Tag: installation

Tatiana Blass

Tatiana Blass, “Penelope”, Loom, Red Yan

In 2011, Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass pierced the walls of a Sao Paulo chapel with large masses of red yarn, letting the bright material trail into the surrounding grasses, landscape, and trees. The installation, titled Penelope, was named after Odysseus’s wife in Homer’s Odyssey, a character who kept herself away from suitors while he was at war by weaving a burial shroud by day, and secretly taking pieces of it apart at night.

Inside the chapel the work continued with a 45-foot-long carpet leading to a loom into which it was stuck. Immaculate on one side of the loom and in pieces on the other, strings of the dismantled rug traveled outside of the chapel through preexisting holes that made their way into the yard. The piece, just like the epic poem, leaves us to wonder whether the work is in a state of construction or unraveling, if the carpet is being built, or slowly torn apart.

Karlo Andrei Ibarra

Karlo Andrei Ibarra, “Remanentes (Remnants)”, Performance with Green Plantains, Tattoo Machine, Wooden Table, Dimensions Variable

Karl Andrei Ibarra received his BFA from the Puerto Rico Escuela de Artes Plásticas in 2005. Through installations, sculpture, video, and photography, he comments on Puerto Rico’s geopolitical situation and other social, economic, and political problems. Ibarra has taken part in the 3rd Bucharest Biennial (2008), the last two editions of the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial (2009, 2012), the 2nd International Biennial of Young Artists in Moscow (2010), and Biennial of the Americas (Denver, 2010).

Ibarra took first prize at the 6th edition of the Digital Art Competition of Central America and the Caribbean at the Museum of Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica, and the People’s Choice Award at the video festival Optic Nerve, organized by the Contemporary Art Museum of North Miami in 2011.

Manfred Kleinhofer

Manfred Kleinhofer, “The Guardians of Time” Series

Manfred Kleinhofer is an Austrian painter, sculptor and photographer living in Linz, Austria.

Drawing on religious and supernatural phenomena, the Guardians of Time are stone statues that are cloaked in hooded robes and situated to seem like they are moving forth in some kind of ritual. In some cases the figures stand alone; in other instances, they are grouped together as if whispering to each other.

Kielnhofer places his statues in public places like ancient castles, old mines, plazas, and parks. They are installed and moved without fanfare, heightening the eerie, mystic aura they give off. The first of these mysterious figures was created in 2006. Since then, Kielnhofer continues to create and install these statues all over the world.

Keith Jellum

Keith Jellum, “Transcendence”, Bronze, South Park Building, Portland, Oregon

Keith Jellum hand fabricates and casts large scale sculptures and unique weathervanes in bronze, copper, and steel. Drawing on animistic themes, he creates one-of-a-kind artworks for both public and private locations.

Transcendence is an outdoor sculpture by Keith Jellum, located in Portland, Oregon, United States. It depicts a fish flying through the brickwork above Southpark Seafood at the northwestern corner of Southwest Salmon Street and Southwest Park Avenue in Downtown Portland. The sculpture measures 11 feet (3.4 m) long and is made of hand forged and welded bronze.

Chiharu Shiota

Installation Sculpture by Chiharu Shiota

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota lives and works in Berlin where she was a student of Marina Abramović and Rebecca Horn. She will represent Japan at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale. His artistic creation combines both contemporary inspirations and Japanese heritage. . His drawings to installations and performances, the artist deals with many apprehensions, by a confusing effusion.

The objects she uses are mainly of old suitcases, letters, old pianos, ghostly robes, and all call a flashback. But the peculiarity of his work lies in the recurrent use of woven son, cables, metal rods, which transform the space into a gigantic spider web. Many place the body as the main subject of his work, but indirectly we distinguish being in this web of messages. The shapes become shadows, envelopes are empty and the majority of its installations, objects are searched by this son of entanglement, which we do not distinguish the borders.

Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling, “ A Conversation with the Sea”, Steel, Aldeburgh, England

The sculture is made from stainless steel and is a celebration of the composer Benjamin Britten who lived in the area. The words stencilled onto the tip of one of the scallop shells read “I hear those voices that will not be drowned” and are taken from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes”. The twelve foot high sculpture is made of 10mm-thick stainless steel, with five tons of shingle between it and its foundation, which is also of steel. It will withstand gales of 100 miles an hour.

The scallop-shaped sculpture was built thanks to the enthusiastic support and fund-raising efforts of Simon Loftus, an influential figure in the Aldeburgh music festival and the chairman of Adnams, the famous brewery in Southwold, up the coast from Aldeburgh.

