Totemic

In Alaska and Canada, I looked at a lot of First Nation totem poles. Each is beautiful and unique. I also saw the work of the great, Bill Reid, a comtemporary carver. The color photograph is of is of his sculpture, Raven and The First Men at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. It depicts part of a Haida creation myth. The Raven represents the Trickster figure common to many mythologies. The totem poles also led me to think about the treatment of First Nation Peoples, and led me to support this project on Kickstarter, the Survivors Totem Pole. They need less than $907.00 to finish the pole and make a base for it. The master carver is Skundaal (Bernie Williams), from the Haida and Coast Salish Nations. She is the only female apprentice of the late master Haida carver, Bill Reid. I am glad the tradition of totem poles is still alive.

everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything

This blog title was the title of a really wonderful Douglas Coupland show I saw at the Vancouver Art Gallery. His work addresses Canadian culture, language, and the presence of technology in modern life. He also has a whopping sense of humor. Some of my favorite works are made with what we might call upcycled or recycled materials. This is a foreign concept in northern Canada where everything is used and reused in a variety of ways—it is just business as usual. Go Canada!

I do so love Tom Sachs...

Tom and James do some hard work!

Tom Sachs new paintings and sculptures at Sperone Westwater remind us of the creativity of artists and the laborious work that goes into the creation of an art object. It also showcases the totally groovy way artists use materials and techniques like resin or  pyrography, where "paint strokes" are burned and etched into wood.

His cultural iconography from McDonalds to James Brown addresses the conception, production, consumption and circulation of modern-day stuff.

My  favorite seen here is "James Brown’s Hair Products" (2009) and relates to color studies by artists such as Albers and Richter.

There's also a nice interview in "Huffpo" with lots if pix. See Keeping Time With Tom Sachs: An Interview With the Artist .

Art as Sharp as a Pencil!

Dalton Getty turns ordinary pencils into miniature sculptures. Working slowly sometimes an individual sculpture taking 2 and a 1/2 years.He uses only a blade, a sewing needle and very bright light.

In the fast moving internet age, these hark back to kinder simpler times.

And lest you think that there is not a pencil carving world out there...

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Hello Columbus

What is there about the Midwest that makes you want to drive long distances to look at weird roadside attractions? Sighted near Columbus, Ohio during my Art and Tech residency at the Wexner Center for Arts.






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Yuken Teruya

Yuken Teruya — amazing paper cutting. Here he's turning toilet paper rolls back into trees—a remarkable feat of recycling. And you wonder what I think about when...I need say no more.

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Au Natural Part 2

Continuing with our concept of natural intervention, I've come up on a couple of resonant oddities relative to the placement of rocks.

One is a story on Current by Elisabeth Wood, It follows two weekenders who spend their weekends balancing rocks and have been doing it for the last seven years.


The second is a project at cool(E)motion. A series of large rock sculptures were created hoping to draw attention to climate change.

The third group are photographs by Kurt of balanced rocks in upstate New York at Ashokan.

Interventions all, societal, political, spiritual and maybe even artistic.










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Leonardo...Drew

I stopped by Sikkema Jenkins Saturday night for the opening of a solo exhibition of new work by Leonardo Drew. He is a friend via my time at the Vermont Studio Center. He creates dynamic large-scale sculptural installations, which incorporate created, manipulated and found materials such as paper, wood, tree branches and roots, rust and mud. His work stuns with humble materials in the service of sophisticated shapes and arrangement. His opening was all abuzz, and he oh so added to the general excitement wearing a bowler and a pair of peacock feather pants.

Love is a funny thing...

These are snaps of a a large scale sculptural installation, "afterparty." It was created by the architectural firm MOS, architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample. I saw it at P.S. 1 last year, and I keep thinking about it. It is part of the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centers joint Young Architects Program (YAP), an annual series of competitions that gives emerging architects the opportunity to build projects conceived for P.S.1’s facility in Long Island City, Queens.

The objective of the project is to provide visitors with an outdoor recreational area for the summer—a much-needed refuge in an urban environment—making the best use of the pre-existing space and available materials. The architects follow a program with a tight budget, and are involved in every aspect of the design, development, and construction of the project.

I experienced it as a large furry tent city. Love is a funny thing...

Little Pig #3 is making Art!

The big bad wolf won't blow this down. This amazing brick sculpture at Pike Street between Division Street and East Broadway, was built by a pig robot. Developed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, Architecture and Digital Fabrication, ETH Zurich , in conjunction with NYC Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program, Storefront for Art and Architecture has created the first architecture project to be digitally fabricated on site, brick by brick, at 1:1 scale. Once the Truck sized robot departed, it left a beautiful undulating sculpture, composed of thousands of bricks. On one of the days I passed it by, Kurt just had to photograph it with his new LEGO Digital Camera. Brick to brick, a siren call?

Stargazer

I'm always interested in how people market their art. I saw this piece by Linda Scott, sitting in a field and pulled over to look. It's positioned on a road leading to the Hamptons, a place where people might have yards big enough to host a monumental sculpture. I liked too that her URL was front and center. Let's just hope that the birds aren't too critical.

Highline #2

The inaugural artwork on the High Line, The River Flows Both Ways, by Spencer Finch is one of the additional pleasures of the Highline. The title of this work comes from the original Native American word for the Hudson River, Muhheakantuck. This work is located on the High Line between 15th and 16th Streets, where the High Line passes through the Chelsea Market building.

Finch transformed the existing windows with 700 individually crafted panes of colored glass representing the water conditions on the Hudson River over a single day. Finch photographed the Hudson River 700 times from the deck of a boat and selected an individual pixelfrom each image and matched each pixel color to a pane of glass.

This installation is presented in partnership with Creative Time, and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, and is made possible by a generous grant from The Rockefeller Foundation's New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. This project was made possible, in part, through the generous support of Chelsea Market and in-kind support from Jaroff Design and Mison Concepts.

Delicious

Sometimes sculpture is so delicious. The new Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Roman galleries—an entire wing housing over 5,300 objects in more than 30,000 square feet—is where the restaurant with the fountain used to be—how New York. Plus, offering a curatorial perspective on this, is Carlos Picón, Curator in Charge, Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lisa Mona, Jon Lisa, Mona Berge, Jon Berge, Mona Lisa

I was remiss in not including my friend, Jon Berge, in the Mona Lisa column. I'd forgotten he did a wonderful piece on the Mona Lisa. Berge showed a poster of the Mona Lisa to 100 inner-city children aged 7 to 14 and asked them to explain what the portrait of the Mona Lisa looks like to someone can't see or feel.

The project was created to be tactile, so that the visual aspect of the piece is not the focus. The tactility of the piece is further reinforced by the use of materials in their natural state.

The children's responses are incorporated into the piece in multiple ways. All 100 statements are thumb-tacked to the wall, forming a horizontal rectangle. In addition, four of the statements were translated into Braille, and mounted on birch wood panels. Each of those panels is the same size as the "original" Mona Lisa. The panels are hung in a horizontal row floating above the statements, held by a pair of bronze hands. All the panels are placed on the wall at the eye level of children and of people in wheelchairs. In addition, touching the piece activates a digital recording of the children reading their statements.

Jon Lisa Mona Berge, this one's for you!

Statuesque

New York, changing, mutating, like a giant coral reef, watched by stony Little Orphan Annie eyes.