I’m obsessed with the emotion of colour. The connection between colour and our psychological being is intrinsic and undeniable. Based on the theories of chromatherapy, this magnificent, multi-coloured LED installation by France’s Superbien makes people feel as good as it looks.
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The photography documenting the project is equally sleek, stunning, and multi-hued. So fresh.
Via Fubiz™
Created by the amazing design, architecutre, and research geniuses at Swiss genius-factory Fabric, their travelling exhibition “Perpetual Sunshine” is pure feel-good. Giving seasonal affective disorder the heave-ho, “Perpetual Sunshine” is a data-based sensory installation made up of 334 high-intensity infared bulbs. The light and heat emanating from the bulbs is calibrated by a computer to match the current temperature in any other part of the world where the sun is currently shining. So even though it might be night-time where you are, you can still be bathed in the exact light and heat glowing, at that moment, on the other side of the world.
Most recently on display at Madrid’s La Noche En Blanco festival, the installation has appeared at both indoor exhibitions and public outdoor events across Europe.
All images © Fabric Ch 2005-2008
Dutch media artist Martijn Hendricks is definitely taking things outside of the box. He takes existing media and other found materials and altering them in way that sometimes enhances the original and sometimes completely undermines it. For examples, in his on-going 2008 project “Untitled (Give Us This Day Our Daily Terror)” he’s taken Hitchcock’s 1963 masterpiece “The Birds”… and digitally removed every bird.
In his video installation “Untitled (12 Glowing Men)” he takes the climactic jury-room scene from 1957’s “12 Angry Men” and haloes the deliberators with a prismatic, heaven-like glow. To me, it’s like a physical manifestation of their emotion and almost as if nature itself is intervening. The light itself spreads and morphs onto the men as each turns his back on the one man you wants to condemn the accused. There’s an intrinsic sanctimony involved in the trial-by-jury system, as if perhaps these men exalt themselves through the act of determining the fate of another. Notice how by the end of the scene, the only man devoid of the ethereal light is the one who’s been shunned by all the others.
Aside from that, it’s stunningly beautiful. Watch “Untitled (12 Glowing Men)”.
Photographer Kristopher Grunert has an obvious eye for taking the (literally) concrete and making it ethereally beautiful. Listen to how exquisitely Grunert explains the passion behind his work: “The engineering, the placement of lights, steel, and concrete – someone, somewhere, poured their efforts into these creations and my objective is to show the beauty that exists there. To me, they are as magnificent as a constellation of stars.”
I feel an affinity for his work because our lives have had a similar trajectory – Grunert was born and raised in Saskatchewan (as was I), and like me he followed a need to create to another side of Canada; his photography led him to Vancouver, where he’s now based. I think that explains another part of why I love his work so much. Growing up in the prairies, you learn a different way to see. There’s not always a lot going on, and so, if you’re artistically inclined, you inherently train you train your eye to dig deeper for subtleties that others might pass over.
I think that’s how, though his subject choices seem at first cold and impersonal – highways, factories, empty parks (all at night), he inevitably captures the light around these solids at the perfect moment. The instant a car’s tail light creates a streak of colour he captures it in parallel to the bridge it’s crossing. As the effluence of a mist fills a highway, he takes the halos of light from the street lamps and finds the moment where he can balance these growing circles and cones in perfect symmetry.
The base of the shots are the industrialized world we’ve created, but I feel like he also uses the energy of nature – qualities of light, the weight of air – to somehow highlight both the invisible geometric structures that have always existed in nature, but also the softness and humanity given to concrete and steel when humans touch it and bring it to their use.
For his Viaduct(s) installation, he mounted several misty blue shots from that series and back-lit them. Imagine coming home into your darkened hallway and instead of flicking on a regular light, being greeted instead by these glowing works of art…
I like fish. I like random shit. So this is right up my alley.
To help celebrate the Lyon Light Festival, France-based artist and designer Benedetto Bufalino created Evasion Urbaine (Urban Escape). Basically, he turned an abandoned phone booth into a big ass aquarium. It’s a little bit awesome.
