The architecture and Art team Snarkitecture have been in the art news lately for their installation at the entrance of the Design Miami Pavilion 2012. Dig is an earlier installation from the team featured here. Often mixing elements of architecture design, art, and performance, Dig was at once an installation and a performance.
The team filled the Storefront for Art and Architecture with solid architectural foam. The artists then excavated a network of tunnels through the foam and inhabited them for the following month. The performance was an artful investigation of contemporary architecture based on excavating rather than building, as well as building for necessity.
Polish artist Lukasz Patelczyk paints censored landscapes. The series, actually titled Censored Landscape, depicts natural scenes in severe blacks and whites. Portions of each landscape is hidden behind a white block. Some of the paintings titled variations of Avalanche and Tornado censor the effects of such natural disasters. The censorship leaves a monument like shape in the foreground of indifferent, even harsh landscapes.
Artist Jesse Treece specializes in collage. Using vintage imagery, he creates surreal scenes and portraits. His collages nearly feel like lost scenes of 1970’s science-fiction and horror films. The collages often juxtapose science with nature, inside with outside, and large with small. Treece makes effective use of familiar imagery and styles to create entirely new artwork. The immersive pieces tell fantastic stories, as well as the mundane ones of life through a flood of images.
Photographer Thomas Jackson captures every day objects traveling in packs. His series Emergent Behavior features plastic cups, leaves, sticky notes, gathering into swarms. These mundane objects fly through city streets and forests, mostly whimsical but at times menacing. They reference self-organizing systems often found in nature such as herding, swarms, insect mounds, and so on. Regarding this Jackson says:
“The images attempt to tap into the fear and fascination that those phenomena tend to evoke, while creating an uneasy interplay between the natural and the manufactured and the real and the imaginary”. (via)
Illustrator, graphic designer, and artist Jordan Speer created his own action figures (or at least illustrations of them.) Recreating the familiar packaging of childhood toys, Speer fills each one with a unique figurine. While nearly nostalgia inducing, each toy is also slightly sinister featuring warnings such as “slightly toxic”, “forbidden”, and “highly illegal”. Speer’s figures are enigmatic characters, unfamiliar and unwilling to reveal much beyond their name and accessories. Which would you collect?
Artist David Meyer‘s installations could blow away at any moment. He forms these installations of letters and figures from sifted flour. Concentric circles of words spelled in capital script letters surround a gallery pillar. The seeming permanence of the letters disappears as a viewer crouches – each letter clearly becomes only a small pile of flour. In a way, Meyer uses the installation to illustrate the nebulous nature of language and images. While words may at times seem heavy and express real ideas, they begin as hazy thoughts like mounds of flour waiting for a breeze. Much of David Meyer’s work explores similar ideas. His installations conjure thoughts of permanence, memory, and information.
Improvised Making is and was an interactive installation by artist Dominic Wilcox. Created for the Making Together exhibit in Milan, Wilcox began the installation/sculpture with a single chair. He invited the public to donate sticks for the project and sticks of all sorts were brought to the gallery. Over the course of six days, Wilcox taped all of the sticks as they were brought to him to the chair. Carefully balancing and taping each piece to the structure, he only allowed the four legs of the chair to touch the ground and support the structure. Prior to moving the completed sculpture into another gallery, the structure’s shadow was documented in red on the wall and floor.
Landscapes are alive in the paintings of Siobhan McBride. Different locations mesh into a single scene. Memories and colors delicately surface in the foreground. McBride’s paintings aren’t so much surreal scenes as they are subtly collaged images in paint. Speaking of her work McBride says:
“I have come to think of my paintings as views of a place where magic reveals itself differently than it does in this world. The scenes are tense with anticipation or blushing in the aftermath of an unseen event. Paintings combine disparate yet familiar fragments into spaces that are still, anxious, and temperamental.”