Jeff Koons

If you’re the type to stop and smell the roses you probably have some appreciation for the natural world. Unfortunately, in this age of technology, less and less people take time to connect with our natural surroundings, which makes the works we’re featuring here so important. The works of Jeff Koons, Ackroyd and Harvey, Binh Danh and Portia Munson all take plant-life and re-contextualize it; the viewer is faced with something familiar cast in a new light. In the cases of Koons and Ackroyd and Harvey, the scale of their works looms over the viewer to remind them that the nature of all things are continually evolving, even that of human civilization. With Portia Munson’s Garden installations, we literally walk into a new world that is groomed yet overgrown, familiar yet psychedelic. Binh Danh’s plant-based portraits balance the fragile surface of the leaves with the powerful imagery of the victims of the 1970’s Cambodian unrest. Though the works are largely different, one thing binds them together, the power of nature to communicate a feeling and a message without words.

Binh Danh

Confront the natural world in your living room with Woolly Pocket. Woolly Pocket lets you transform spaces, making vertical gardens easy to install and maintain. . Our favorite aspect of Woolly Pocket is their Woolly School Gardens project that connect schools looking to start a garden with community members looking to support their efforts. Help kids give nature new meaning  by visiting Woolly School Garden and find a school near you to sponsor.

 
Woolly Pocket

Portia Munson

Portia Munson

Woolly Pocket

Ackroyd and Harvey

Ackroyd and Harvey

Woolly Pocket

Jeff Koons

Two of my favorite upcoming artists, Timothy Bergstrom & Denise Kupferschmidt recently opened up solo shows respectively @ Halsey McKay in East Hapmton. Tim brings a new suite of his gluey material paintings that visually imitate sounds, while Kupferschmidt shows a series of studies surrounding a sculptural installation, as well as a lovely mural. Good stuff, more after the jump.

They’re the reason flowers smell so nice

Dutch art collective WE MAKE CARPETS create a contemporary interpretation of the centuries-old medium of carpets but with the weaving method, materials, and patterns reflect the 21st century. At a distance, you simply see a decorative carpet. Closer inspection will, however, surprise you as WE MAKE CARPETS uses everyday items to create large carpets.

Products that normally have no value once they have been used, such as plastic forks, plasters, paving tiles, pasta, cotton balls and pegs are arranged in an inventive way to form a graphic pattern. WE MAKE CARPETS are inspired by the color, shape and possibilities of the discarded and cheap materials.  The result is not just a decorative carpet, but an object that makes us think about the consumer society that produces these ‘weaving materials’.

British Artist Andy Goldsworthy is a master of ephemeral work, capturing the beauty of nature and tempering it with the fleeting nature of all organic things. Each one of his works is a collaboration with nature, and with each piece he strives to gain a closer understand of nature through these intimate interactions. Using his hands and “found tools,” Goldsworthy’s work is a celebration of the world outside the buildings that humans spend their lives inside. His photographs capture the sculpture moments after they are complete, afterwards the sculptures live on changing with the wind, rain and elements until it ceases to exist as Goldsworthy shaped it.

Such is the nature of the Woolly Pocket. Woolly Pocket allows the urban dweller to manipulate nature and incorporate plants into formerly inhospitable territory. Woolly Pocket can take over a wall, fence, living room or any structure and make you the sculptor of your surroundings. Our favorite aspect of Woolly Pocket is their Woolly School Gardens project that connect schools looking to start a garden with community members looking to support their efforts. Help kids get their hands dirty by visiting Wolly School Garden and find a school near you to sponsor.

Woolly Pockets

Andy Goldsworthy

Woolly Pockets

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

Whether its an image of a pizza with a phalic sausage sticking out of it or a large mural of ornate pattern made out of plastic flowers and cheap snack food the art work of Adam Parker Smith has a tongue in cheek comic conceptual approach that will make you think, laugh, and say “why didn’t I think of that” all at once. I especially love his tapestries made out of hundreds of friendship bracelets. See these and more after the jump.

This Side of Paradise (I Lost All My Money in the Great Depression and All I Got Was This Room)
2012
This three-dimensional wall treatment for a former bedroom at the Andrew Freeman Home underscores the fact that the “wealth” that manifested itself here was in fact an illusion, created for the comfort of its residents. The greatly enlarged pattern emulates a traditional wallpaper motif, and is articulated with an array of plastic flowers and fruit, varnished baked goods, elegantly wrapped hard candies, jelly beans, and costume jewelry. While the materials allude to opulence, they are purchased inexpensively at a dollar store. There is cheery hopefulness to the arrangement that suggests both optimism in the midst of loss, and the absurdity of keeping up a good facade.

Alice Anderson’s giant installations created out thousands of feet of red colored doll hair are a thing of wonder. Selected for its relationship to her own bright red hair, Anderson selected the material to refer to her childhood where she invented rituals based around her hair to calm her anxieties when left home alone. Draped over buildings, walls, and every imaginable surface, Anderson’s work is just as much about reinterpreting an everyday material as it is about coming to terms with the ghosts of her youth. (via)

Designer Revital Cohen’s The Immortal installation consists of  five hacked life support machines so that they each keep one another alive.  Each machine is circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.

The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering. Watch a full video of this piece in action after the jump. (via)

In his installation, reverse of volume RG at the Rice Gallery in Houston Texas, Yasuaki Onishi uses the simplest materials — plastic sheeting and black hot glue — to create a monumental, mountainous form that appears to float in space. The process that he calls “casting the invisible” involves draping the plastic sheeting over stacked cardboard boxes, which are then removed to leave only their impressions. This process of “reversing” sculpture is Onishi’s meditation on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind.
Onishi wanted to create an installation that would change as visitors approached and viewed it from outside of the glass wall to inside the gallery space. Seen through the glass, the undulating, exterior surface and dense layers of vertical black strands are primarily visible. At first glance, standing in the center of the gallery’s foyer, it appears to be a suspended, glowing mass whose exact depth is difficult to perceive. Upon entering the gallery and walking along the left or the right side, the installation transforms into an airy opening that can be entered. Almost like stepping into an inner sanctum or cave-like chamber, the semi-translucent plastic sheeting and wispy strands of hot glue envelop the viewer in a fragile, tent-like enclosure speckled with inky black marks. Visitors can walk in and out of the contemplative space, observing how the simplest qualities of light, shape, and line change. (via)