Category: Art

Whilst the real Villa Savoye stands under UNESCO protection as a world heritage site, in the Vejle fjord, Danish artist Asmund Havesteen-Mikkelsen has sunk a 1:1 replica of Le Corbusier’s masterpiece in his work ‘Flooded Modernity’.

Created as a part of ‘Floating Art’, an annual festival held by the Vejle Art Museum, the replica sits partially submerged in the waters beyond the institution. The piece stands—or sinks—as a “For me, the Villa Savoye is a symbol of modernity and enlightenment…”critical statement about modernity: Namely, all that the movement promised, and all it failed to deliver. “For me, the Villa Savoye is a symbol of modernity and enlightenment,” explains the artist. “It represents the faith in the critical powers of the human mind in relation to progress and in our use of criticality in the public sphere.” His disillusionment follows a period defined by political mistrust and privacy breaches: “After these scandals, I think our sense of democracy and the public sphere has been distorted through the use of digital technologies to manipulate elections,” he explains. “Our sense of modernity has been ‘flooded’. I sense the need to ‘re-state’ our“…it represents the faith in the critical powers of the human mind” political institutions, because our old ones have ‘sunk’.”

Constructed from styrofoam, white painted plywood, and plexiglass, the piece is certainly lighter than the 1930 concrete original in Poissy, France. Villa Savoye is considered as one of Le Corbusier’s most significant works, its construction heralding an age of modernism and an optimistic end to ornamentation.

South African photographer Dillon Marsh has created ‘Gold’: his fourth project that utilizes CGI techniques as part of the photographic series titled ‘For What It’s Worth’.

The series explores a significant part of South Africa’s history; the mining of natural resources such as copper, gold, and diamonds, and the effect this has had on the land over time. In ‘Gold’, Marsh uses CGI to create a scale model of the total amount of gold extracted from each of the seven Witwatersrand Basin goldfields. For context, the Witwatersrand Basin is a geological formation responsible for almost half the world’s gold reserves. Marsh’s enormous gold spheres are juxtaposed against the land from which the gold is produced. The result is a poignant series of photographic images that speak loudly about our capitalistic demand for gold.

Marsh, whose copper series of the same theme we’ve featured previously on iGNANT, explains of his discontent with mines: “Their features are crude, unsightly scars on the landscape. [They are] unlikely feats of hard labor and specialised engineering, constructed to extract value from the earth but also exacting a price”.

Philadelphia-based textile artist Maggie Casey creates extraordinary free-standing tapestries and architectural constructions, taking materials like string, silk, and plaster and elevating them to arrestive new heights.

The fiber artist’s fascination with string is informed by her background in weaving, sewing and pattern making. Casey harnesses materials for what they are and creates installations that give the perception of a moment frozen in time. Her artworks range from room installations to smaller projects and sculptures. Larger pieces include ‘Stairs’: an ascending staircase in an abandoned ball court made from monofilament fiber, string, and staples; and ‘Skim’: a floating mass of many beaded curtains knotted together and held up by invisible wires. Smaller works include ‘Breaker’: an abstract cavern-like painted plaster mold, colored netting wall hangings, and ‘Cloud’: a delicately hanging cloud model made from silk organza, held in place by thread, copper tacks and wood.

‘Azaadi’ is the collection of sculpted garments created by New York-based artist and designer Misha Japanwala. Fusing fashion and art, ‘Azaadi’ is an homage to the strength and bravery of the women of Pakistan.

The London-born artist and designer grew up in Islamabad, Pakistan, before relocating to New York, where she has spent the past year working on a collection for her university thesis. In the later processes of her research for ‘Azaadi’, Japanwala traveled to Pakistan where she spent time speaking to victims of domestic violence about their experiences. Returning to New York after this affecting trip, she completed ‘Azaadi’, imbuing the collection with the stories of the women she spoke to. The result is an intimate selection of sculpted garments that illuminate the female body in both fabric and plaster. The artist created grey plaster molds of her own nude body to symbolize shields of armor; a metaphor for the protection of said women. The hand molds are taken from the women Japanwala spoke to, bringing together parts of their bodies with hers.

Her artist statement explains the journey of understanding the precarious experience of being a woman in Pakistan: “I wanted to use casts of my own body as vessels to highlight the strength of the women who weren’t afraid to fight to live on their own terms”, she explains. “[And] also, the fragility that comes with being an outspoken woman in Pakistan”. Azaadi, which means ‘freedom’ in Urdu, is a compelling way for Japanwala to express both herself and the lived experience of many.

