We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important message from your environment courtesy of Jung Lee, master translator, whose photographs place neon signage in unconventional places, working as emotive subtitles.
Each piece reminds us– it’s not necessarily the people we are searching for in relation to love, but the lingering romanticism of time and space: the feeling of earth cradling our fall.
As the Fondation Cartier points out, ‘a Ron Mueck exhibition is a rare event.” His hyperrealistic sculptures are worked over carefully for countless hours. Thus new work is especially exciting. Mueck’s current exhibit at the Fondation Cartier introduces three new sculptures. Couple Under an Umbrella, featured here, illustrates Mueck’s style well. His amazingly lifelike sculptures are only betrayed as inanimate objects by their surreal size. The giant couple beside their creator makes for a bewildering sense of scale and reality. [via]
Igor Eskinja’s simplistic installations are elegant and optical illusory. Using basic and inexpensive materials such as tape, wires, and cords, Eskinja practices his art with precise measurements and an architectural eye. His work straddles the transition between 2D and 3D perception. He thoughtfully uses the space of the wall and floor of his installations, requiring viewers to stand at a particular angle in order to experience the effect given in these photos. The simplicity of his form and the perception between what is visible and not introduce space for interpretation and meaning. Oftentimes, after the installation is over, the work is thrown out due to the instability of his work, drawing attention to the impermanence of the forms he creates.
The work of artist Adel Abdessemed is at once direct and poetic. He often uses common imagery and objects as a point of departure. However, the mundane beginnings of these objects only further underscore the weighty nature of his art. Abdessemed’s installations are able to provoke a sudden impact of its viewer. Still, the installations communicate complex ideas that unfold over extended viewing. At times controversial, his work is effective in piquing thought and discussion.
With a toxic mix of oil-based paint, the surfaces of artist Claire Falkenberg‘s large-scale photos are transformed into mysterious and eerie clouds. The ominous, milky clouds obscure the space directly in front of the photographer, delaying the viewer’s ability to understand what lies just under the surface of each picture plane. This inclusion is generous, because it offers another layer of surface detail to the viewer who is willing to inspect the ghostly swirls of oil paint. The slick, snapshot-style images of trash slowly begin to reveal themselves—vanishing almost entirely at the center, and bringing into question just exactly what Falkenberg has chosen to cover up in her series.
Science never ceases to amaze us with its bizarre, powerful and sometimes even beautiful. Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has managed to create tiny flower like sculptures out of crystals. Now crystals are commonly known for having hard jagged edges. However Noorduin’s crystals buck convention with their organic shapes that were created by manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid through a chemical reaction between Barium Chloride and Sodium Silicate. (via)
“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes.” -Wim L. Noorduin as told to Caroline Perry
With your face close to Jacob Everett‘s ball point pen drawings, you’ll notice they look very similar to the endless swirling pen marks of a distracted mind. The kind of meaningless doodles we may do while speaking on the phone. If you zoom out, however, the doodles turn into detailed portraits of celebrities. For his Well Known Faces series, Everett painstakingly arranges the tiny swirls to create huge portraits. First, he sketches and graphs his subjects before layering them in swirls section by section. He says of his work:
“I am interested in the contrast between the minute, repetitive mark-making and the highly personal image that is created. The process is similar to mass production. I work from photographs, concentrating on one section of the face at a time. Over several shifts spent in this way, the work culminates in a finished product which is, paradoxically, an authentic and personal portrait.”
In a way, endlessness is a fundamental characteristic of gifs. However, the work of Turkish artist Erdal Inci, highlights this aspect of a medium in a style that is especially hypnotic and creepy. Inci has worked in video for nearly ten years. He’s since translated work into gifs using his same clone and light effects. In them, he seems to produce an endless hoodied army of himself marching, sliding down handrails, hopping up and down stairs. Though the action is brief, its repetitive nature makes it difficult to pull away your eyes. All of the Erdal Inci clones in lockstep trudge on together until we manage to close the window. [via]
