Wonderment >> Aerial Photography >> Alex MacClean

Unmarked Tennis Courts, Manchester, NH

 I just don't get sick of aerial photography (see past posts here and here).  It's the wonder you felt as a kid looking out of a plane window, captured in a photograph, how awesome.  Ok, I still feel that way looking out of a plane window.

I am really digging the graphic quality of these images by Alex MacClean.  I'm fairly obsessed with that top image of unmarked tennis courts-- it's just so cool that you can't tell at all what it is until you know the title.

 Marias River Drainage and Pivot Irrigator, Loma Area, MT

I seem to like the images more the more they abstract what the subject actually is-- it's cool to see these views of very real, tangible things only for their graphic qualities.  If you visit his website you'll see he has tons of different subjects and style, but I'm most drawn to the bold, graphic, and pattern-suggestive images.

 

Floating Daisy Docks, Chicago, IL

B-52 Bone Yards, Tuscon, AZ

Apple Trees After Spring Snowstorm, Clinton, Mass

[Alex MacClean website]

Arts Visuels >> The World's Largest Work of Art

Remember Jim Denevan, whose work I put up back here (if you didn't see it, check it out, pretty awesome)?  Well apparently back in March, he completed the "world's largest work of art," on Lake Baikal in Siberia, and there's a documentary in the works about the piece (intro below).

Denevan's large-scale earth works explore the impermanent, carving geometric shapes into element-sensitive areas, like sand and snow, that will eventually be erased by wind and water.  

This latest project in Siberia was a 9-square mile spiral of circles, along the fibonacci curve, starting at 18" and ranging up to miles in diameter. 

Jim Denevan site here.

Siberia project as featured on The Anthropologist

If you like Andy Goldsworthy >> Arte Sella

Like Andy Goldsworthy, the artists taking part in Arte Sella create their works on site using materials from the area, which in this case happens to be a forest outside of Padua, Italy.

However, unlike Andy Goldsworthy's art, and most earth art really, where all you see as the viewer are the resulting photographs of the work, with Arte Sella, all of the artists are brought to one location to create their pieces, so you get to wander the forest and see the works in the environment where they were created.  Pretty cool concept.

One of my favorite experiences ever was the Venice Biennale, for the adventure of wandering the city and the gardens, in and out of buildings, looking at art, and I think this would be a similar experience-- except in the woods, and with art created from and for the woods. 

Not to say that one would be better than the other, but just another experience in any way like the Venice Biennale is definitely on my list of things to do.

Arte Sella website here.

Other earth art posts here, here, here, and here.

via Black Eiffel

Wonderment for your Monday

Loving this project...

French journalist, environmentalist, and photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand started an image bank called Altitude Agency, for which he commissioned and assembled over 500,000 aerial photographs of the earth.

Then, alongside UNESCO World Heritage, he gathered the most beautiful images into a project called The Earth From Above (la Terre vue de ciel). 

 This one is a shot of an underwater plant that is only visible 

when a certain tide changes the water level in the Loire River.

These images were put into a book with the same name, and they were additionally shown in numerous free exhibits, in which the images were printed on giant posters and hung in public places like on the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.  I love that the public got to see them...

A wonderful reminder of how incredibly beautiful our world is...

Gone With the Wind

Jim Denevan's exacting and graphic earth works are tediously created, only to be destroyed by the elements.

 

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