Bryan Olson lives and works in North Carolina. He combines vintage imagery to form an ongoing science fiction themed narrative. Many sci-fi elements are prevalent; portals, UFOs, analytical graphs, and celestial bodies are common in his work.The collages represent our never ending fascination with the unknown and the search for our place in the Universe.(via)
The work of Matthew Picton is something more than a map, even something more than a model city. He meticulously builds cities from paper. Each buildings wall is built from a strip of paper leaving its interior empty. In a way his three dimensional maps get at the personality of a city. Speaking about cartography Picton says,
“There is some intrinsic quality to cartography that goes beyond the scientific document – a beauty of form and detail, a record of past times and places, something that lives as a world in which imagination can flow; places to re-visit, places to re-imagine, a world to re-make itself in the imagination.” [via]
Several of his pieces depict cities before and after a natural disaster or war. The charred strips of paper mark burnt or crumbled buildings. Pockets of burnt paper seem more like injuries than a cold record of a past fact.
Nicolas Deshayes lives and works in France. He utilizes vacuum-formed plastic, anodized aluminum, and polystyrene to create textured abstractions. His compositions remain static until an area is covered in the formed plastic, the work then resembles flowing color fields. Like glimpses into another dimension his sculptures ebb and flow as colors swirl around the viewer.
Central to Doug Aitken’s “100 YRS” exhibition at 303 Gallery is a new “Sonic Fountain,” in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the variable symphonic structure of song. The water itself appears milky white, as if imbued and chemically altered by its aural properties, a basic substance turned supernatural. The amplified sound of droplets conjures the arrhythmia of breathing, and along with the pool’s primordial glow, the fountain creates its own sonic system of tracking time.
Behind a cavernous opening carved into the gallery’s west wall is “Sunset (black),” a sculptural work that resembles cast lava rock in texture and spells out the word SUNSET as it glows from behind, its letters forming a relic of the entropy and displacement inherent in the literal idea of a sunset. Viewed from and obscured behind a hole in the wall, the sculpture appears as cosmic debris, as if pulled from a parallel world where a sunset is only an idea, obfuscated by detritus of the age of post-everything, a reductionist standpoint between the modes of pop and minimalism, its glow fading into the next realm. Also on view is the mirrored sculpture “MORE (shattered pour)”. Like a time-piece, the work creates a kaleidoscope of reflections of all that surrounds it. As if it were a fragmented film, “MORE (shattered pour)” creates a literal manifestation of the present and aspirational escapism, which cannot be viewed without glimpsing a piece of one’s self within the work’s reflections. Another refraction of time is glimpsed through “Fountain (Earth Fountain)”, created from plexiglas letters spelling the word “ART”, through which a slurry of moist dirt is pumped, physical earth perpetually redoubling and standing in for itself. The word ART itself subverts the entropy of time, creating a holding pattern that organic matter cannot escape from. The flickering lightbox “not enough time in the day” completes the communicative supercurrent of shimmering malaise, its letters overlapping as if seen inebriated, somehow both more profound and less understandable. The work creates a cycle that is both hypnotic and inescapable. (via)
Watch a video of the show after the jump!
Chic & Artistic is a Paris based multi-disciplined creative studio working in a wide array of mediums and styles. Their Panto’ N’ Roll series caught my eye and immediately made me chuckle. Mixing pop culture references, typography and Pantone color chips, they have created a humorous word/image association game for all of us to enjoy. (via)
These are not photos of miniatures or models. Rather these are images from photographer Ben Thomas‘ Cityshrinker series and are actual cities around the world. Thomas uses what is called a ’tilt-shift technique’. Among other things, the technique basically corrects the distortion caused by perspective. This correction often has the appearance of miniaturizing the camera’s subject. Thomas’ images present the world as if it were a toy. Some of the world’s largest cities seem to shrink into playful places. The images turn a lighthearted eye onto some of our favorite places. [via]
Dan Bradica lives and works in Chicago. Using extremely basic materials (paper and fluorescent lights) he obscures, highlights, and examines the world around him. An image of stacked cardboard boxes in a field of barren trees becomes a metaphor for the consequences of deforestation. In other work pieces of bright paper take form of apparitions and playfully haunt the scene. These simple alterations reinvigorate the landscape and simultaneously comment on waste, excess, and consumption.
Diane Meyer distorts sections of personal photos resulting in compositions that comment on memory. In her own words: “This series is based on photographs taken at various points in my life and arranged by location. Sections of the images have been obscured through a layer of embroidered pixels sewn directly into the photograph. The embroidery deteriorates sections of the original photograph forming a new pixelated layer of the original scene. The project refers to the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs become nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past.” (via)
