Month: October 2016

Wolfgang Buttress

Wolfgang Buttress, “Lucent”, Fibre Optics, Mirror

Commissioned by Hearn for the John Hancock Center in Chicago, Lucent will be the focal point of the towers entrance.

Working with eminent astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Bayliss, from the Australian National University, Wolfgang has created a semi-spherical sculpture made up of thousands of nodes which accurately map the stars which can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere from the Earth with the naked eye.

Fibre optic lighting subtly pulsates over the day and throughout the seasons. Lucent is attached to a mirrored ceiling creating the illusion of a whole sphere. Beneath the artwork sits a polished black granite pool of water; this reflects the sculpture and suggests a sense of infinity

Lucent expresses and emanates light; the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are implied in it’s reflection. They are there but cannot be seen.

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George, “Hope”, One of Four Paintings of the Series “Death Hope Life Fear”, 1984

Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began to create art together, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Over more than forty years, they developed a new format that created large-scale pictures, which are visually and emotionally powerful, through a unique creative process. Most of their pictures are created in groups and made especially for the space in which they are first exhibited.

The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death.

Felix da Housecat’s Remix of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”

 

“Sinnerman” is one of Nina Simone’s most famous songs and she recorded her definitive 10-minute-plus version on her 1965 album “Pastel Blues”. Simone learned the lyrics of this English song in her childhood when it was used at revival meetings by her mother, a Methodist minister, to help people confess their sins.

In the early days of her career during the early sixties, when she was heavily involved in the Greenwich Village scene, Simone often used the long piece to end her live performances. An earlier version of the song exists, recorded live at The Village Gate, but was not used on the 1962 Colpix album Nina at the Village Gate.

Simone’s version of Sinnerman has been sampled by Kanye West for the Talib Kweli song “Get By”, by Timbaland for the song “Oh Timbaland”, and by Felix da Housecat for Verve Record’s “Verve Remixed” series.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Rufino Tamayo

Three Works by Rufino Tamayo

The top image is a lithograph entitled “Perro / Dog”, 1973,  from a series of 15. The middle image is an oil painting entitled “El Comedor de Sandias / The Watermelon Eater”, 1941, one of many works Tamayo did on the subject. The bottom image is an oil on canvas, painted on the eve of the United States entry into World War One, entitled “Animals”, 1941, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.