Category: installation

James Brunt

Land Art by James Brunt, Stones, Trees, Leaves

James Brunt creates elaborate ephemeral artworks using the natural materials he finds in forests, parks, and beaches near his home in Yorkshire, England. This form of land art, popularized and often associated with fellow Brit Andy Goldsworthy, involves detailed patterns, textures, and shapes formed using multiples of one kind of material.

Brunt collects twigs, rocks, and leaves and arranges them in mandala-like spirals and concentric circles. He photographs his finished work to document it before nature once again takes hold of his materials. Brunt offers prints of his photographed artworks on his website.

Thanks to https://skogshaxa.tumblr.com

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto, “Infinite Expanse of Sky”, 2008/ 2009, Vellum, Bamboo, Wire, Wood, Dimensions Variable

Jacob Hashimoto is an American born sculptor and installation artist currently based in New York City and Verona, Italy. He is best known for using traditional Japanese methods to create large-scale “tapestries” out of thousands of hand crafted paper and wood kites. While they are three-dimensional and can thus be described as sculptures, these works also invite associations with painting.

The kites appear as abstract painted forms suspended in space. Hashimoto’s dynamic constructions also blur the line between abstract and figurative. A tapestry may resemble a landscape when glimpsed from afar, however that likeness disappears when the work is approached at a closer distance.

Andom International

“The Rain Room”

Known for their distinctive approach to digital-based contemporary art, Andom International’s experimental artworks come alive through audience interaction. Their largest and most ambitious installation yet, “Rain Room” is a 100 square metre field of falling water for visitors to walk through and experience how it might feel to control the rain.

On entering The Curve the visitor hears the sound of water and feels moisture in the air before discovering the thousands of falling droplets that respond to their presence and movement. Cameras installed around the room detect human movements and send instructions to the rain drops to continually move away from visitors. The water drips through a grid in the floor where it is treated before being sent back up to the ceiling to fall again.

At the cutting edge of digital technology, Rain Room is a carefully choreographed downpour – a monumental installation that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The work also invites us to explore what role science, technology and human ingenuity might play in stabilising our environment by rehearsing the possibilities of human adaptation.

rAndom International said: “Rain Room is the latest in a series of projects that specifically explore the behaviour of the viewer and viewers: pushing people outside their comfort zones, extracting their base auto-responses and playing with intuition. Observing how these unpredictable outcomes will manifest themselves, and the experimentation with this world of often barely perceptible behaviour and its simulation is our main driving force.”

Finding a common purpose as students at the Royal College of Art, rAndom International was founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. Today the studio is based in Chelsea – with an outpost in Berlin – and includes a growing team of diverse talent. With an ethos of experimentation into human behaviour and interaction, they employ new technologies in radical, often unexpected ways to create work which also draws on op art, kinetics and post-minimalism.

A short film by rAndom International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FslABAyj2OA

Ydessa Hendeles

Two Installations by Ydessa Hendeles

In a distinguished career as gallerist, collector and curator before she started to make her own works, Ydessa Hendeles has fashioned a distinctive space in the contemporary art world. Internationally renowned as a pioneering exponent of curating as a creative artistic practice, her groundbreaking work is widely discussed and embraced as a model by leading members of the new generation of curators emerging today. In her exhibition making and artistic practice, Hendeles often explores notions of difference and diversity, and especially the way representation and distortion, appropriation and assimilation can filter group and individual identities.

The Top Six Images:  “From Her Wooden Sleep”, 2013, utilises display to create a narrative space where appearances and roles are distorted. A vast collection of pseudo-human wooden mannequins, each subtly unique in size and expression, is arranged within its own gallery. These figures seem to form a distinct community, and confronted by them the visitor is suddenly cast in the position of ‘outsider.’

Despite their human likeness, shared characteristics of the mannequins separate them as a group, and their collective stare isolates the visitor, transforming him or her from the observer to the observed, the guest to the interloper. This space of distorted roles and perceptions is enhanced by a series of funhouse mirrors that line the perimeter of the space, contorting the reflections of visitors and making direct reference to the untrustworthy nature of representation.

The Bottom Four Images:  “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)”, 2002,  is a vast display comprising more than 3,000 family-album photographs of people posing with teddy bears, alongside display cases that contain antique stuffed animals. The installation adopts the toy as symbol for the consolatory and encouraging power of artworks, and highlights the relationship between people and their objects of affection.

Jame Jones

Jame Jones, “Beyond the Edge of Reason”, Stainless Steel, 3 Meters Wide

James Jones is fascinated by our ever changing notion of consciousness. By creating forms that juxtapose the scientific with the spiritual, the philosophical with the biological, James explores our belief systems and the systems within the mind/body that create our experience of the universe. The interrelated concepts of unity; opposites; balance; the internal and external; micro and macrocosms; the self and the soul are also examined through his sculptural work.

James’s recent sculptures involve the use of “zeros” and “ones” that can be seen as a metaphor for mutually dependent dualities such as on-off, male-female, all-nothing. By combining this visual language with a variety of forms, James attempts to further question our notion of consciousness.

Ken Unsworth

Ken Unsworth, “Suspended Stone Circle II”, Wire and Stones

Ken Unsworth came to prominence as a sculptor in the 1970s, when he combined performance or body art with highly conceptual sculptural forms. Some of these performances, in particular ‘Five secular settings for sculpture as ritual’, involved using his own body as a kind of minimalist sculpture. In one, he posed spread-eagle on the wall, held aloft by a pole between his shoulder blades in a visual recreation of Richard Serra’s lead prop piece now held in the National Gallery of Australia collection in Canberra.

