Daily Delight ~ Javier Perez

Javier Perez

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Daily Delight ~ Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota

Installations made with black wool threads.

 

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Daily Delight ~ David Spriggs

David Spriggs

Vision, Espace Virtual

264 x 315 x 91 cm, sprayed acrylic paint on multiple sheets of transparent film

 in display case, 2010.

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Daily Delight ~ Ran Hwang

Ran Hwang

Dreaming of Joy

240cm x 720cm - 6 panel, Buttons, Pins, 2008

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Ephemeral Clouds ~ Berndnaut Smilde

The ultimate ephemeral sculptural installation ~ Clouds, created by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde.  He creates indoor clouds with a combination of smoke, moisture, and dramatic lighting, however they appear only for a few moments, then vanish - how fascinating!!

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Christo & Jeanne-Claude

Christo & Jeanne-Claude

 

Christo [Bulgarian-born American Environmental Artist, born in 1935.
Jeanne-Claude [French-born American Environmental Artist, 1935-2009]

“On September 22, 1985, a group of 300 professional workers completed the temporary work of art The Pont Neuf Wrapped. They had deployed 40,876 square meters (454,178 square feet) of woven polyamide fabric, silky in appearance and golden sandstone in color… The fabric was restrained by 13,076 meters (42,900 feet) of rope and secured by 12.1 metric tons (11.8 long tons) of steel chains encircling the base of each tower, 1 meter (3.3 feet ) underwater…. Wrapping the Pont-Neuf continues this tradition of successive metamorphoses by a new sculptural dimension and transforms it, for fourteen days, into a work of art.” (Christo & Jeanne Claude)

The Point Neuf Wrapped transformed the entire bridge and connecting structures into a totally new and engaging environment for a fortnight in 1985, allowing the viewer to experience a known structure in a totally new and enchanting way while still maintaining the main shapes of Paris’ oldest bridge. The use of fabric and rope gives the whole piece a “dressed” feel, one could almost compare the work to various iconic fashion designs; as well as allowing movement and dynamics in the wind/sunlight/rain. The fabric gives the bridge a delicate and dramatic feel at the same time, the sandstone colour adding to the delicate and fragile aesthetic. The way the bridge was wrapped allowed continued river, motor and pedestrian traffic under and over the bridge. Viewers were able to engage in a very physical and personal way as they made their way through the folds of the fabric.

This huge ephemeral site specific artwork has a beautiful dreamlike quality, an image and feeling the viewer would take away with them and relive when they visited the site again in future. The temporary nature of the work adding to the viewers sense of a waking dream, something personally experienced that then drifts away. The artists wanted to express the continued change/evolution of the bridge over time through their own vision, adding to the rich history of the structure itself. 

“On May 7, 1983 the installation of Surrounded Islands was completed… 585,000 square meters (6.5 million square feet) of pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water, floating and extending out 61 meters (200 feet) from each island into the Bay. The fabric was sewn into 79 patterns to follow the contours of the 11 islands.” (Genetologic Research. 2009)

Another example of the artists temporarily redefining a landscape, but in this instance by surrounding 11 Islands in Biscayne Bay, with giant shiny pink fabric spanning 7 miles. The central location allowed for a huge audience via air, water and land. The view changing for each of these spectators depending on their location and distance from the piece. From the air the work looks like giant single celled organisms, the smaller split from the larger, as it begins its evolution. Again the artists transform the familiar into the extraordinary for a brief period of time, taking the viewer into a constructed fairy-tale world.

This site specific artwork was designed and created with this specific site in mind. Christo & Jeanne-Claude spend years planning and researching their locations. In this instance the islands, their ecology and use by the community was studied, to develop a piece that is relevant to the space.

The artists want their work to create a feeling of love and tenderness “to their works, as an added value, (dimension) as a new aesthetic quality”. (Christo & Jeanne Claude)

This desire to evoke specific feelings in the audience is communicated in the use of wrapping and here surrounding. It would appear the work is holding the islands together, holding them close or embracing them with fabric. This particular project saw a specific environmental benefit to the islands themselves, in the removal of tonnes of garbage in the process of creating and removing this work, hence literally expanding on the loving care symbolism of the surrounding fabric.

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Kate MccGwire

London based sculptor Kate MccGwire's feather sculptures appear active as they wind, writhe and emerge, yet they are mostly large frozen shapes created from thousands of bird feathers (which are collected and sent from farmers and pigeon racers) creating sensual, graceful and organic looking pieces. However there is also a sharpness to her work, an edge which creates an almost menacing feel due to its real vs unreal, abstract nature.

'i gather, collate, re-use, layer, peel, burn, reveal, locate, question, duplicate, play and photograph.' - Kate MccGwire

Kate MccGwire's practice probes the beauty inherent in duality, exploring the play of opposites - at an aesthetic, intellectual and visceral level - that characterises the way we conceive the world. She does this by appealing to our essential duality as human beings, to our senses and our reason, and by drawing on materials capable of embodying a dichotomous way of seeing, feeling and thinking. The finished work has a consistent 'otherness' to it that places it beyond our experience of the world, poised on a threshold between the parameters that define everyday reality. http://www.katemccgwire.com/index.php?pid=60  

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Nina Saunders

Nina Saunders is a Denmark born artist currently living in London. Her use of discarded traditional furniture and her surreal treatment of it, with the dripping/melting distortion harks of Dali and her use of taxidermy is a surprise as it pushes and peeks through the furniture in an attempt to get out and through, to escape.

Her work is impressive, bizarre and quirky, expressing humour as well as a sense of weightiness (both physical and emotional) through her surreal treatment. 

“Saunders' convoy of animals is both comic and unsettling. The taxidermied animals that populate this procession have been made yet stranger by Saunders who has seamlessly blended each creature to an item of benign household furniture. The animals are of the type that populate children's literature and folk tales, part of our collective imagination, harmless and yet casually hunted. Each item of furniture has been reupholstered in white but its structure has been undermined so that each appears disproportionate, uncomfortable but curiously mobile.” (Gleeson, D. 2002)

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Daily Delight ~ Motohiko Odani

Motohiko Odani ~ The Specter

Sculpture ~ The Phantom Solo Exhibition

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Tara Donovan

New York artist Tara Donovan's work must be reconstructed for each showing. Her installations are very dependent on the size, light and architecture of the space. This then determines the scale and direction of her work. Tara uses the same mass produced object over and over again, making the work look organic and digital at the same time, creating an almost alien feel to the space.

“I think the new fertile territory, for myself at least, encompasses a range of practices that capitalize on the iconic identities of commercial and industrial materials by pressing them further into the realm of abstract seduction.” says Tara. (Kino. 2008)

 

 

 

 

 

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