Category: Art

The luminous architectural installation comprises of reflective rotating columns designed to reference the experience of living in a metropolis like NYC. “Our goal was to create a simple, yet transformative experience that metaphorically and physically reflects the surroundings of A/D/O and New York City at large”, explains Matt Clark, the founder of United Visual Artists (UVA). This reflection is enacted by the golden installation, each nine-foot-tall column splitting and refracting its surroundings as it rotates. These movements have been determined by research into human activity in the city; the algorithm illustrating when the crowds are most frantic, and most calm throughout the day.

This poetic movement manages to illustrate artfully the motion of a place like New York; sometimes it seems that the city does sleep. The experience of walking amongst the columns in the A/D/O courtyard is both unsettling and exciting — two emotions often felt upon a first visit to a big city. At night the installation is quite literally illuminated, as lights from within the columns flood the space.

Its location is appropriate for such an innovative piece of art: A/D/O, whose courtyard ‘Spirit of the City’ sits within, was a warehouse until New York studio nArchitects reimagined it as a creative hub, restaurant and start-up incubator for MINI. Here, alongside design thinking programs and artist studios, you’ll find young creatives from around the world working on varied projects. You can visit and see for yourself, though the space was made by designers, it is also open to the public.

‘Spirit of the City’ was unveiled to correspond with the annual NYCxDesign Festival, and is on display at A/D/O until the second of September 2018.

All images by © MINI
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In collaboration with MINI.

Using only smoke and water, Dutch artist Berndaut Smilde creates clouds with a lifespan of approximately 10 seconds: just enough time to capture these ephemeral artworks through the lens of a camera.

In the ever-expanding series ‘Nimbus’, Smilde photographs his cloud-like apparitions in locations various around the world — from coal mines to co-working spaces and cathedrals. In an interview with Wired, Smilde explained “I see them as temporary sculptures of almost nothing — the edge of materiality. It looks like you can dive into them or grab them, but they just fall apart. There’s a duality there that I really like, where you’re trying to achieve this ideal thing that then just collapses moments later.”

There are few requirements for the location of his clouds; the space must be cold and a little damp, with no air circulation. First, water is misted in the air and then smoke is issued from a machine — upon meeting these two elements combine and form Smilde’s artworks. When working, Smilde can create up to 100 of his ‘clouds’ in order to capture the cloud. Smilde typically works with architectural photographers; something instantly recognizable in the perfectly captured lines of the austere spaces that his ephemeral installations briefly call home.

Portland-based painter Lisa Golightly takes familiar scenarios and abstracts them, producing figurative portraits thick with brush strokes of acrylic and nostalgia.

Drawing from her background in photography, Golightly’s work celebrates the unplanned and the in-between: whether that be friends caught in the midst of conversation or a body in motion between water and sky. Growing up with a father who was a painter; Golightly admits that she always cast “an envied glance” at painting, particularly when studying photography at college. “While I enjoyed photography and how it forced me to look at at the world,” she explains, “there is definitely an immediacy that comes with painting.”

Often working from found images, Golightly presents sun-bleached views of beach days and moments by the pool, lusciously watered lawns and suburban streets full of children. The faces are ambiguous, but the scenes feel strikingly familiar. “In the beginning I used family photos,” Golightly explains to us, “and in college I experimented with my own photos, painting on an image and then using that as a negative to print from.” Now she draws predominantly from found or purchased photographs of faces unknown to her: “While the imagery is something that could be from my own life,” she admits, “there is a freedom that I find when I don’t actually know the story or the people in the picture.”

Her work revolves around memory and how photographs have the potential to metamorphose what we remember. The figurative nature of her works lends itself to the blurred edges of memories and recollected stories from summers long past: “I think a painting lends itself to a viewer more when they have to fill it in and finish the story”, she explains.

Playing with our sensual relationship to material and color, Sydney-based artist Jonny Niesche creates iridescent works that confuse perception and mood.

