Studio Toogood. La Cura

Studio Toogood. La Cura:









La Cura, a series of intimate performances for Milan Design Week, April 2012

all images: ALESSANDRO MARIA NACAR
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The last project of London interior designers STUDIO TOOGOOD, presented earlier this month at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, transcends disciplines and reemphasizes their constant preoccupation with material and experimentation.

This year, visitors to TOOGOOD‘s space were greeted by a white-on-white installation like a ‘hospital for the senses‘ and a bespoke scent in the air that was commissioned for the event from the perfumer 12.29, DAWN and SAMANTHA GOLDWORM, which is designed to capture the essence of the colour white in olfactory form.

Whilst experiencing a therapeutic sound and light composition produced in collaboration with KITE & LASLETT, visitors are offered an elixir created by food designers ARABESCHI DI LATTE, before being presented with an enamel dish and ball of clay to mould and shape into something that reflects their own individual expression and mood. These artworks — called The Cures — are collected at the end of each performance and clustered together in the Pavilion during the course of the week to create a collective sculpture.

From a Bedroom Art Show to Iraq

From a Bedroom Art Show to Iraq:
British conceptual artist Jeremy Deller’s first large-scale piece, Open Bedroom, was truly an at-home job. One day in 1993 he found himself home alone. His parents had gone on holiday. With the house his own for a blissful, but short, time, Deller turned his room—mess, posters, and all—into an exhibition.
Since then, Deller has played with a variety of visual media in a number of projects, including The Battle of Orgreave, for which he won the Turner Prize in 2004. His work is often tinged with political undertones: Battle, for example, dealt with social unrest in Britain in the 1980s. However, it wasn’t until this February that he managed to stage a full-scale survey of his creative output. A retrospective, Joy In People, is now on view at London’s Hayward Gallery in the South Bank Center, showcasing several of his successes, as well as a room of select failures.
Among the many pieces, 2012’s So Many Ways To Hurt You, which scrutinizes boxer Adrian Street, stands out. Street, the son of a Welsh coal miner, became famous as a pioneering “glam” wrestler with a penchant for glitzy pink clothing. According to Deller, he still packs a mean punch, even though he’s currently 72 years old.
The political slant of Deller’s work is apparent in pieces such as 2009’s It Is What It Is, which consists of an overturned car that was damaged in a bombing in Baghdad set next to two people engaged in a discussion of the unstable area. Maps of the U.K. and Iraq are hung next to each other, featuring each country’s landscape dotted with the other country’s cities. And yet, the heaviness of the concepts and the politics are offset by whimsical touches. Three machines at the end of the exhibition offer viewers the chance to stamp their programs for a lasting reminder of the show.




Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is, 2009. Photo by Linda Nylind.




Jeremy Deller, Valerie’s Snack Bar, 2009. Photo by Linda Nylind.

SEVEN Heats Up the Boiler

SEVEN Heats Up the Boiler:
Along with Frieze and NADA, SEVEN celebrates its New York debut this week after two years at Art Basel Miami Beach. While your initial inclination may be to lump SEVEN in with the many satellite fairs, it feels more like a group show.
SEVEN is a collaboration between seven galleries from New York and London created as an alternative to the traditional art fair model. Each gallery mounts a solo installation that puts the focus on the artist. Taking place in Pierogi’s project space in an old factory boiler room, SEVEN offers a platform for artists and galleries without the sterile cubicle feel of a large convention hall.
SEVEN New York is significantly smaller than its Miami counterpart, but each artist’s work is stellar and the exhibition is cohesive. Some works are site-specific, such as Emil Lukas’ Skin, which modifies the industrial space, or Ben Gocker’s chaotic arrangement of objects, which is best described as a “visual poem.” There is a common thread of collage and combinations of disparate imagery through all of the works. Hew Locke, a Briton of Guyanese descent, created his own coat of arms from exotic imagery, mimicking the cultural adaptation of colonized peoples and the fungibility of culture and identity. Artist Gil Yefman works with knitted sculptures, a traditionally female medium of work, to reconcile his identification as both a man and woman.
Check out a preview of works from SEVEN below.




Hew Locke, Chariot of the Gods, 2009. Courtesy of Hales Gallery.




Ben Gocker, Bad Dreams, 2012. Courtesy of PPOW.




Andy Yoder, 2012. Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery.




Diana Cooper, Untitled, 2012. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery.




Dawn Clements, Untitled (B & W Table), 2010. Courtesy of Pierogi Gallery.




Gil Yefman, Blood Moon, 2010. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.




Emil Lukas, Skin, 2012. Courtesy of Bravinlee Programs.

Salvador Orara

Salvador Orara:




Salvador Orara
Work from Affection Research Lab
“(ARL) Affection Research Lab: Affection Stations is a thesis project by Salvador Orara searching for ways to reconnect to our devices to facilitate revelations. They are designed as immersive installations which listen, and transcode a device’s unique incidental sound, exposing them to be more than just tools, toys, or gizmos but content generators revealing our intimate relation to them.
There are three stations: the Sound Station, Kinetic Station, and the Light Station. These “primary” stations are a means to provoke larger conversations on the presence of our electronic residues, also known as electromagnetic activity. Rather than designing to protect or provide awareness of these imperceptible activities, the Stations provoke conversations by becoming physical, tangible, and perceptible.

