ArtPress

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2010-04-16T21:50:00.001-05:00

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2010-01-17T22:17:00.001-05:00

Minako Abe

2009-09-09T20:25:00.002-05:00

From Tokyo Art Beat

"Softly spread in silky thin layers, Abe’s color reverberates against the white walls of Base Gallery with a calming dreamy sensibility. Layered segments begin to feel like the stratified sediment of psychedelic soil, as the paintings manipulate a varied palette into a smoothly harmonious voice. And as if to emphasize this gentle quality the colors all move lazily with the slight sense of a ripple or wave beckoning us in further.

More so it was in the slight deviations from flattened surfaces that the most enjoyable moments in Abe’s work appeared. Several curious details broke the images sharpened lines and spoke out with a voice less calculated. In one work, a small row of grey blocks indicated depth as it led to what appeared to be a tunnel, while in another image a patchwork of violet grays suddenly offered detail amid a row of residential silhouettes. But the uncertainty about what these moments might mean in relation to the narrative and the painting as a whole proved a particularly satisfying. These sudden instances of thickened paint and articulated detail in a building or field seemed more magical in a way, as though their existence was a note of willingness to fumble amid a field of careful deliberations.

Yet as with most digitally manipulated imagery however, the evidence of Adobe was readily apparent and left the impression that although these works seemed so alluring at the moment, they might perhaps lose some of their presence overtime. Still, bathing in the warm safe colors of these landscape meditations it was easy to believe that these better places existed somewhere, and Abe had found them and returned with these glimpses to share."

Extreme Sheep Hearding

2009-09-09T19:34:00.002-05:00

Using LED lights attached to the back of sheep, herders in Wales have created a massive LED display on the side of a hill to play PONG, simulate fireworks and even crop together the Mona Lisa. The extreme sheep LED art project was sponsored by Samsung’s Smart LED technology.

Shawn Patrick Landis

2009-07-21T09:19:00.003-05:00

"Negative space is accustomed to being ignored. People walk right through it without a second glance. Only artists are drawn to enlarge upon its possibilities, the meaning of what's between table and chair, hoof and mouth, dog and kennel, us and them.

Decades earlier, Bruce Nauman made art from the space between the legs of a chair, a suggestion that Rachael Whiteread turned into a career. Landis has his own spin, however, bringing a mad scientist sensibility to the deadpan banality of the objects he chooses to anchor the air, which is the nothing that makes everything possible." seattlepi.com

Dean Byington

2009-07-12T23:01:00.002-05:00

I saw this artist's work at the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville, TN and at first was unimpressed with what I took to be pastel color field paintings. Looking at them closer I was amazed at the level of detail and complexity, not to mention story telling, with each of these paintings. No reproductions do them justice, as the details are just too numerous to capture.

Art in America
December, 2003
by Jerome Tarshis

Berkeley-based artist Dean Byington makes only five to 10 works per year. Ranging from 4 to 8 feet in height, his oil-on-canvas paintings are filled with detailed renderings of grass, trees and flowers, which invite the viewer to read them as landscapes. Their flattened space has an all over quality akin to modernist painting, and their small, repeating elements suggest the additive character of a Chinese scroll. They belong to a tradition of picture making that undertakes to possess the world by sheer enumeration of parts and multiplication of detail.

Together with his labor-intensive drawing style, Byington's use of a narrow, almost monochromatic range of color evokes the austerity (and also the authority) of printer's ink. His compositions, rendered freehand and with stencils, are derived from 19th-and 20th-century illustrations. The rabbit in King and Queen, for example, could have been plucked from John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland; in the same painting, the rats gathered around the corpse of a larger animal belong in some children's book rather less high-spirited than the Alice stories. Byington's work depends on our knowledge of cultural shocks and material spoliation, past and present. Nevertheless, these are not visits to a timeless Victorian nursery; while Byington's paintings depict trees in leaf and flowers in bloom, they also have more than their share of stumps and bare patches of earth.

Through countless visually seductive paths suggesting nostalgia for the stylistic tropes of Victorian and early 20th-century engravings and innocuous evocations of menace, these paintings provide us with a few unobtrusive reminders that awful things have happened. Old fairy-tale books are still there for us, but Chekhov's cherry orchard has long since been cut down.

Theo Jansen - Kinetic Sculptor

2009-05-10T20:39:00.002-05:00

"Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life.

Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat.

Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storms and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives."

Fluid Schulpture

2009-05-10T20:26:00.003-05:00

Fluid Sculpture from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.

