apt representation of pain and suffering, others say it’s creepy or scary. Laberge says he delivered on the church committee’s request to depict a “powerful, working-class Christ.”

“I wanted a strong, drive-by presence,” Laberge said. “I made something bold and big that tells something about the crucifixion and what came after. I warned them that depictions of Christ are a touchy thing.”

When Laberge drives past the mural today, he questions the negative reaction.

“It’s not that bad,” Laberge said. “A person who died on the cross is not going to look pretty.”

[…]

The mural became the subject of community controversy in 2001, when church officials considered making changes to the artwork as part of building renovations. The renovations ran over budget, however, so the idea of altering the mural was dropped, church members said. Soon after, someone suggested planting a tree in front of the mural as a way to take care of the problem.

The plan seemed to be working until the tree started showing signs of stress in recent years. Whether it can be brought back from the brink a second time is unclear.

Full Story Here. So, no one suggested praying the tree back to life? I’m shocked, after all, it’s not a fig tree. After staring at that art work for what is probably too long, I think they need a much bigger tree. Much bigger.

Yuichi Ikehata

I have been paying attention to art of all kinds for most of my life, and Ikehata’s work is right at the very top of the most evocative works I have ever seen. Incredibly evocative. Thought provoking. Poignant. Emotional. A reminder of our mortality, our fragility. Staggeringly beautiful. Terrifying. Astonishing. Look at everything. Click on it all, see it full size.

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Yuichi Ikehata works.   Fragmented beauty: Japan’s Yuichi Ikehata – artist profile.

We live from moment to moment in a mix of truth and fiction that we consider to be reality. The distinction between reality and fiction is a relationship such that we require one in order to recognize the other, and at times they are so closely connected that we are unable to distinguish the two.

Fragment of Long Term Memory (LTM), an ongoing photographic series, conveys an unrealistic world through fragments of reality. My understanding of reality comes from its moments of beauty, sadness, fun, perfection, and those days when nothing special happens. Many parts of our memories, however, are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images.

I always feel an uncertain anxiety. I find it important to have this anxiety stimulated by negative factors and feelings surrounding the uncertainty of existence, because by feeling my own existence as small and unstable, this in turn will lead to my recognizing a vast world and being in awe of it.

Magnificent Textile Trees

Lesley

© Lesley Richmond.

Absolutely gorgeous textile trees, forests, and leaves by Lesley Richmond, using the Devoré technique. From an interview:

I take photographs of trees, concentrating on their branch structure and transfer these images on to a silk screen. The image is then printed with a heat reactive base on a silk/cotton mix fabric. This is heated and the reactive base expands and becomes dimensional. The cellulose fibers are then eliminated with a mild acid (devore). This leaves just the image and the silk thread background. The structures are then stiffened and painted with pigments and metal patinas.

I work alone in the studio in my house, with occasional assistance from a former student to assemble my large pieces.

More of Lesley’s work can be seen here.

Make Love, Make Art.

Images courtesy Allure Art

Images courtesy Allure Art.

Making art and making love have a lot in common—hard work is vital, for one thing—but Latvian creatives Elina Vaivode and her partner Toms Grinbergs have united the two with a project called the Allure Art Kit. It’s everything you need to make a completely original artwork by banging on top of a canvas while covered in paint.

The Allure Art Kit comes with a cotton canvas, washable and safe paints with your choice of color, a protective plastic floor cover, two pairs of disposable slippers and a shower sponge. That covers everything from setup to wash down. All you have to do is a bit of creative cuddling, a quick rinse, and then some picture frame shopping.

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Via The Creators Project. Allure Abstract Art Kits. Check it out, a fun way to spend an evening. Or morning. Or afternoon.

Second Skin

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Second Skin (2015), Esmay Wagemans. All images courtesy to the artist.

Instagram itself is quite clear about it: nudity is in no way allowed. Yet there’s still a lot of discussion going around this policy. A question that often arises, for example, is: Why are male nipples allowed while female ones aren’t?’ Last year, the #freethennipple movement unexpectedly took surface. Woman from all around the globe took to Instagram and Facebook, and shared selfies of their nude bodies. They still got censored, but the motivation was clear. Advocates of the movement accused the Western world in general (and the platform itself) of a sexist double-standard. Instagram subsequently defended their policy by stating they wanted their platform to be suited for all age groups (the app has a 12+ rating in the App Store). And children, so it seems—according to their general opinion—shouldn’t see any female nipples.

If it’s up to Esmay Wagemans, a fourth year at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, this will soon change. For her project Second Skin, she worked out a way to bypass Instagram’s nudity censorship. By using a self-developed special kind of latex, she actually managed to show her nipples without showing any skin.