‘Fool’s Gold’ is the upcoming exhibition by Colorado-based artist Shawn Huckins. In it, he presents ‘The Erasures’: a collection of oil and acrylic-on-canvas paintings that depict historical paintings of prominent political figures and landscapes, that have had large parts of their form erased.

Take heed: there is no photography or photoshopping in Huckins’ process. All works are original paintings by Huckins’ own hand, with manipulations physically painted on in addition. The checkerboard pattern is well known to graphic designers and Microsoft Paint users alike, it appears when you wipe out part of an image. Huckins uses this tool as a motif to signify a broader, important topic at the forefront of public consciousness: the erasure of history. “The underlying works chosen for this series originally served as testaments of those who came before us and the indelible mark they left on the world”, Huckins explains in his exhibition statement. “In an era where the internet makes everyone a publisher… The Erasures forces us to examine our assumptions regarding the longevity of individual influence and institutions”.

Greek artist Anestis Anestis has created a series of abstract portraits of the G8 world leaders. Each image in ‘This is not a group’ is comprised of four hundred photographs layered on top of one another, rendering the people within them as blurred but familiar forms.

Using custom-made software designed with Processing, Anestis developed a program that stacks Google image results on top of one another, condensing hundreds of photographs into a single portrait. As the artist explains, “Each pixel captures the light and color details of numerous original images, and the huge algorithmic details displayed in large dimensions challenge the viewer to fuse his physiological perceptions with their digital “…a reference to Claude Monet’s impressionist method of painting the same scene many times to capture the essence of passing seasons”representations in a world of big data.”

Though the portraits are abstracted, some of the faces in them remain familiar—the colors of Angela Merkel and Donald Trump notably so. The merging of so many images into one gives the portraits a painterly quality, and Anestis himself points to the impressionistic style that they have taken on. In a statement about the work, he nods to Pointillism and wider Neo-Impressionist art, along with CMYK printing and Abstract Expressionism as references for the series. “The clustering of many different images portraying the same query term…is also a reference to Claude Monet’s impressionist method of painting the same scene many times to capture the essence of passing seasons,” Anestis explains. If a picture tells a thousand words, four hundred pictures condensed into one certainly tells much more.

Stockholm-based conceptual photographer Carl Kleiner’s video series ‘Postures’ features artfully arranged dying tulips that move in a delicate and melancholic fashion.

Do note, the flowers are not actually moving. The illusion of their freefall is provided by a natural version of stop-motion photography. With regular stop-motion animation, objects are physically manipulated in tiny increments between each individual frame to create an impression of motion. In ‘Postures’, the drooping tulips manipulate themselves with gravity, and because they are in the process of dying. The weight of the flowers change as they slowly dry out, changing in return the shapes that they make in their dances—Kleiner captures images of this process at expertly timed intervals. ‘Postures’ is reminiscent of the Japanese floral art arrangement, Ikebana. The flowers are mounted on a construction of metal wires, with some being propped up by monochrome bases. Kleiner, who is mostly known for his still-life photography, explains of the technique: “The posture series comes from experiments with methods to [position] the flowers in order to photograph them in poses and arrangements that made them look alive”.

An interactive digital museum of color and light installations has opened in Tokyo, Japan. ‘teamLab Borderless’ is the first of its kind, featuring 50 fluidly-moving installations that position the viewer directly within the artwork’s sphere.

The immersive, kaleidoscopic works do not remain static: no borders, walls or doors separate each piece of art from the next. Artworks move freely, sometimes out of the borderless rooms, communicating with viewers and intermingling with other works. The works transform according to the presence of people—here the distinction between viewer and art is completely dissolved, exemplifying precisely how digital technology is expanding the art world.

The museum consists of five zones, using almost 1000 projectors and computers across 10,000-square-meters of space. All of this forms together as a labyrinth of multi-sensory virtual experiences. The installation titled ‘Wander Through The Crystal Universe’, which is part of the Borderless World, for example, has a seemingly infinite number of LED lights with particles that morph and change as the user passes through. This allows them to become the center point of the installation. The area was designed with its own distinct aroma; specifically the smell of the ‘universe’, which was supervised by the astronaut Naoko Yamazaki.

Toshiyuki Inoko, founder of the art collective responsible for the museum, explains that ‘teamLab Borderless’ explores the new relationship between humans and nature, via the convergence of art, technology, design and the natural world. “If an artist can put thoughts and feelings directly into people’s experiences, artworks too can move freely, [and] form connections… with people”, he says. It’s an astounding testament to the link between human consciousness, nature and the universe.