Arts Visuels >> New Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down

Anish Kapoor's new installation at Kensington Gardens, on view through March 13th.

Sky Mirror, red, 2006

C-Curve, 2007

Non-Object (Spire)

Check out the video to see the effect on the pieces of the clouds moving across the sky... the photos don't capture the fact that the pieces are always in flux due to the ever-changing sky.

Arts Visuels >> Baptiste Masse

I know.  I can't believe it either.  

A "smash hit," no?  Ah, what an awful pun, but I couldn't resist.

By Baptiste Masse.

Arts Visuels >> Classics >> Jacques Henri Lartigue

De De (his cousin), Diving with Water Ring, 1911

I am totally enamored with Jacques Henri Lartigue and his work.  Born in 1894, he received a camera for his seventh birthday, and from then on essentially kept a photo diary of his life.  Fascinated by the things most young boys are interested in, including cars, dogs, his family and friends at play, aircraft, many of his most famous photographs were taken during his childhood.

ZYX24 Takes Off, 1910

My Hydro-Glider with Propeller, (Self-Portrait), 1904

Zissou, 1911  (How hilarious is this image??  Have you ever seen someone look so serious (or fully dressed) while in an intertube?)

Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine, 1912

Apparently, Wes Anderson is a big fan and has modeled many of his characters and images after Lartigue's work, including Max from Rushmore.  Also did you notice the photo of Zissou?  Bet that's where he got Steve Zissou's name!

As he continued to document his surroundings and outings for his entire life, he later took many photos of fashionable Parisian life and French vacation spots, but I'll save that era for another day.

Today, I'm loving the joie de vivre, humor, and idiosyncrasies captured in his childhood photographs.

Can you believe his technical capability at such a young age?  This was before digital made everything look good, y'all.

Must See >> Bruce Weber's "Haiti/Little Haiti"

Bruce Weber, a part-time resident of Miami and full-time fashion photographer, shifts his focus in a new project about his neighbors in Little Haiti for his first museum exhibition, "Haiti/Little Haiti," which opens this month at MOCA Miami. 

 Apparently, the exhibition, which contains photos from 2003-2010, is partly as a reaction to the disproportionately aggressive deportation efforts that have been aimed at Haitian residents of Miami.  I love that Bruce is using his status to bring awareness to such an issue!

SpY Does It Again >> Street Art for the Non-Seeing

Oh this really touches my heart.  Interesting that no one has done this before (or at least not that I know of, which may mean nothing).  Street artist SpY has made street art for blind pedestrians...

Braille label-maker

"Mambo Kings"

 Stickers placed on surfaces highly-used by blind pedestrians.

Also reminds me of the scene in Amelie where she leads around the blind man and describes everything to him... looove that scene (and movie).

[SpY]

Arts Visuels >> Art For a Cause >> Re:Form School

Last week, redu, a movement aimed at rebuilding America's public school system, sponsored a huge collaborative arts show, called Re:Form School, aimed at raising public awareness about the need to reform our school system.

WK, one of the participating artists, created this awesome installation at a New York City public school playground using photos he took of kids at the school and drawings he collected from them.

Check out this video from WK to hear more about it...

And this one to see the photo shoot with the kids.. pretty cute.

Love that even the art world is helping focus attention on our public schools right now!

[Re:Form]

[Kitsune Noir]

Arts Visuels >> Zac Freeman ...a knock-off of Vik Muniz and Chuck Close?

Found item collage portraits by Zac Freeman combine pointilism, impressionism, and mixed media by using film canisters, telephone parts, gears, and other odds and ends to create faces that are the sum of their parts.

I like... but... also kind of just feels like a mash-up of some of Chuck Close and Vik Muniz's work:

Chuck Close, "Phillip Glass," 1977, Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper

Chuck Close, "Big Self-Portrait," 2000-2001, Acrylic on Canvas 

So Chuck Close has got the pointilist portrait thing going on...

Vik Muniz, "Self-Portrait (Back) (Pictures of Magazines)," 2003, Chromogenic Print

Vik Muniz, "Toy Soldier," 2003, Chromogenic Print (of toy soldiers)

 ...And then Vik Muniz takes the idea to the collage realm, using hole-punched bits of magazines and toy soldiers and everything in between to make portraits (as well as recreations of Old Master pieces).  So while Freeman's work is impressive for its tedium and is interesting to look at, and he certainly has an eye for light and dark, I kind of feel like he's ripping off two other great artists... do you?  

Arts Visuels >> Classics >> Brancusi

In seventh grade, Ms. Hearey, my art teacher, showed our class this piece and immediately and forever changed my understanding of Modern art.  

Bird in Space, 1923.  

She put up a slide of this sculpture on the first day of class, without telling us the name or giving any introduction, and asked what we thought of it.  As twelve and thirteen year-olds with no particular artistic leanings, we stared dumbly and were unable to offer anything of substance.  I remember actually thinking the classic non-Modern-art-lovers' comment, "I think I could have done that." 

Then she told us the name, and showed us more examples of Brancusi's style of reducing and abstracting ideas to their simplest form-- in this case, a flying bird represented not by beak and wings and feathers, but by a fluid, graceful form encapsulating the essence of a bird in flight-- and it all clicked. 

The Kiss, 1916

Brancusi (and these two pieces in particular) became a favorite, and Katy Hearey, if you're out there, I think I have you to thank as starting me on a path that would result in my majoring in art history and generally loving art history for life.

I Love Maps >> More from Ball-Nogues Studio

Ball-Nogues studio, who created these awesome suspension installations, also created this map of San Diego for a new local hotel.

Not content with merely an "artistic representation" of the layout of the city, they created a geographic and topographic replica using custom-made software to transform an aerial photo in a 3-d bas relief using wood, bronze, and polymer resin.

Arts Visuels >> Classics >> Peter Beard

Arts Visuels >> Claire Morgan

In the same way that people often describe experiencing the moments of a car wreck or calamitous accident as though it were in slow motion, so slow that they can recall every detail with supernatural clarity, Claire Morgan's painstakingly precise installations composed of taxidermied animanls, manmade plastics, and natural elements seem to reconstruct a freeze-frame of the metaphorical factors that collided to cause the death of the animal on display.

[Claire Morgan]

Ball Nogues Studio

 Ball-Nogues studio designs these installations of dyed twine, which they call "Suspensions," using a computer program they created, and then they hang the twine by hand.  Are you in awe??  I am!

Ball-Nogues studio is a design and fabrication studio based out of Los Angeles and is headed by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, who studied together at Southern California Institute of Architecture.  Represented by Edward Cella Gallery in LA, their work has been featured at P.S. 1, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim, and many more prestigious institutions and exhibitions.

PS- if you like these, check out these installations.. highly reminiscent!

[Ball-Nogues]

[Edward Cella]

[via Kitsune Noir]

Urban Play

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, in collaboration with lettering guru Jessica Hische and 150 volunteers, created this public installation in Amsterdam composed of 250,000 eurocents proclaiming, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better."  After it was finished, the installation was left unprotected to see how the public would interact with it.

About 20 afters after it was complete, when the plaza was empty, a man came through and started picking up the coins and putting them in bags.  A neighbor, concerned that someone was "stealing the artwork," called the police, who tried to find the artist, and when they couldn't, they called a city cleaning company to bag up all the money and put it in a safe until they could reach the artist.  Ha!

More on Sagmeister's site here, including a timelapse video of the installation.

Jessica Hische website here (tons of awesome typography/graphic design stuff to explore).