Patricia Piccinini’s Incredible Skywhale Hot Air Balloon

by

skywhale-patricia-piccinini

skywhale-patricia-piccinini

skywhale-patricia-piccinini

Floating high above the sky Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale hot air balloon is a thing of wonder. Commissioned by The Centenary Of Canberra the massive flying sculpture that is a cross between a turtle, breasts and prehistoric fish will be making the rounds in Australia during 2013.

Here’s what creative director of the COC had to say about this project:

“Observing Canberra’s continuing love of the spectacle of hot air balloons , each autumn gracing the airspace over the national capital, I wanted to offer this highly visible ‘canvas’ to an Australian artist as a Centenary of Canberra commission. Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most successful ‘sculptors’, her work seen in major collections in Australia, and a survey show broke all attendance records for the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery: she has had recent exhibitions in Nashville, Istanbul and London. Her highly imaginative work invites us every time to think about the human condition, and it was this relationship with the very concept of ‘life on Earth’ that made me think of her. Many special shape balloons have started to replicate characters or animals, but they are mostly caricatures and in the realm of kitsch, rather than art.

To my delight, Patricia was immediately responsive to the idea of her work in a new form, and insisted that it would not be a novelty, but a continuation of her ouevre and its years of investigation into the way life has evolved. This is exactly what the new work is, and we are so proud to have been able to find the resources to help this great artist make it happen. That Patricia was educated in Canberra, also makes this a celebration of the fine talent that the national capital has, and continues to produce.” (via)

Watch three fantastic videos with the artist in her studio as well as footage of the Skywhale in flight after the jump!

Read More>

Wyatt Kahn’s Clean And Simple Yet Geometrically Intricate Wall Sculpture

by

wyatt kahn - sculpturewyatt kahn - sculpturewyatt kahn - sculpture

 

Wyatt Kahn’s wall sculptures are built from a series of stretcher panels and raw canvas beautifully pieced together to make one collaged structure. The crevices and peeking back wall help create compositional depth, captivating the eye, revealing clean and simple, yet geometrically intricate work, which is devoted to the complex juxtaposition of space more so than color.

Of Kahn’s art, Sam Cornish writes, “Broadly the type of illusion Kahn employs is one that comes after the reduction of minimalist painting. The flat, object quality of each part is in one sense simply accepted. There is no hint of the surface being broken, of a window open to an atmospheric or light filled space beyond (however shallow).”

Read More>

Advertise here !!!

Squid Soup’s Motion-Responsive Sea Of LED Lights

by

Squid Soup installation6 Squid Soup installation7

Submergence, Oslo from squidsoup on Vimeo.

Submergence is the newest project from the artist collective known as Squidsoup.  Chains of multicolored LED lights – 8,064 lights to be exact – are carefully hung for the installation.  A colorful and immersive environment, Submergence is intended to be experienced from within the installation. The piece performs complex programmed patterns and is responsive to movement.  In fact the piece runs through a four parts to create a twenty minute movement-responsive piece.  Check out these four parts in the video after the jump.

Read More>

Oli-B’s Beautiful Shapeshifting Abstract Street Art

by

Oli-b street art

Oli-b street art

Oli-b street art

When Brussels, Belgium based street artist Oli-B isn’t busy creating his fluid abstractions on the walls of europe he is working in the studio on a variety of personal and commercial collaborations. Starting as a traditional graffiti artist that dealt with the manipulation of typography, Oli-B has gradually transitioned from lettering to characters and finally to the present where the characters have evolved into amorphous shapes and colors that only hint at the presence of a figure with the occasional eye or mouth. (via)

Read More>

Precariously Perched Concrete Blocks By Fabrice Le Nezet

by

Fabrice Le Nezet installation7 Fabrice Le Nezet installation8

Fabrice Le Nezet installation1

Artist and designer Fabrice Le Nezet‘s series Measure precariously positions concrete blocks.  Using metal tubing, Le Nezet supports the concrete in way that makes the industrial materials seem nearly organic.  The brightly colored pipes cling to the concrete like webs.  His intention with the work was to make the materials and its weight easily felt.  He says:

“I worked here on a physical representation of the idea of measure. The objective was to ‘materialize’ tension in a sense, to make the notions of weight, distance and angle palpable…This work lies in the context of my search for purification around raw materials such as concrete and metal. This is why I played with simple shapes which catch light and transcend the volume structure.”

Read More>

Jon Kessler’s Installations Questions The Nature Of Reality

by

KesslerInstalation2 KesslerInstallation

KesslerInstalation6

Jon Kessler’s installations respond to our current information-saturated culture where the search for the self often occurs within the realm of digital media. His most recent exhibition, “The Web“, immerses viewers in our technology obsessed world. Cameras and surveillance equipment abound, constantly capturing and clicking photos and videos of participants. The installation itself is a conceptual clusterfuck that suggests our importance of ritualistic clicking over what’s actually being captured with the clicks. His other work similarly addresses themes of capture, surveillance, fame, and mass media by using related techniques. These installations confuse us and ask us to consider the nature of reality and the authority we grant to technology and mass media with regard to our own identities.

Read More>

Sohei Nishino’s Collaged City Maps

by

Sohei Nishino photography5 Sohei Nishino photography10

Sohei Nishino photography9

Photographer Sohei Nishino creates unique maps to document memories more than geography.  An avid traveler, Sohei snaps countless photographs on his trips around the world.  By hand, he recreates the city from his many images as one large collage.  Not intended to be accurate representation, the ‘map’ is a record of the city as he experienced it.  He’s recorded trips to cities such as London, Paris, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Osaka, Berlin, and more.  To get an idea of the way the concept works check out the first two images – a ‘map’ of New York and details from the collage.

Read More>

Amanda Boe’s Poetic Photos Of The In-Between

by

Amanda Boe Amanda Boe Amanda Boe

Reveling in the small, quiet corners of everyday life, Bay Area photographer Amanda Boe explores themes of isolation, curiosity and mise-en-scene in her strange, stunning work. When looking through images from her series Here and There, it’s easy to let your mind wander into each frame, gently prompted to think about time, place, and what it feels like to be “passing through.” The crisp simplicity of her work is charged with her natural sensibilities as a curious, highly-engaged observer—collecting visual treats as she moves through the world. Boe investigates the places in-between the larger moments of life, and reports back with work that is meditative, personal and poetic.

Read More>