Created with lighting designer Benoît Deseille, the artist explains that “With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel.“
And throw crackers inside, I’m assuming. Or, since it’s Lyon… dried baguette.
This reminds me of the 50 Nancys I had when I was little. I had 50 Neon Tetras in a tank in my room. I decided that, for ease of communication, it would be best to name them all Nancy. It would have been far too frustrating to try and get Roger’s attention when Martha was in the way, swimming around Lou-Anne and Bartholomew. And if any of those little fuckers decided to hunker down behind the aquatic spaceman guy or the little plastic castle, there would be some serious mass miscommunication going on.
So, it was Nancy for everybody. My parents warned me they would die if I didn’t clean the tank, but I was in Grade Three and didn’t give a shit. Eventually, all the Nancy’s went the way of their ancestors – through the toilet bowl into the big gigantic French phone booth modern art aquarium in the sky.
Goodbye Nancy x 50. My heart will go on…
The Dutch excel beyond the rest of the world when it comes to finding new ways to get fucked up. Here’s another one. Dutch commercial designer, forward thinker, and all around good time guy Marti Guixé is my new favourite person. His Gat Fog party featured a room filled with fog made from gin and tonic. That’s right. He hotboxed the whole place with Beefeater.
I have deep respect for the way the girl in this picture is getting her face right in there. That’s right, bitches – breathe deep.
Held at Casco Projects – the “Office for Art, Design and Theory” – the party used meteorological technology normally used for cultural farming to create the installation. My favourite part of the whole thing (as if breathing alcohol wasn’t enough) are the safety signs they used out front:
“Danger – The Air Contains Alcohol”. Easily the most enticing warning message I’ve ever read and, completely contrary to it’s nature, it makes me feel little to no danger whatsoever. Only happiness. And joy. And an overwhelming desire to move to Holland.
I need this machine. I need it in my house. My office would be good too. Preferably I could just travel around with the mobile version of it, and take a puff when I need à la Céline Dion’s “saline sinus treatments”.
Canadian collage artist Paul Butler takes the experience of art off the wall and turns it into a full-on party. Literally.
A “traveling experimental group studio with a rotating cast”, Collage Party has roamed North America and Europe creating walk-in, full-room cut and paste installations.
Unlike your run of the mill house party, these all-nighters (if the beer bottles and artists sleeping on clipping-strewn tables are any indication) are no-holds-barred creativity jams. The results range from nailing teddy bears to the wall to multi-coloured floor to ceiling construction paper towers to mummifying one of the artists in scraps and taping him to a pillar… when you think about it, why not? Its like pre-school craft time without having a teacher telling you not to eat the paste. No material is off limits as long as you can cut it, draw on it and then stick it to something else.
Having referred to some of his own collages as “the visual equivalent of Prozac”, Butler’s individual works revolve around cutting, taping, pasting and combining found images and objects in way that completely alters their original meaning and creates a whole new visual message. Austere and seemingly simple (taping the words “Go Go Go” on a discarded plastic shopping bag bring up a certainly layered take on the state of consumer culture), it’s that apparent simplicity that makes the deeply meaningful messages within so delicious to uncover.
In just a few words he can dilute these consumerist images into a commentary on what’s really being sold to us – when he glues “Decisions, decisions, decisions” onto a picture of a forest glade the relevancy of what he’s saying becoming subtly and immediately clear.
Butler is also founder of The Other Gallery, a “web-based nomadic gallery” designed to promote up-and-coming Canadian artists.
This is so totally random that you gotta’ love it. That’s right… admit it. You love it. Don’t even try and convince yourself that you don’t, because deep down inside you know you do. It’s a big mother rainbow fruitbowl “Hell, Yes!” sign, and you wish it was on your own house.
The Bowery’s stunning New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Japanese architectural team SANAA, is the first museum in New York City ever built right from the ground up. In all of it’s new contemporary hyper-coolness, NMCA has attached Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-brite 2001 Hell, Yes! to it’s outer façade. The New Museum’s website says that “since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life.”
Ugo sounds like a happy guy to me. All sunshine and lollipops and good times. And he made a colossal sign that looks like a school-girls barrette circa 1986. I love this man and desperately want to take him shopping.
shape+colour 