Month: August 2015

The HR Giger Bar, Kalchbuhl Center

The HR Giger Bar, Kalchbuhl Center, Chur, Switzerland: Highway Exit “Chur South”, Tel: 081-253-75-06

The Giger-Bar, which exists in the Swiss city of Chur, was originally planned for New York City. When it became apparent that the budget for the bar envisioned for New York was not going to be enough to allow for the design and construction of the elements which had been planned for it, Giger decided it would be wiser to wait until it could be financed properly.

Fortunately, Thomas Domenig came into Giger’s life at about the same time. In his youth, Giger had attended high-school with Thomas Domenig’s wife. Domenig is the number-one architect of Chur. having built about a third of the city. There were plans for a café in his Kalchbuhl-Center, which was already under construction, and Giger had, evidently, shown up at just the right moment. He was able to convince Domenig to change his plans and back the idea of a bar.

The furniture program for the Giger-Bar was significantly expanded by the new designs for a chair, a glass topped table and the bar itself. The establishment’s door is that of Giger’s armoire design, enlarged by one third. The oval mirrors, the wall lamps and the special coat racks were also designed by Giger and carried out with the aid of Giger’s most important team of technical experts, de Fries, Schedler, Ammann, Vaterlaus, Gruber and Brigitte von Kanel.

The bar’s official opening was on February 8, 1992, three days after Giger’s birthday. There is now a Giger Bar-Museum located in Chateau St. Germain. Gruyere, Switzerland. It was Giger’s hope that, one day, a Giger-Bar can still be realized in New York City, his favorite amongst all the cities of the world.

Ghost Train

Artist Unknown, (Ghost Train), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what’s the alternative? Usually there is none.”
― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

Sankai Juku Dance Troupe

Sankai Juku

Sankai Juku (山海塾?) is an internationally known butoh dance troupe. Co-founded by Amagatsu Ushio in 1975, they are touring worldwide, performing and teaching. As of 2010, Sankai Juku had performed in 43 countries and visited more than 700 cities. Amagatsu Ushio maintains that “butoh is a dialogue with the gravity,” while other dance forms tend to revel in escape from gravity. He sees his dance, in contrast, is based on “sympathizing or synchronizing” with gravity.

The all-male company’s work is performed by as few as six dancers eschewing the movements typical of modern or other dance forms. The performances are characterized by slow, mesmerizing passages, often using repetition and incorporating the whole body, sometimes focusing only on the feet or fingers. Sometimes minuscule movement or no movement is discernible and one is presented a meditative vision of statuesque postures or groupings.

Occasionally recognizable emotive postures and gestures are used, notably contorted body shapes and facial expressions conveying ecstasy and perhaps more often, pain and silent “shrieks.” Frequently, ritualized formal patterns are employed, smoothly evolving or abruptly fractured into quick, sharp, seemingly disjointed sequences whose symbolism or “meanings” are obscure.

If you hear Sankai Juku is performing in your area, buy tickets and go see them perform. It is an event that will become etched into your mind.

Manuel Acevedo

Paintings and Illustrations by Manuel Acevedo

Manuel Acevedo’s work combines projected image, drawing, flipbook animation, and photography to explore how light and movement shape experience. Through various media he employs visual language in ways that transform flat, static images into active spaces of experimentation. Acevedo has been exhibiting his work in the United States and abroad for over twenty years.

Paul Landacre

Wood Engraving Landscapes by Paul Landacre

Although he took some life-drawing classes at the Otis Art Institute between 1923 and 1925, Paul Landacre largely taught himself the art of printmaking. He experimented with the technically demanding art of carving linoleum blocks and, eventually, woodblocks for both wood engravings and woodcuts. Landacre’s fascination with printmaking and his ambition to make a place for himself in the world of fine art coalesced in the late 1920s when he met Jake Zeitlin.

Zeitlin’s antiquarian bookshop in Los Angeles, a cultural hub that survived into the 1980s. included a small gallery space for the showing of artworks, primarily prints and drawings. It is there in 1930 that Landacre was given his first significant solo exhibition. Zeitlin’s ever-widening circle of artists came to include Edward Weston, a photographer who shared the modernist vision that so captivated Landacre. Well-connected to the New York art scene, Zeitlin associated himself with the circle of artists represented by Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan and, later, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By 1936 Zigrosser considered Landacre to be “one of the few graphic artists worth watching” in America, and included him among his portraits of 24 contemporary American printmakers in his seminal work, “The Artist in America” (Knopf 1942). Elected a member of the National Academy in 1946, Landacre was honored in 1947 with a solo exhibition of his wood engravings at the Smithsonian Museum, its graphic arts division under the curatorial leadership of Jacob Kainen.

http://magictransistor.tumblr.com

The Gardener

Photographer Unknown, The Gardener

“After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.”

― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

Ascension

Photographer Unknown, (Ascension)

“Study yourself. Become your own mentor and best friend. When you are suffering stay at the bottom until you find out who you are. Let the storms come and pass. How you walk through the fire says a lot about you. Nobody likes a victimhood mentality and what happened to you is not important. It is about how you use your chaos that matters. The dawn will come”
― Mohadesa Najumi

Leslie Pierce

Leslie Pierce, “Sebastian in Stained-Glass Window,, Collage, 2011

Leslie Pierce is a contemporary artist, known for art that focuses on scenes with underlying themes involving coding systems, documentation, fragmentation and technology. She has worked with collages, situating traditional images of Saint Sebastian in absurd contexts, such as a communist street demonstration in Paris, or displaying male nudes against religious backdrops.

“Sebastian in Stained Glass Window” was shown at the “Saint Sebastian: From Martyr to Gay Starlet” exhibition held at Friday Cottage Art Space, a gallery in one of the historic downtown homes in Columbia, South Carolina. . The exhibition was part of a week of events that led up to the South Carolina Pride Festival in early September of 2012.

Pierce has relocated from Austin, Texas, to San Diego, California, and now runs a Studio Gallery in Arts District Liberty Station- an old converted Naval base that is bustling with creative businesses, non profits and eateries. She exhibits and sells her work internationally and teaches Painting and Drawing.