MUSIC:Ratatat, "Imperials" from their album LP3

Graffiti Artist Blu

2009-03-18T22:11:00.002-05:00

Tunnel with 40,000 LEDs

2009-02-25T21:14:00.005-05:00

The name of the installation is Multiverse, and it was installed by artist Leo Villareal in a 200-foot-long tunnel in the National Gallery of Art in Washingtong DC. The entire thing features 41,000 LEDs that animate and move on their own, using randomness to ensure that no one will see the same configurations twice. Multiverse will be on display throughout 2009.

Villareal "Multiverse" National Gallery of Art, Washington DC from Walter Patrick Smith on Vimeo.

Burble London

2008-11-22T22:30:00.006-05:00

The Burble is a massive structure reaching up towards the sky, composed of approximately 1000 extra-large helium balloons each of which contains microcontrollers and LEDs that create spectacular patterns of light across the surface of the structure. The public, both audience and performer, come together to control this immense rippling, glowing, bustling 'Burble' that sways in the evening sky, in response to movements of the long articulated interactive handle bar at the base of the structure. The ephemeral experience exists at such a large scale that it is able to compete visually in an urban context with the buildings that surround it.

The Burble is a massive carbon-fibre structure reaching up towards the sky, composed of approximately 1000 extra-large helium balloons each of which contains microcontrollers and LEDs that create spectacular patterns of light across the surface of the structure.

The Burble is held down to the ground by the combined weight of the crowds holding on to the handle bar. They may position it as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd's desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.

As people on the ground shake and pump the handle bars of the Burble, they see their movements echoed as colours through the entire system. Part installation, part performance, the Burble enables people to contribute at an urban scale to a structure that occupies their city, albeit for only one night.

More info: http://www.haque.co.uk/burblelondon.php

Burble London from haque d+r on Vimeo.

Oblong's g-speak: the 'Minority Report' OS brought to life

2008-11-15T09:23:00.005-05:00

Not really an art post, but I could see where this has tremendous possibilities for the arts. Similar to the movie "Minority Report".

Nelly Agassi

2008-11-03T21:23:00.002-05:00

I cannot find much on this artist except her cv and that she lives and works in Israel. Her body based fabric pieces are reminiscent of Janine Antoni or Rebecca Horn and are incredibly striking.

Gerhard Richter at Serpentine Gallery

2008-11-03T21:16:00.001-05:00

from serpentine gallery:

"Gerhard Richter (born Dresden, 1932) is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Since the early 1960s he has tirelessly explored the medium of painting at a time when many were heralding its death. He has produced a remarkably varied body of work, including photography-based portrait, landscape and still-life paintings; gestural and monochrome abstractions; and colour chart grid paintings. This autumn, the Serpentine presents 4900 Colours, a major new work comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid formation to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic colour.

4900 Colours comprises 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares that can be reconfigured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings. Richter has developed a new version especially for the Serpentine Gallery exhibition: 4900 Colours: Version II, formed of 49 paintings of 100 squares.

4900 Colours is in the context of Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced the stained glass that was destroyed in World War II. Cathedral Window, unveiled in August 2007, comprises 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colours that are derived from the palette of the original medieval glazing."

Phonographantasmascope

2008-10-13T12:52:00.002-05:00

Photographer Gregory Crewdson

2008-10-03T19:48:00.002-05:00

Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 and received a BA at SUNY, Purchase and an MFA at Yale University. His photographs are included in numerous museums and public collections around the world. A European retrospective of his work began at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2005) and traveled to institutions including Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and the Hasselblad Center, Sweden. Crewdson is a faculty member of the Department of Photography at Yale University and lives in New York City.

His photographs are completely staged odd realities that make you look twice. There is a sense of deja vu with his work, a sense that something is just not right.

Jon Burgerman -

2008-10-03T19:43:00.002-05:00

John Burgerman studied art foundation in Bournville, Birmingham and then Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.

His work is hand-drawn characters. He said, "Even though it's often scanned into the computer I don't want it looking too clean and 'photoshopped'." The characters are often linked together in one seemingly connected line.

His influences range from art shows to computer games, Saturday morning cartoons, and adverts to sweet wrappers and root vegetables.

Frank McCauley

2008-10-03T18:02:00.002-05:00

Frank was my roomie in undergrad and the guy I got into any trouble with. We have since parted ways but still keep in touch quite often. He has revamped his website from the ground up and warrants a mention here if not solely for the crazy background on his home page but more importantly for his amazing prints/paintings he's been creating.