I spoke to Wagemans about the creation of Second Skin, how people reacted on it, and why she thinks it’s important to revolt against any patronizing platform.

[…]

Why do you think it’s important to put your breasts on Instagram?

To me, Instagram is a very important platform to share my work as an artist. And I’m not going to change the essence of my work just because it would be too shocking for other people, or because it wouldn’t fit the social norms. Sure, I get that pornographic images shouldn’t be on it, but then again Instagram should focus on creating a different, less sexist and more refined nudity and censorship policy. Apart from all of this though, I do think Instagram’s strict nudity policy is sustaining the idea of a woman’s body as a sexual object.

How do you mean, “sustaining the idea of a female body as sexual object?” Don’t you think it’s a good thing children are restricted from seeing naked breasts?

I myself don’t think nudity should be such a taboo, because it feeds objectification. Look, if you’re not portraying breasts in an erotic or pornographic way, I think everyone should be able to see them, even children. By withholding those kinds of “normal” nudes from young teenagers, you’re still presenting the female body as something sexual. That’s simply not beneficial for anyone. Within that abstinence, the idea of the body starts being seen as something separate from the woman. It’s right there, where the objectification starts.

Chewed Gum and Old Books.

Photographer Michael Massaia has created some amazing work with chewing gum. Yes, you read that one right.

Broken Heart-2016 42"x60" Pigment Print

Broken Heart-2016
42″x60″ Pigment Print

Transmogrify#2 – Chewed Gum Sculptures-
All of the images are created from a single piece of chewed gum. I mold all the shapes by using my hand, tongue, and teeth ( the shapes are not created digitally). The sculptures range from anatomical organs, flowers, sea creatures, clothing, and abstractions. After I mold them, I mount them onto black plexi glass (or face mount them to regular glass), and photograph the sculpture using either a Creo scanner or a large format camera.

The rest of the series can be seen here, and WOW is about all I have. I have used a good number of unusual things to create art pieces, but chewing gum never entered my mind.

Cara Barer has found old, discarded books to be a great medium.

"Nightshade" 2015 48" X 48" Ed./9, 36" X 36" Ed./9, 24" X 24" Ed./9

“Nightshade” 2015 48″ X 48″ Ed./9, 36″ X 36″ Ed./9, 24″ X 24″ Ed./9

"Morpho" 2014 48" X 48" Ed./9, 36" X 36" Ed./9, 24" X 24" Ed./9

“Morpho” 2014 48″ X 48″ Ed./9, 36″ X 36″ Ed./9, 24″ X 24″ Ed./9

I transform books into art by sculpting them, dyeing them and then through the medium of photography presenting them anew as objects of beauty. I create a record of that book and its half-life.

Books, physical objects and repositories of information, are being displaced by zeros and ones in a digital universe with no physicality.  Through my art, I document this and raise questions about the fragile and ephemeral nature of books and their future.

I arrive at some of my images by chance and others through experimentation. Without these two elements, my work would not flow easily from one idea to the next. A random encounter on Drew Street with a Houston Yellow Pages was the primary inspiration for me. After that chance meeting, I began to search for more books, and more ways to recreate them.

I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need a “Windows 95 Manual”?  After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half-Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house yielded a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper and sometimes contents.

As I begin the process, I first consider the contents of each volume. I only spent a few seconds on the “Windows 95 Manual”. The “New Century Dictionary of the English Language,” was a treasure. Its fascinating illustrations and archaic examples saved it from taking on a new form.

This transformation and photographic documentation led to thoughts on obsolescence and the relevance of libraries in this century. Half a century ago, students researched at home with the family set of encyclopedias, or took a trip to the library to locate information. Now, with computers, tablets and/or smartphones, an Internet connection and cloud storage, a student has the ability to amass knowledge and complete a research paper without ever going near a library. I have fully embraced all this technology, and would not want to be without it, but fear the loss of the beautiful record of books common over the last two centuries.

Have a look. *Thinks about the stacks of old manuals in the house*. I’m just going to have to play around a bit.

Odd Things

Cope Ceramic, acrylics, mix media 10" x 15" x 8" 2016

Cope
Ceramic, acrylics, mix media
10″ x 15″ x 8″
2016

Erika Sanada does absolutely stunning sculptures, which are born of anxiety and trauma:

My work reflects the weird and the creepy; I am fascinated with the dark side. “Odd Things” is my current body of work and I use ceramic for making bizarre creatures. They have extra body parts such as multiple arms, legs, teeth and ears.  These are how I express my sensitive mind. There are two reasons I create misshapen and abnormal work. One is my bitter childhood and the second is my constant anxieties.

