Art – Page 9 – Kristen Baumlier

Category: Art

The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang : Collaborative Gunpowder Drawings

Posted on December 22, 2011December 22, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Drawings with a bang? Cai Guo-Qiang is an artist who was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, and has a background in stage design. While living in Japan, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings. This led to experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and creating explosion events. The projects explore ideas of Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues, and create a site-specific approach to culture and history.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab (“mirage”) is a large exhibition of more than 50 works at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. The show includes his signature gunpowder drawings, large-scale site-specific installations and a large explosion event of Black Ceremony. The works in the show explore the historic and contemporary symbolism of the Arabian Gulf and its seafaring culture, as well as Islamic history.

In October 2011, with the help of 200 local volunteers, Cai Guo Qiang produced a series of large-scale gunpowder drawings that trace the maritime route from ancient Arabia to Quanzhou. Volunteers helped with the production of the works which involved placing large pieces of paper on the floor, positioning stencils, and dusting gunpowder on the pieces. Boards and bricks were put on top of the paper and the artist and his trained team would light the pieces with the volunteers watching the explosions.

The process was open to the public, and the final drawings are images reminiscent of the botanical patterns seen in Islamic decorative art. A video is online that documented the production of the piece.

Links:

Video of 200 Doha Residents work with Cai Guo-Qiang to make Explosive Art

Cai Guo Qiang Website

Mathaf Website

Paula Hayes: Living Works of Art

Posted on December 16, 2011December 12, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Paula Hayes is an artist and designer who makes creative work with terrariums and other organic materials. She currently has work on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts until December 30, 2011 of recent sculpture as well as some new commissioned work. Her work combines modern contemporary design with plants and natural materials – the end result which is a futuristic terrariums with quirky plants and crystals that resemble slugs, eggs, and other organic forms.

Balancing the role of gardener and sculptor, Hayes works with industrial materials such as hand-blown glass, silicone, and cast acrylic and makes organic shapes that she fills with plants, minerals, and crystals. The pieces are sometimes mounted on pedestals or arranged as necklaces or constellations of “micro-terrariums.”

“It’s only very partially an object. It’s mostly a verb,” Hayes says about her work. Her work brings the outdoors inside and is a contemporary approach to terrariums and does not include fake plants, small bamboo plants, or natural twine (like planters and terrariums of the 1970’s.)

Hayes also created the Wexner Center Roof Garden near the Wexner Center’s entrance, which will feature hearty sedum plants, perennial plantings, grasses, and sculptural planters. The garden is a permanent addition and will change, grow, and be visually interesting in all 4 seasons.

A gardener, landscape designer and artist, she has been commissioned to design and execute gardens for multiple public and private spaces, including Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York, W Hotel Landscape in Miami, and Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

Links:

Paula Hayes’s website and blog

Paula Hayes at Moma – Video

Behind the Scenes: Paula Hayes, Nocturne of the Limax maximus

Wexner Center Exhibition Preview

Paula Hayes Wexner Rooftop Garden Installation

Wireless Drones in the Landscape: Liam Young and Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today

Posted on December 14, 2011December 12, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Tomorrows Thoughts Today is a London-based think tank started by Liam Young and Darryl Chen that explores topics such as urbanism, sustainability, utopia, urban planning, architecture, land use, and public space.

One recent interactive installation was called Electronic Countermeasures and was performed live at the GLOW Festival in Eindhoven NL in the evening. The project is an aerial drone choreography performed by “drone pilots.” Using a local wifi network, the modified glowing “quadrocopters” did a choreographed in-air performance.

Visitors could interact with them by calling specific phone numbers. Dialing the number made the drones break formation, and approach. The drones would light up, flicker and glow while becoming a pirate broadcast network or a mobile infrastructure that passers-by could interact with. The more interaction, the more animated the drones would become.

About the project the artists write, “Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbors. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. In this context the Electronic Countermeasures explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, local, wifi community and pirate file sharing network.

Liam Young will be an Artist in Residence this Spring, and is the first recipient of San Francisco’s Headlands Art Centres ‘ new Architecture/Environment Artist in Residence award. Young’s residency will begin with a series of sorties (or flights/attacks), through the surrounding landscape to survey the ecology and obsolete military technologies of the Marin Headlands. Large-scale maps and drawings will be the basis for a series of small robotic installations and architectural prosthetics, which will be installed on site in the landscape.

The residency will conclude with a series choreographed aerial robotic drone performances titled ‘Birds of Prey’ launched from the abandoned Nike missile silo sites. Also part of the residency will be an intensive interdisciplinary design workshop and curated storytelling event in the surrounding woods.

Image Source:

Tomorrows Thoughts Today

Links:

Tomorrows Thoughts Today – Liam Young and Darryl Chen

Electronic Countermeasures

Desert Rooftops – an installation of “Surburban” Rooftops in Times Square

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Desert Rooftops is a 5,000-square-foot sculpture by artist David Brooks that was recently installed in Times Square that is an a configuration of multiple asphalt shingled rooftops similar to those on suburban developments, new houses, and strip malls. The roofs are built close together, and create a landscape of rooftops, or a image of rolling asphalt dunes or hills.

The piece raises questions issues of the natural and built landscape, and uses humor to present issues about suburban and urban sprawl. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification defines desertification as: land degradation into arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including human activities and climatic variations derived from over-development, over-grazing and an overworked land. The result is often a depleted landscape inhospitable to other life.

Brooks investigates this idea as it applies to housing communities, which devour more and more land and resources each year. By definition, the outcome is equivalent to this very process of desertification.

The Last Lot is a short term donation to Art Production Fund from The Shubert Organization, and is part of the Times Square Alliance’s public art program that works to bring cutting-edge art to Times Square.

The piece will be on view The Last Lot, (46th Street & 8th Avenue) until February 5^th, 2012.

Links:

Desert Rooftops – Art Production Fund

David Brooks

Rare Botanical Prints on View and For Sale – Saturday December 10th

Posted on December 7, 2011December 7, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Last week I stopped by the library at the Cleveland Botanical Garden (CBG) and learned about the upcoming sale of botanical art books, rare prints, and posters which is happening this Saturday December10th in the Eleanor Squire Library. Each year the library has this sale to help raise funds for CBG.

I got a sneak peak at some of the prints, which included some hand colored lithographs, some rare Mary Vaux Walcott prints and some original seed catalogue prints. Gary Esmonde, librarian explained to me that the Walcott prints are extremely rare. They come from a 5 volume set and are rarely split up, either as books or as individual prints.

I got a look at some of the smaller prints that are for sale which included some prints from the late 1800’s, and were various plants and flowers. You could see the plate marks on the print, and the fine lithograph lines lend a quality of detail only seen in prints. One of my favorite prints included a lithograph of a Picotee flower, which has lots of petals in an interesting arrangement.

Some of the books for sale have 30-40 prints inside of them (so you could split the book up later if you want a series of prints), and there are over 160 single prints that will be on display and for sale.

Want to buys some prints – or just take a peek at some interesting botanical prints and books? The sale is open from 10am-5pm, and is free with CBG admission.

For more information, call 216 707-2812 or contact librarian Gary Esmonde at gesmonde@cbgarden.org.

Image Source:

Prints from the CBG library

Links:

Cleveland Botanical Garden

Rare Print Sale @ CBG Information Event Page