J Mayer H

J Mayer H, “Metropol Parasol”, Wood Sculpture, Seville, Spain

The power of a wood structure is defined in a striking new edifice. A wood canopy of six “parasols” has been erected in Seville, Spain. Completed last month, it was designed by Berlin architect J. Mayer H., with timber construction by Finnforest-Merk GmbH, Aichach. “Metropol Parasol”, as it is formally known, is built of 3,400 wooden parts, is over 90 feet tall and almost 500 feet long.

The structure is made of  interlocking pieces of wood  held together mostly with glue and with metal clamps. Costing an estimated 130 million Euros and built over the course of five years, the structure is designed as an urban icon to draw attention to Seville, and reclaim an underutilized urban area. Restaurants and shops are embedded in the towers and below the canopy. A view walkway crowns the top. Architect Mayer designed it as an entry in a competition in 2004.

“The Metropol Parasol scheme with its impressive timber structures offers an archaeological museum, a farmers market, an elevated plaza, multiple bars and restaurants underneath and inside the parasols, as well as a panorama terrace on the very top of the parasols. Realized as one of the largest and most innovative bonded timber-constructions with a polyurethane coating, the parasols grow out of the archaeological excavation site into a contemporary landmark, defining a unique relationship between the historical and the contemporary city.” – J Mayer H

Odani Motohiko

Sculptures by Odani Motohiko

Motohiko Odani was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1972 and received an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1997. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts. In his sculpture, photography, and video works, Odani mingles human, animal, and futuristic anatomy, exploring the boundaries of reality and myth, the physical and the spiritual.

Odani’s has exhibited widely throughout Europe and Asia; in 2003, he was selected by curator Yuko Hasegawa to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.  He has also participated in the Lyon Biennale (2000), Istanbul Biennale (2001), and Gwanju Biennale (2002).  Major solo exhibitions include Phantom Limb (P-House), a 2010 traveling exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka; Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Kawaga and the Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto, and Motohiko Odani: Hollow at Maison Hermes, Tokyo.

His works can be found in the public collections of Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among others.

David Letellier, “Catan”

David Letellier, “Catan”, Kinetic Sound Installation, Saint Sauveur Chapel in Caen, France

By a symbolic mirror effect, the curves of the wires, created by the gravitational force, reflect the shapes of the church arches. Caten opposes the ephemeral to the eternal, the movement to the static, and produce a tension between the lightness and the millenary stability of the space. The sound composition is inspired by the medieval solmisation prayers, especially the first verse of “Ut Queant Laxis”, also known as the “hymn to St John the Baptist”, used in the eleventh century to determine the names of the notes of the scale used in latin countries.

At each turn, the engines emit one of the first 4 notes of the scale (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa), creating a sequence of intervals, constantly reconfigured. Low frequencies resonate in the space and emphasize the transcendental character of a place once dedicated to faith. The name is derived from the term catenary, which describes the plane curve formed by a rope hanging between two points.

Created for the Saint Sauveur chapel in Caen, Caten is a levitating sculpture, determined by gravity and guiding the evolution of a sound composition. 300 fine wires suspended from two ropes, connected themselves at each end to a slowly rotating arm, form an evanescent surface which interacts with the architecture.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Henrique Oliveira

Henrique Oliveira, “Transarquitetônica”

Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira completed work on his largest installation to date titled “Transarquitetônica” at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade in São Paulo. As with much of his earlier sculptural and installation work the enormous piece is built from tapumes, a kind of temporary siding made from inexpensive wood that is commonly used to obscure construction sites. Oliveira uses the repurposed wood pieces as a skin nailed to an organic framework that looks intentionally like a large root system. Because the space provided by the museum was so immense, the artist expanded the installation into a fully immersive environment where viewers are welcome to enter the artwork and explore the cavernous interior.

Rafael Gomezbarros

Rafael Gomezbarros, “Casa Tomada”, Ant Sculpture Installation, 2007

“Casa Tomada” is a project of traveling installations started in 2007 by Colombian artist Rafael Gómezbarros in which giant sculptures of ants are fixed in swarms on buildings and structures. Self-described as “urban intervention” by Gómezbarros, the ants have been showcased in locations varying from London to Cuba with a very specific goal in mind: shedding light on immigration, forced displacement, and uprooting through historical points of departure for travelers and immigrants.

The 2-foot ants themselves are crafted out of tree branches for legs and two joined skull casts made of fiberglass resin and fabric to make up the torso, making for a particularly morbid, visceral depiction of migrant workers in Latin America who are looked at as nothing more than vermin. When placed on the facades of government buildings and blank gallery walls alike, the ants give off a chilling sense of foreboding and encroachment.

By placing them in swarms, Gómezbarros makes the insects even more strikingly representative of the peasants displaced by war and strife in Gómezbarros’ native Colombia. The giant insects that make up Casa Tomada, which translates to Seized House, are certainly works that are bound to linger with viewers, whether in nightmares or otherwise.

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.