Category: Art

‘Mirage Gstaad’ is a fully mirrored installation completed in the style of Californian ranch houses of the ’20s and ’30s. Located in Videmanette, Gstaad in Switzerland, this single storey house relies on natural light and changing weather to illuminate the piece as it both absorbs and reflects the surrounding landscape. The kaleidoscopic experience can be experienced in person until January 2021, or via the live stream here.

Kim welds stainless steel into various large-scale sculptures, that typically feature human body parts in action. Selected works include ‘The Way To Happiness II’, a painted metal sculpture of a human face; the outline of which is created through roots reminiscent of blood vessels, and ‘Vitality Of Vision’, depicting a blue body that appears to have burst out through the wall in pursuit of something unknown. Commenting on this artwork, Kim explains that his work explores the “weak and incomplete existence of human beings”. Kim’s perceptive art examines topics such as virtue, meaning, and our tendency towards discontent, granting perspective of the human experience: “We can feel the truth whenever we stand under the sky that we are just a tiny part of creation”. This understanding of our place in the world is portrayed as frankly as possible in Kim’s work.

Orrico’s interest in performance and the human form stems from his background and earlier career in dance choreography. His live-drawings can last anywhere between 15 minutes to seven hours, and use either the movement of just his hand and wrist, or his entire body. ‘Penwald Drawings’ is a series of graphite on paper illustrations, that were created with precise, choreographic gestures that are appealing to watch. Addressing Orrico’s performances, the Wall Street Journal critic Robert Greskovic described Orrico as “Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in contemporary, casual clothing, seen from the back, extending his arms in the act of conjuring a vaporous circle out of continuously scrawling black lines.” Watching the performance of these drawings very slowly take shape is mesmerizing. “I commit my attention, rationally, to the sensitivity of my body at the receptive level”, the artist explains, where “the course is non-objective; it is a continuation of pathway and response to stimuli.” Orrico’s work is a keen example that art is as much about the creative process as it is about the final, visual result.

The elaborate wooden benches merge public art, furniture design and architecture together, operating as functional benches. The wooden ‘roots’ of the installation undulate in different directions and elevations, providing public furniture at three different heights for the community to enjoy. “Root Bench is fused into the grass and blurs the boundary between artificial installation and natural environment”, explains a statement on the firm’s website. The 700 square meter project was designed using a computer algorithm, which generated the three-dimensional geometry of the benches. After dark, lights that are positioned under some of the elevated roots are switched on, turning the piece into a night-installation. “It provides visual stimulus creating a strong contrast to the background of [the] spacious outdoor park”, continues the firm. “Visitors can feel comfortable in [the] resting space and can enjoy the art piece at the same time”.

Calderwood, who is also known for his hazardous performance art, relies on counterbalance and friction to keep his works standing. He transforms household items such as sports equipment, gardening tools, crockery, ladders, and buckets, into improbable conceptual sculptures. The works below were part of a group exhibition that posed antonym pairings: balance versus unbalanced, starting versus stopping, and work versus play. The contradictory nature of the theme aimed to challenge the definition of dualism. As the exhibition statement explained, Calderwood’s work is a reminder that “In art, as in life, not everything unbalanced is unbeautiful.”

The result of a fifty year period of “experimental forestry” in the area, these rings of Japanese cedar trees are the result of a scientific trial that aimed to measure the effect of tree spacing on growth. The experiment was undertaken by planting trees in 10 degree radial increments, forming ten concentric circles of increasing diameter. From the aerial shots of the forest, the effect of tree spacing on growth seems immediately apparent—both of the rings have grown to have a concave shape; the trees increase in size the further from the center they are.

French visual artist Hugo Livet saw this image, and like many others questioned who had created it: Surely it could not be a product of nature? Inspired by this strange sheet of ice found floating near the“The first thing that came to my mind while looking at the picture was ‘who did that?’” east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, Livet decided to create his own angular icebergs in a series titled ‘Derivé’. “The first thing that came to my mind while looking at the picture was ‘who did that?’”, Livet explains. “I then realized that it was the work of nature—but was it really?” Using photographs of bodies of ice that he found available royalty-free on the internet, Livet reconfigured their content to create his series of angular icebergs.

At a time marked by surges in population, both countries developed housing solutions that were emblematic of their evolving cultural identities. The necessity of suburban housing after the Second World War required architects turn their attention to domestic sites, and so this era is responsible for some of the more inventive and inexpensive modernist designs that we see in Gosse’s paintings. “By looking backwards and painting these homes across the two countries I want to undo the impersonal, unflattering suburban stereotype of today”, Gosse explains, “and cast our minds back to a generation of young architects and European migrants that breathed a spirit of invention into the suburbs.”