Pablo Valbuena: Lighting Projects

Pablo Valbuena: Lighting Projects

Born in 1978 in Spain and currently based in the south of France, Pablo Valbuena is known for art installations focused on space, time and perception.

His art explores the overlap of the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’, the creation of intellectual spaces by the observer, and the dissolution of boundaries between real and perceived. Pablo’s research examines the bonds connecting space and time and the use of light and sound as prime matter.The strobing light installations creates a harsh contrast of their physical space and provides an illusion of infinity depth. Created by Pablo Valbuena.

The Artist’s site: http://www.pablovalbuena.com/index/

Huang Yong Ping

Huang Yong Ping, “Wu Zei”, Oceanographic Museum, Monaco, 2012

A founding member of the Xiamen Dada group in China during the mid-1980s, Huang Yong Ping has garnered an international reputation as an avant-garde provocateur. His diverse practice explores ideas related to society, its destiny, cultures, and the impact of globalization on identity. The artist combines Oriental and Western philosophies and adapts mythologies, giving them modern day references, to draw attention to the troubling and alarming events of our time.

His large scale installation for the Oceanographic Museum is inspired by the sea and refers to maritime disasters caused by man. “Wu Zei” is a gigantic hybrid animal – an octopus and a cuttlefish. The 25 metre monster invades and takes possession of the entire ceiling of the Museum’s prestigious Salon d’Honneur and encircles the pillars with its eight tentacles. The monster sits in position and waits to entrap the smaller aquatic animals, representatives of the life of the Sea.

By calling his installation “Wu Zei”, Huang Yong Ping creates ambiguity. The title “Wu Zei” is the Chinese name for a cuttlefish yet Huang Yong Ping’s work is a hybrid beast. “Wu” is also the character for the colour black and “Zei” the symbol for spoiling, corrupting or betraying. Huang Yong Ping plays with language and semiology juxtaposing cuttlefish ink to oil spill and corruption to regeneration.

James Turrell

James Turrell, “Twilight Epiphany”, Light Sculpture Installation, Rice University, Houston, Texas

The Mayan looking mound with the flat roof suspended above it at the head of Rice University’s forlorn upper quad is artist James Turrell’s latest Skyspace — one of only 73 in various incarnations he’s made so far, and the the second in Houston. But it’s the first Skyspace designed for music — the kind you’d want to listen to while staring through a 14-ft.-by-14-ft. opening in a raised roof at the darkening sky around sundown, or a lightening one at dawn.

The structure has been named “Twilight Epiphany”. It sits just outside the east entrance of Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. A sold-out, silent performance in the space marked the space’s public opening. The new structure was designed by Turrell with New York architects Thomas Phifer and Partners. An array of computer-controlled LEDs at the top of the mound projects a 40-minute light show on the underside of the roof, matched — for the audience inside — against the single lot of aerial real estate seen through the center opening.

Dawn and dusk light shows are planned daily; A website set up by Rice (http://skyspace.rice.edu/cms/visit-skyspace/) shows the schedules and a continuous countdown clock showing the time till the next performance.

Xu Zhen

Xu Zhen, “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” and “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian”, Solo Show at the Long Museum, West Bund Branch, Germany, 2015

With his characteristic humor, Xu Zhen intervenes in all manners of subject matter concerning global culture. With a taut expressiveness, he ingeniously integrates a Western spirit with Eastern culture—a new culture which transcends traditional schemas is hereby born. The all-new creation “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography, the work deals with both the sense of form and spirituality, thereby manifesting a vigorous vitality which dumbfounds the audience’s visual perception. “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian” joins two Western sculptural works; its absurd and yet stunning visual effect perfectly showcases the balance of force and belief.

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall, “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, 2013

The Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, in Berlin showed an impressive exhibition by New York-based artist Anthony McCall. For his first solo show at a museum in Germany, McCall displayed the installation “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”. Since the ’70s, he has been developing the realm of projections that scratch at the surfaces of cinema, drawing and sculpture. The visitors of the exhibition got to walk into the beam of light and create a new appearance of the light installations/projection. Within 1,000 sq meters, McCall had five single and two double projections that slowly move.

Alexa Meade

Painting Installations by Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is an American artist best known for her portraits painted on the human body. She takes a classical concept—trompe l’oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representation look three-dimensional—and works in an opposite direction. Her aim is to collapse depth and make her living models into flat pictures. The result is walking, talking optical illusions, 3D paintings that confuse how the eye processes objects in space.

Meade applies acrylic paint to the surfaces of people, objects, and walls in a style that mimics the appearance of brushwork in a traditional painting. The three dimensional scene may be approached from multiple angles and still appear to be a flat painting through the lens of the camera, without the guise of Photoshop or digital effects.

“The effect of the optical illusion is striking. Many of the images make it nearly impossible to find visual evidence of the secret their construction” – Christian Furr, exhibition curator of the Saatchi Gallery

Jim Sanborn

Sculptures by Jim Sanborn

Jim Sanborn (born Herbert James Sanborn Jr.) is an American sculptor. He is best known for creating the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. surroundings. Sanborn designed Indian Run Park located adjacent to the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Beltsville, Maryland with inspiration from the Iroquois Nations that inhabited the area nearly 900 years ago. On this site, hundreds of artifacts by the Iroquois have been discovered, and it is estimated that thousands still remain.

