Visual Arts – Page 2 – Environmental Humanities Center

December 17, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

Mineral crystals grown on thin threads form the shape of a chair in this installation by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka. He created the Spider’s Thread sculpture of a chair by suspending just seven filaments within a frame that was set in a pool of mineral solution. The solution was drawn up the threads and gradually formed into crystals around them, fleshing out into the shape of a piece of furniture. “Spider’s Thread applies the structure of natural crystals in an advanced way aiming to produce a form even closer to the natural form,” said Yoshioka. The designer says this iteration references a traditional story by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “The Buddha takes a thread of a spider in Heaven and lowers it down to Hell so that the criminal can climb up from Hell to Paradise,” explains Yoshioka. “In the story, the thread of a spider is a symbol of slight hope and fragility.” (source).

June 8, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

If you notice a massive, polygonal being sunning itself by the sea, you may have just stumbled upon DIVA, an 11.5-foot-tall paper sculpture hand-built by French artist Thomas Voillaume, a.k.a APACH. DIVA is made up of 853 triangles, constructed over four weeks of repetitive tracing, cutting, and assembly which APACH says put him in a trance-like state, opening, “les portes d’une autre dimension”— the door to another dimension — as the sculpture took shape. The giant humanoid looks like it could have wandered ashore from some other reality, while its two-part structure creates the illusion of it phasing right through the ground. (source).

June 8, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

Amsterdam-based design studio Studio Drift created In 20 Steps. With 40 glass tubes, the sculpture appears as an abstract flapping of wings, like an enormous bird of glass elegantly taking flight within the space. Last month, the installation debuted at the Venice Biennale as part of the Glasstress 2015 Gotika, a combined exposition from the Hermitage in Sint Petersburg and the Berengo Studio in Venice.

In a press release, Studio Drift-founders, Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordjin write, “Studio Drift is intrigued by the continuous attempts of humankind to deal with its limitations, so miraculously opposed to nature as these ventures might be. Humankind has always had the desire to fully understand nature and to detach itself from earthly ties. No matter how far science has come, some things are likely to remain forever out of reach.” (source).

March 12, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

We’re familiar with composting food, but composting photographs? For a new photo series, Ajay Malghan set out to see what dirt, water, and other forces of nature would do to his pictures. It turns out the process can leave behind ghostly patterns and texture (when it doesn’t completely destroy the photograph). “Any wrong move (hand bumping the tray, syringe slips etc.) ruins the image…Most of images don’t work out.” Sometimes “not working out” means the photo disintegrates, but other times the result is a psychedelic mass of color. Malghan collected his successful photos into a series called Collaborations with Nature, some of which can look charming and vintage, or turn the freeze-framed woodlands and waterfalls into something terrifying. (source).

March 9, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

At first, the thought of a lighthouse in the desert seems like a ridiculous idea, but if you’ve ever driven across the vast expanse of a desert yourself (especially at night), you might know how unsettling it is to not have even a tiny glowing beacon to help guide you. In this sense, a lighthouse would serve the same function as it does by the lake, sea, or ocean. It was this realization that first compelled multimedia artist Daniel Hawkins to embark on the ambitious endeavor of building his own lighthouse in California’s Mojave Desert.

“This time around I am sparing no expenses. The lighthouse will be fully fortified,” Hawkins resolves. “It always was and is grounded in my belief in the need for this stabilizing beacon of light. It seems so essential in an era of destroyed landmarks, radical environmental change, economic turmoil, private space travel, and increasingly surreal local war games.” (source).

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February 17, 2015/in Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

Berlin-based speculative artist Mathias Vef wants viewers to get lost in his collaged “digital ecosystems.” “The process of the creation of an image is then again opposing the process of evolution, which is an emergence out of coincidence,” says Vef. This opposition, he adds, is why he decided to name the show Syncretics. In this series, images that are named Scion are made out of a single original motif that is repeated and images called Amphigony, a biological term for sexual reproduction, combines different Scion pieces. Combining all of these, and seeing which new visuals emerge is like a “survival of the aesthetics,” Vef describes. Attendees are reminded of the “visual infection” our reality is facing, from the onslaught of wearable technologies such as Google Glass, Oculus Rift, and more on the horizon. The future, he predicts, will split creation in two paths: one that emerges from a genuine, conscious source, and another that’s a wild, untameable growth—much like the visuals he brings to life. (source).

February 7, 2015/in Anthropocene, Visual Arts /by Julia Olson

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Fascinated by the idea of what people will leave behind for those who live millions of years from now, Erik Hagen developed a unique series of paintings for his new exhbit, Fossils of the Anthropocene. “While we’re looking backwards in time at what the fossil record can tell us, what are they going to find in the future – whoever they are? That really captivated my imagination and led me to do all of these different pieces,” he said. Some of Hagen’s “fossils” were created by throwing marble dust on a canvas covered with latex paint mixed with sand, then embedding casts of plastic coins or a cell phone, referencing commerce and communication. Several of the paintings incorporate plastic waste, including a water bottle as well as plastic fragments and micro-beads like those used in lotions and soaps. (source).

February 7, 2015/in Anthropocene, Visual Arts /by Julia Olson

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Mel Chin’s project CLI-Mate proposes an easy interface to link individuals personally with global climate change and establishes feedback loops to provide an opportunity motivation for behavioral change. CLI-mate is a means to stimulate critical adjustment in human behavior, ultimately on a global level. If climate change is the most urgent issue of our time, then the development of an interface to encourage, or to be the means by which we make those modifications, is needed now. One of the essential challenges is to facilitate a personal relationship between individuals and global climate change. Chin’s project directly connects global warming trends to the source in order to change behavior. (source).

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February 7, 2015/in Anthropocene, Visual Arts /by Julia Olson

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Mary Mattingly is a New York based artist. For her exhibition, “House and Universe,” she bound up virtually all her possessions, creating what she calls “man-made boulders,” which resemble postminimalist sculptures. One photograph finds her pulling a boulder down a city street with the underlying message that our ecological future is apocalyptic. (source).

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February 5, 2015/in Anthropocene, Visual Arts /by Kiana Fatemi

Bustling cities are transformed into vibrantly colored maps depicting eroding terrains in the gorgeous series Flowing City Map by Geneva-based illustrator Chaotic Atmospheres. Chaotic Atmospheres began by rendering city maps in the program World Machine, a 3D terrain software. The illustrator then combined the maps with procedural terrains in order to achieve the right amount of “erosion flow.” “I wanted to represent the influence of cities on their environment as a kind of invisible fluid that overflows from the city to its surrounding,” the artist explains. Erosion and natural features take the form of streaks of color that flow throughout the densely packed metropolis like water, turning the landscape into a dreamy plane of ripples and currents. (source).