The Affection Stations are for the public. The Stations provide a space for one to discover their own meaning, and their own affection on how their device presents itself through the stations. They are a means to poetically inform our generation and of those to come, of the materiality of our time. The Stations are a means to express the possibilities of new relationships with our devices — a paradigm shift on how they are constructed, physically, computationally, electronically. The Stations embrace the inevitable electromagnetic spectrum, and exposes a new realm for design to take hold.”
via Creative Applications

Haroon Mirza. \|\|\|\| \|\|\

Haroon Mirza. \|\|\|\| \|\|\:







HAROON MIRZA, \|\|\|\| \|\|\

exhibition view at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, May 2012

Photo: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, GUNNAR MEIER
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A characteristic of HAROON MIRZA‘s installations is that you hear them before you see them, listening to them by approaching the space in which they take shape. And the exhibition entitled \|\|\|\| \|\|\  at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is no exception. Part of a series of works with which MIRZA is exploring the idea of site-specificity, \|\|\|\| \|\|\ exploits architectonic properties of the exhibition space reducing the installation to its essential, physical components.
The artist creates three minimalist sculptures with these light chains in the primary colours red, green and blue, which are stretched between columns and walls in the first and last rooms. The sounds which the lights generate when going on and off are amplified many times and transported to the middle exhibition room, where they will be heard as a rhythmic composition. MIRZA is thus transforming the Kunst Halle into a new wave walk-through installation.
HAROON MIRZA (*1977, London) graduated from the Winchester School of Art (Fine Art Painting) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Painting & Drawing). Subsequently he studied Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art & Design as well as Critical Practice and Theory at Goldsmiths College. He now lives and works between Sheffield and London. In 2011 he won the Silver Lion Award at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and in 2010 he was awarded the Northern Art Prize. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, London.
\|\|\|\| \|\|\  by HAROON MIRZA is on view at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen through July 1, 2012.

Spontaneous Symmetry Violation .01

Spontaneous Symmetry Violation .01:

Spontaneous Symmetry Violation .01 (2003) by Recursion VideoLab, 1h 10 min of great visual video manifestations, according with Jason Stephens, more madness from the VHS vaults of the VideoLab. "Recursion VideoLab is a subjective science research project devoted to the exploration and expression of complex emergent behavior through a variety of video-related processes applied to immersive video environments, club visuals, performance art, video projection therapy, and intelligent healing spaces. The Video Lab consists of intertwined video mixers, cameras, computers, sensors, switches, monitors, projectors, controllers, and playback mechanisms which are organized to allow complex video patterns to emerge from simple interactions between components. The process is a type of Generative Art, related to Artificial Life, which can be understood in terms of Complexity Theory and Wolfram’s New Kind of Science. The resulting output is best described as a Dynamic Mandala or a highly evolved descendant of the creatures found in Conway’s Game of Life." See more;

Music: BOOMIN' SIDE / TRIPPER SIDE (Derek, mixed tape 1992, 0:00 - 42:00) 

Music: Digital Division | Live @ Treewood (Derek & Eric, 1993, 42:00 - end). 

via | VIDEO CIRCUITS

Trace Heavens by James Nizam

Trace Heavens by James Nizam:

James Nizam is showing (4 - 26 May, 2012) at Gallery Jones "Trace Heavens", an exhibition consisting in a photograph series about his very impressive geometric light sculptures made using directly the sunlight. I found a really good information about "Trace Heavens" and its process at Canadian Art; 

"The large black and white photographs depict the transformation of darkened rooms into uncanny light sculptures that intersect elegant geometry with math-class daydreaming. Bridling sunlight into streamlined rays via perforated and sliced walls, and with the aid of artificial fog to intensify the slants of light, Nizam creates imagery that might bend our perception of photography."  See more;

"The majority of works in the exhibition were created in a darkened studio space where small mirrors were fastened to ball joints for easy pivoting, perfect for manipulating the light streaming through holes in the walls (see Drill Holes Through Studio Wall) The logistics were no small feat; Nizam sometimes had as little as five minutes of perfect sunlight in which to create his images. And the process of waiting for those brief periods no doubt felt like déjà vu for a photographer who has spent plenty of time in dim rooms watching dust dancing in sunlight." More info at Canadian Art.

Aérial

Aérial:

Aérial by French artist Baptiste Debombourg flows like a monumental wave of broken glass into the Column Hall of the former Benedictine abbey ‘Brauweiler’ in Cologne. Carrying with it the light that passes measured through the windows. The crystalline structure of the Broken seems petrified, frozen in a moment of unrestrained movement. It took about 420 hours and two tons of glass to complete the project. Baptiste Debombourg explained ‘the mind is everything. The material is the servant of spiritual.’

All images © Krupic Kersting Galerie | Via: Colossal

tcct

tcct:

All images © Luc Roymans