Working with hard reflective surfaces such as mirrors, welded steel and polished brass, along with softer, shimmering fabrics, Niesche is able to manipulate space and perspective in a fanciful way. He combines these reflective material choices with a kaleidoscope of colors, which transport the viewer into a dizzying world. Niesche’s color selection often has a narrative behind it and informs the audience’s understanding of the artwork. For his first solo show in London entitled ‘Cracked Actor’, the artist used color gradients that were featured on the cover of Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ album; for ‘Picture This’ a series of colorful rectangular pieces, he used samples that were taken entirely from images of Debbie Harry’s (Blondie’s frontwoman) hair and make-up during the 1970s. This interesting use of pigmentation can be traced back to his childhood where his understanding of color was formed while “being dragged around the cosmetic section of a department store with [his] mum.”

What is felt most prominently when looking at Niesche’s work is its performative effects. The work interacts with the space it occupies in an experiential way. Additionally, it implicates the viewer, drawing them in through its reflective qualities, and causing them to rethink their understanding of surface via a fusion of light, color and touch.

‘Ama’ is a short film performed and directed by deep sea diver and filmmaker Julie Gautier. Over five minutes, the piece follows Gautier as she dances underwater.

Performed in the world’s deepest pool in Italy, Gautier holds her breath for the duration of the film, only allowing herself to open her lungs when she rises to the surface at the culmination of her beautifully choreographed routine. Named ‘Ama’, the film draws its title from 海女, a Japanese term that refers to pearl divers and which translates literally to mean sea maiden. The “For this is not too crude, I covered it with grace. To make it not too heavy, I plunged it in the water.”practice of ama is said to be over 2000 years old, and traditionally the women it refers to would dive without scuba gear or air tanks, making it the precursor of the modern free dive movement which Gautier is a part of.

Gautier gives no explanation of the meaning behind ‘Ama’, except to say that “It tells a story everyone can interpret in their own way, based on their own experience. There is no imposition, only suggestion.” Opening with unbroken eye contact in the rain, we suddenly find ourselves immersed in water, at the bottom of a pool. “I wanted to share my biggest pain in this life with this film,” Gautier writes. “For this is not too crude, I covered it with grace. To make it not too heavy, I plunged it in the water.” Closing with a note of dedication to “My tiniest daughter”, Gautier released this film on International Women’s day stating that it was for all the women of the world.

“I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated”, renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama explains. This experience as a child informed her most recent work, ‘Flower Obsession’.

Commissioned for the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennal, ‘Flower Obsession’ is an immersive installation that invites guests to “obliterate” a room with flower stickers — and in doing so, to enact Kusama’s childhood memory. The flowers, like dots and nets, are Kusama’s leitmotifs — and their appearance first came to her during childhood. “I call them my repetitive vision. I still see them… It is an obsession.”Born in 1929 in the Japanese Alps, she began seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10 after she began experiencing visions were dots, nets, and flowers covered everything that she saw. In an interview with Justin McCurry, she explains, “I call them my repetitive vision. I still see them. [They] cover the canvas and grow on to the floor, the ceiling, chairs and tables. Then the polka dots move to the body, on to my clothes and into my spirit. It is an obsession.” Upon entering ‘Flower Obsession’, guests are given fake gerbera flowers and stickers which they are invited to place on any surface on their choosing. At the conclusion of the four-month Triennal, the room has, as Kusama wished, been “obliterated”.

Argentinian artist and sculptor Conie Vallese casts faces in eternal states of transformation.

Look at a sculpture for long enough and you start to see new faces and new profiles.Inspired by her father’s experiments in sculpture, the Buenos-Aires born artist creates small-scale plaster faces that appear to be caught in motion. After studying at University of Buenos Aires, Vallese moved to New York where she made a career for herself as an artist, working on campaigns for titan fashion labels such as Joseph. She has also tried her hand at modeling, becoming the face of an FCUK campaign and the muse in her husband photographer Josh Olins’ experimental series ‘Tierra’.

She is best known for her fluid sculptures and monochrome prints. Her collection of porcelain heads feature mouths left hanging open, faces appearing to look around the corner and contorted expressions. These sculptures work almost like optical illusions: look at a sculpture for long enough and you start to see new faces and new profiles. It is this fluidity and ability to warp perceptions that make Vallese’s sculptures so engaging.