Jim Sanborn himself has also “seeded” 10,000 arrowheads within the grounds, allowing visitors the possibility to take a piece of this work of art with them. The park, named after the original Indian Run River that once existed here, includes a waterfall and walkway resembling the snaking waterway. Also, located within the park is a bronze cylindrical sculpture written in Onondaga language and “transcribed from the ancient oral tradition of the five Iroquois nations.” At night it is illuminated with a pinpoint light that emits its text upon the surrounding environment.

Cornelia Konrads

Sculptures by

Cornelia Konrads

Cornelia Konrads was born 1957 in Wuppertal, Germany. Even though he studied philosophy and culture-Science, he has been freelancing since 1998. He focuses on site-specific installations and objects. He participates in various sculpture- and Land Art projects in Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, USA, Taiwan(wowowowwww), South Korea and Australia.

Ralph Eaton

Ralph Eaton, “Fuzzy Kudzu”, Stuffed Animals, 2013-14, Taubman Museum

Born in Roanoke, Ralph Eaton was very influenced by the West Coast art scene of the 1990s. Working in Los Angeles at the same time as acclaimed artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, who used re-purposed mundane materials in their works, Eaton saw thrift store cast-offs as symbols of a consumer culture gone awry. Says Eaton: “Making art out of junk is my therapeutic strategy for coping with the human condition, with the clutter of the world.”

At the time, Eaton started buying trash bags full of used stuffed animals to make his works, beginning with a series of “cured teddy bears (curing them of their cuteness by burning and other surgeries).” In the past few years his pieces have grown more abstract, where wall constructions are dominated by red or blue clumps and animals’ faces either missing or buried.

Commissioned by the Taubman Museum of Art, Eaton’s “Fuzzy Kudzu” transforms the City of Roanoke Atrium into an otherworldly fantasyland, where a thirty-foot cascade of white furry tendrils made from restructured stuffed animals spills over the central balcony, countering the building’s architecture in ways both welcoming and unsettling.

Most of its “pelt” is recycled from discarded teddy bears, bunnies, and kittens, each taken apart by the artist and reassembled into over fifty “vines” ranging from twenty to thirty-four feet. Weighing nearly a ton, “Fuzzy Kudzu” is comprised of faux fur fabric, polyester fiberfill, and more than one thousand stuffed animals.

Henrique Oliveira

Henrique Oliveira, “Baitogogo”, Reclaimed Tapumes, 2013, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Paris, France

Designed by Henrique Oliveira to look like an impossibly tangled Gordian Knot, the Baitogogo sculpture was installed within an exhibition space at Palais de Tokyo as a mass of tree-like plywood branches.

The exhibition curators said “ Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a work that combines the vegetal and the organic.”

The large installation was created from reclaimed tapumes – a plywood material traditionally used in Brazilian towns to construct the hoardings around construction sites. Oliveria collected the discarded tapumes from the streets of São Paulo, where he both lives and works. The veneer-like strips were bent into shape and nailed together to form the installation’s branches. Further wooden veneers were fixed to the structure to give it a bark-like texture and appearance.

Janet Echelman

Janet Echelman, Aerial Sculpture, Colored Polyethylene Rope, Boston

The 600 foot work by Janet Echelman was installed in a park in Boston’s Financial District using a cranes and scissor lifts. The orange and magenta netting made of polyethylene rope weighs a ton, and is designed to respond fluidly to wind and weather. It will remain suspended in the Rose Kennedy Greenway between two high-rise buildings across the Greenway through October.

Echelman is based in suburban Brookline. Her sculpture is inspired by ancient fishing nets. She has installed similar works in Seattle; Madrid, Spain; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and other cities.

Patrick Dougherty

Sculptures by Patrick Dougherty, Sapling Branches

In a career spanning four continents and three decades, internationally acclaimed environmental artist Patrick Dougherty has created over two hundred majestic sculptures out of nothing more than saplings.

“I think that part of my work’s allure is its impermanence, the life cycle that is built into the growth and decay of saplings. My focus has always been the process of building a work and allowing those who pass to enjoy the daily changes or drama of building a sculpture as well as the final product. However, the line between trash and treasure is thin, and the sculptures, like the sticks they are made from, begin to fade after two years. Often the public imagines that a work of art should be made to last, but I believe that a sculpture, like a good flower bed, has its season.” – Patrick Dougherty

Ernesto Neto

Fabric Sculptures by Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto began exhibiting in Scotland in 1988 and has had solo exhibitions abroad since 1995. He represented with Vik Muniz their country in 2001 Venice Biennale, his installations were featured in Brazil’s national pavilion and in the international group exhibition at the Arsenale.

Neto’s work has been described as “beyond abstract minimalism”. His installations are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space that viewers can touch, poke, and walk on or through. They are made of white, stretchy material – amorphous forms stuffed with Styrofoam pellets or, on occasion, aromatic spices. In some installations, he has also used this material to create translucent scrims that transform the space’s walls and floor. His sculptures can be regarded as expression of traditional abstract form, but in their interaction with the viewer, they work on another level as well.

Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales, “Black Cloud”, Installation, Black Paper Moths

Black Cloud is an installation by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales involving tens of thousands of black paper months affixed to the walls of large interior spaces. The piece was first installed at Yvon Lambert in 2007 and then in a different configuration at an old baroque church in Spain that was converted to a multi-use space called Espacio AV in 2009.

Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett

Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett, “New Moon”, 2014

New Moon is an interactive shadow and light sculpture from artists Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett that was installed twice in Lexington, Kentucky in February of 2014. Built from 5,500 burnt out incandescent bulbs donated by the community, the sculpture allows viewers to manipulate phases of the moon using a large turnstyle.