When I was young, my friends ignored and bullied me. As a result, I stayed indoors and watched supernatural movies and animations. They helped me escape from reality and gave me power. These movies showed main characters using magic to turn others into freakish animals and insects. This transformation inspired me to make work that reflected the images that I saw in those movies and animations.

I have had an anxious personality since I was a child. I worry about everything, even tiny things. Anxiety drags my mind to the dark side, which is more powerful and intense than my bright side. Sometimes I can’t move forward because I am emotionally paralyzed. I decided to go face-to-face with my anxieties by creating irregular and eerie creatures representing my dark side. As a result, these creatures show my twisted mind as I try to overcome anxiety through my creation.

Influence Ceramic, glaze 10.5" x 9" x 10" 2015

Influence
Ceramic, glaze
10.5″ x 9″ x 10″
2015

Have a look at Odd Things, wonderfully beautiful and thought provoking.

INKS

For their latest video game INKS, London-based State of Play Games have created a new spin on classic pinball by turning the background of a pinball game into a piece of interactive art. As the ball traverses the course, the bright lights and clanking sounds of traditional pinball are replaced with pockets of watercolor paint that explode into flourishes. The ball in turn leaves trails of color as you solve each level. […] It’s a visually stunning game with some pretty innovative ideas, even if you don’t particularly enjoy pinball. You can download INKS for iOS here.

Via Colossal Art.

And, if you prefer a longer version:

I always sucked at pinball, but this looks fun.

Egyptian Artists Work Around State Oppression And Censorship.

Ollah - installation by Hossam Dirar (2015)

Ollah – installation by Hossam Dirar (2015)

 

Division (2013) installation by Hossam Dirar (Photo via Hossam Dirar)


Division (2013) installation by Hossam Dirar (Photo via Hossam Dirar)

In times of chaos, artistic expression can be cathartic. But artist expression in a place like Egypt can be insalubrious while working under an oppressive political regime.

“In recent years, the Egyptian arts and culture sector has faced debilitating repression,” the Arterial Network, a non-profit network of artists and activists building democratic arts practices in Africa, noted in December. “Prohibitive restrictions affecting the freedom of artists and journalists are ongoing.”

The Egyptian government passed a law that debilitated certain art-funding NGOs in 2014, and in December of last year, police raided and closed a gallery and a theater in downtown Cairo without giving an official reason. Some artists have also been banned from traveling abroad to receive awards for their work.

Crackdowns on the arts have led many Egyptian artists to avoid addressing politics altogether. “Most of the art since 2011 has avoided talking about political points, aside from a handful of artists,” Dirar told ThinkProgress.

“The current system is perhaps the worst in terms of attacking [or] not accepting people’s voices, whether artistic, political or social,” he said. “There can be no opposition; the state rejects opinions and ideas that differ from their own. The artist finds himself in a tight spot. If you like the system and choose to defend it, you’re fine, but if not, if you vocalize dissatisfaction, if your commentary does not match theirs, you could end up in jail for life.”

Politics may be taboo or risky, but artists throughout history have found ways to be subversive or rebellious to oppression. But for some artists, avoiding politics is impossible. Their impact casts a shadow over society and affects the calculated behavior of every individual Egyptian. To avoid repression, Egyptian artists create social and political commentary using Aesopian methods.

Justin Salhani has the Full Story at Think Progress. It’s a great read. What can I say? Artists must create, it’s not a matter of what we do, it’s what we are. These are artists working in highly dangerous circumstances, going ahead with making a statement and sharing that expression with others at personal risk.

Ollah Project.

Kinetic Artwork Jller.

Jller (Ignorance, with Benjamin Maus), 2015.
 
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Jller is part of an ongoing research project in the fields of industrial automation and historical geology. It is an apparatus, that sorts pebbles from a specific river by their geologic age. The stones were taken from the stream bed of the German river Jller, shortly before it merges with the Danube, close to the city of Ulm. The machine and its performance is the first manifestation of this research.
A set of pebbles from the Jller are placed on the 2×4 meter platform of the machine, which automatically analyzes the stones in order to then sort them. The sorting process happens in two steps: Intermediate, pre-sorted patterns are formed first, to make space for the final, ordered alignment of stones, defined by type and age. Starting from an arbitrary set of stones, this process renders the inherent history of the river visible.
The history, origin and path from each stone found in a river is specific to the location, as every river has a different composition of rock types.

Via Colossal Art.