Unsworth’s art is often ephemeral, surviving only in the memory of those who once saw it or in rumours of that memory, or sometimes as photographs or scratchy old videos. Like Joseph Beuys, whose work Unsworth passionately admires, his art is full of apparent contradictions. He reworks the great sagas of life and death while shaking the staff of a jester and yet he has created remarkable and enduring monumental sculptures. He is admired by formalists for his sculpture and for the rigorous logic of propped or suspended stones, while others respond to the expressionism of the paintings and the symbolist theatricality of his kinetic installations.

In many of his early body art pieces, Unsworth held his body in suspension as if levitating between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the material world and the immaterial. The figure seems trapped, pinioned or bound. These works are not only about equilibrium, balance and formal relations; they are also violent and claustrophobic experiences and many of his sculptures continue this theme. ‘Suspended stone circle II’ is one of his levitation works with 103 river stones each weighing around 15 kilograms held in place by three wires tied to three rings secured to the ceiling structure. The stones form a suspended disc, with each one held as if in a force field. The stones are hung so that their centre of gravity falls exactly on the central axis of the disc and each stone is equidistant from its neighbours. The three sets of wires create three cones, suggesting the force field which they literally constitute.

John Bisbee

John Bisbee: Nail Sculptures

John Bisbee is an American sculptor living and working in Maine. He is an art professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Bisbee received his B.F.A. from Alfred University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Bisbee’s work is included in the collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, The Albright-Knox Gallery, the Portland Museum of Art, at Microsoft, and in private collections.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Seven Heavenly Palaces”

Kiefer, born 1945 in Donaueschingen and long considered to be one of the most important German artists alive, gave each of the towers its own name: “Falling Stars,” “Sternenlager,” “Die Sefiroth,” “Tzim-Tzum,” “Shevirat Ha-Kelim,” “Tiqqun,” and “The Seven Heavenly Palaces.” For Kiefer, an important point of reference was the myth of creation in ancient Jewish mystical literature describing man’s part in God’s word.

Yet the artist has taken other points of reference into consideration in his work, as well, some of which are decidedly contemporary by comparison: in his usage of the material cement and his orientation along the customary dimensions of a shipping container, Kiefer establishes connections to present life marked more than ever before by globalization and possibility.

Kiefer, who has been living and working in Barjac, France since 1993, understands the universalism expressed in these works as an apt image of our time at the beginning of the 21st century. The cross-references and symbolism in “The Seven Heavenly Palaces,” which operates on several levels simultaneously, are numerous.

With the Sefiroth tower, for instance, the painter, sculptor, and installation artist takes recourse to the three mythological paths open to mankind for lending life order and meaning, according to ancient Jewish tradition: love, sympathy, and strength.

David DiMichele

David DiMichele,” Pseudo Documentation”, Installation/ Photography Series

David DiMichele’s current body of work, Pseudo Documentation, is a series of large-scale photographs depicting grandiose installations in fantasy exhibition spaces. DiMichele creates this work by first building scale models of exhibition spaces, and producing original artworks in drawing, painting and sculpture mediums, which are sited in the spaces and then photographed to create the final works.

The Pseudo Documentation photographs are inspired by DiMichele’s background  as an installation artist, love of abstract forms and passion for monumental museum and gallery architecture.

Images from Top to Bottom: Hose Drawing, 2008;  Salt and Asphalt, 2007;  Pendulum Drawing, 2005;  Broken Glass, 2006:  Melting Ice, 2007;  Light Rods, 2008; Apollonian and Dionysian, 2009;  Holes, 2009.

Top image reblogged with thanks to http://contemporary-art-blog.com

Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota, “Traces of Memory”, 2013 Installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh

When Shiota visited the Mattress Factory in 2011, she was inspired by the old Victorian rowhouse at 516 Sampsonia and curious about the previous inhabitants and their lives. “I work always with someone’s memory because it is strong and it exists but I cannot touch the memory,” says Shiota about her work in an interview with Felice and Shannon of the Mattress Factory Education Department.

She describes her use of black yarn as a 3D drawing material that she weaves through the air to create space, and sees the act of weaving the yarn in these spaces as a way to give form to memory and create a new world. For Shiota, the yarn gives form to unsent feelings, memories, and history. Once the installation is cut down, the memory of the installation is what remains.

Human relationships are complex, and she describes the yarn as analogous to human connections:   “The string makes tension or is tangled or is loose. The string is like feeling or relationship to people, and the relationship is connected, or loose or tight. I feel like this is just like a mirror of my feelings.”

Note: Chiharu Shiota is one of my favorite sculptors/installers. There are three more posts on this blog of other installations.

Yayoi Kusama

The Art work of Yayoi Kusama: Photo Set Two

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism. Her art is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, the Tate Modern in 2012, and the Hirshhorn in 2017.

Claire Fontaine

Paris-based Collective Claire Fontaine, “Carelessness Causes Fire”, Audain Gallery, Vancouver, 2012

A Paris-based collective founded in 2004, Claire Fontaine is named after a brand of French notebooks and stationery. In an attempt to identify the transformed position of “the artist”, Claire Fontaine has conceived of the “readymade artist,” which considers the contemporary artist as equivalent to Marcel Duchamps’s urinal or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. The collective has developed a practice in which existing forms and materials—such as ephemeral-object sculpture, installation, video, painting, infographics, and neon—are crafted into works that critique political and aesthetic norms of the art world.

Reblogged with thanks to http://contemporary-art-blog.com