From his website:
"My work investigates the distortions of language and logic, by looking at ways in which technology can influence perception. It does this by exploring instinct and irrational comprehension. When I take the everyday person as my subject it is put through a process in which its features are distorted, suppressed, or intensified in the service of expressing something beneath or behind the observable surface. That is, something which is best implied in the slippage between the recognizable and what is unexplained or mysterious.

In my work there exists a fascination with the relationships between private and public, reality and fiction, object and representation, and also the dynamic interplay between the individual and structures or masses. Some of my processes include: disrupting narrative flow, piling up disjointed fragments, incorporating references to prior images and texts, isolating figures to emphasize their role as personifications of concepts, and using images with multiple associations to draw attention to many layers of meaning and the necessity of interpretation. All these means serve to frustrate a straightforward reception of the image, which would consume the work for the story told, or the information conveyed."

Fudge Factory Comics

2008-10-02T07:24:00.002-05:00

I came across Travis Millard's site Fudge Factory Comics when researching for my super heroes project. Sort of reminds me of the old Garbage Pail Kids cards I used to collect when I was a kid.

advancedbeauty.org

2008-09-09T21:08:00.002-05:00

"Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

The first collection is a series of audio-reactive 'video sound sculptures'. Inspired by synasthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.

The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within; to start, finish and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, all sculptures sharing the same white environment."

Click the image below to watch an HD trailer for the upcoming DVD.

www.advancedbeauty.org

Naked Toys

2008-08-07T20:33:00.002-05:00

I came across this designer, Matt Kirkland, who in one of his "stupid projects" has taken various animatronic toys and stripped them of their beloved fur. They are quite interesting in their birthday suits.

Luke Lamborn

2008-07-27T13:56:00.003-05:00

Syracuse Computer Art Grad. From his website:

"This video series documents extraordinary occurrences captured by a passing videographer. The title and direction of the series are a reference to the writings of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda who studied ancient shamanistic methods of experiencing the world paranormally. He described "square millimeters of opportunity" as momentary and radical shifts in perception, during which amazing events are possible. Video compositing and special effects are used to actualize these moments."

Sean Hovendick

2008-07-27T07:30:00.002-05:00

Sean was a colleague of mine at Syracuse University who created interactive, engaging, yet austere works through video, physical computing, and other media.
"I am very curious as to what makes men act the way they do. My own mannerisms and ideology seem to clash with particular identities of men both portrayed in the media and in society alike. Often I find myself critically analyzing the identity of males while at other times I feel myself conforming to a stereotype to simply fit in. I seem to be in a constant state of flux—on an endless journey searching for who I am—tormented by the oddity of the mediated persona. I attribute this contradictory existence with my lack of a father figure and the consequences of using of mass media as a surrogate parent.

In general, my work is a critical assessment of media’s omnipresence and the effects of its power to influence our society. In particular, it reflects the alienation of the male identity in regards to behavior learned from mediated reality. I draw inspiration from the way in which mass media is used for entertainment, information and social connectedness and the unconscious issues that arise with such dependence. These issues of persuasive media and the effects of mediated reality are the driving forces of my life and work—both of which concerned with the impalpable human identity evident in our stereotypically based culture." (© Sean Hovendick)

www.studiofusion.com

Time to start posting again

2008-07-26T20:49:00.002-05:00

I have noticed that the majority of the traffic to my website comes not from people actively looking for my work, yes, it's humbling, but from searching for an entirely different, usually much more popular artist that I wrote a brief article about on this blog. This does however drive traffic to my own site. So, and don't hold me to this, but I am going to try to cover a new artist, show, or something else I think is interesting twice a week. This should keep me actively engaged in looking at new work, while also helping me to establish what one of my colleagues once called "google juice". Stay tuned.

Rotating Wall by Richard Wilson

2007-06-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

Work by Richard Wilson,
very similar to Gordon Matta Clarke (image to the left). Wilson's video can be viewed below.

There is an exhibition at Renew Rooms in Wood Street giving full details about this amazing installation.

'The most daring piece of public art ever commissioned in the UK', Turning the Place Over is artist Richard Wilson’s most radical intervention into architecture to date, turning a building in Liverpool’s city centre literally inside out. One of Wilson’s very rare temporary works, Turning the Place Over colonises Cross Keys House, Moorfields, and will be launched in June 2007 and will run through until end of 2008.

Co-commissioned by the Liverpool Culture Company and Liverpool Biennial, co-funded by the Northwest Regional Development Agency and The Northern Way, and facilitated by Liverpool Vision, the project is a stunning trailblazer for Liverpool’s Year as European Capital of Culture 2008, and the jewel in the crown of the Culture Company’s public art programme. (http://www.artinliverpool.com/biennial/biennialarch/news/)