This beautiful video footage was recently shot by the Asia Society Museum in New York City, where Korean artist U-Ram Choe‘s most recent triumph, a shimmering, golden, “breathing” sculpture, is being premiered.
Most of Choe’s elaborate kinetic sculptures are assembled from stainless steel and acrylic, and motorized with robotics that he himself develops and programs. The above work, called Custos Cavum (“Guardian of the Hole” in Latin) is a particularly delicate and elaborate piece created as a response to this tenth-century Shiva Nataraja sculpture. (Custos Cavum is part of the Asia Society’s “In Focus” series, which invites contemporary artists to craft new works inspired by pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. Choe’s new work is being shown with the Shiva sculpture.)
Choe has stated that his creation is “a creature [that] protects the flow of communication between the two realms that assures mutual respect. In this fable, the guardian is a symbol of coexistence just as the Hindu god, Shiva, is a symbol of balance and harmony.” (via)
A captivatingly atemporal silver gelatin print from 1995:
“Hall of Thirty-Three Bays” by Hiroshi Sugimoto
(Our 400px column width definitely ain’t doing the composition any favors; it’s worth taking the time to view this stunning image as large as possible.)
The work of Tokyo/NYC-based artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto reflects a lifelong fascination with infinity and eternity. He has “spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.” (via)
The story behind this particular image: these are the fiercely protected, rarely viewed 1001 statues of the Sanjusangendo, a 390-foot-long wooden temple in Kyoto containing thirty-three bays, also known as Sea of Buddha. Sugimoto was determined to show the statues as they were meant to be viewed during the Heian Perod (794-1185). It took seven years for Sugimoto to get permission to enter the “Hall of Thirty-Three Bays” with his camera equipment and capture the eight-hundred-year-old Armed Merciful Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara figures just as the early morning sunlight hit them, simultaneously illuminating one-thousand-and-one haloes. The resulting imagery is both ancient and somehow futuristic, infinite and immediate.
A woodworker in Marrakesh creates a chess piece (a King, specifically) using a skew chisel, a bow lathe and his hands and feet. At one point it looks as though he has made some sort of error; one of the lines is askew, at odds with the rest. It is only a short time later that you realize that what he’s done is carved a free-floating ring! Simply astonishing. I’ve watched this video three times now and each time I am blown away by the man’s proficiency.
Thomas Negovan of Century Guild is an incredibly brilliant and intuitive creative force whose latest curation, “Grand Guignol II: HÄXAN – Satan + The Women Who Love Him” opened to the public tonight (Saturday October 22nd) at the Century Guild salon in Chicago. The art –which, as you might guess from the name, focuses on dark femininity and the demonic– assembled for this group show is astonishing:
“Austin Young’s 1999 portrait of avant-garde diva Diamanda Galás; Georges de Feure’s 1893 Japonist conjuration of wickedness “Friends of the Devil in the Flesh” ; Gustav Klimt’s ultra-seductive “The Witch” (1919) ; and “Italian Art Nouveau master Adolfo Hohenstein next to modern Italian artists Malleus, painter Gail Potocki, and sculptor Stanislav Szukalski.”
Carlos Schwabe’s “Destruction”
(Un)holy fucking shit, right?!
Thomas says “This is far and away my favorite show I’ve curated. Ever.” As of this moment, he tells Coilhouse that most of the works are available, but they’re going to fly off the walls shortly, so if you’re in Chicago, you gotta go see this jaw-dropping collection of pieces brought together for one luxuriant, once-in-a-lifetime event. Incroyable.
Numen / For Use are an art and design collective who create organic, web-like structures from adhesive tape. Their temporary installations are large and stable enough for several adults to crawl through, and the effect is not unlike being trapped in a giant spider’s web.
After climbing up a step ladder, you find yourself suspended in a series of glistening caverns, the frosted plastic obscuring your view of the outside world.
Photo by Fred Kroh.
Their latest project, Tape Melbourne, took eight days to complete, with three artists and fifteen volunteers working nine hours every day. The exhibit used thirty kilometers of tape to build, with more tape to repair and fix the structure on a nightly basis.
The Numen / For Use website contains more examples of their work, including images and videos of the construction process. You can explore their newest installation at Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia for a few more days; from now through September 24th, 2011.
Photo courtesy of Federation Square
More photos of the installation after the jump. (Editor’s note: This is our cherished intern Connie Chen’s first blog post for Coilhouse. Thank you, Connie!)
Via Morbid Anatomy/BoingBoing/Jessica Joslin, here’s the British Pathe‘s splendid ’65 tour of the now sadly defunct Walter Potter Museum in Bramber, UK, which, until recently, housed all of the famed anthropomorphizing taxidermist’s weird and whimsical work.
Katsuyo Aoki works principally in ceramics, cialis creating incredibly complex pieces. Her Predictive Dream series is especially impressive, recipe comprised of a number of skulls formed by lacy, online swooping, and fragile ceramic tendrils.
Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel.
Sadly, despite taking it’s inspiration from Melville’s most famous work, it does not appear to include an infinite loop of tiny Ahabs.
When I was a child, I had an ongoing and masochistic addiction to scale models. That is to say, that while I enjoyed miniatures, mostly of the military variety, I mainly enjoyed them in the idealized, finished versions in my head. I did not, however, take much joy in the harsh, time intensive reality of constructing a 1/48th scale German Tiger tank — a reality fraught with frustration and toxic substances. It was a truly volatile combination, I assure you, and usually resulted in my shaking with impotent rage over a pile of badly painted plastic, it’s surfaces ravaged by the effects of Testors Model Cement.
Despite a complete lack of ability (which I have learned to accept) I still find myself fascinated with diminutive, scale reproductions of places and objects. Randy Hage does not work in the area of war that so preoccupied the violent imagination of my youth, but his work is astounding. Focusing on New York City storefronts he recreates everything from the signage and shutters to the graffiti that adorns their facades and various bits of detritus inside and out. The level of detail here requires a patience that I never possessed or, no doubt, ever will.
Featuring an inventive use of mixed media, Gregory Euclide’s work centers around the seemingly simple premise of making a a traditional painting three dimensional. His solution is fairly ingenious — twisting and shaping the canvas and blending it into the sculptural additions. Fashioned from man-made and natural material they help complete the illusion of a landscape painting spilling over the frame and back to life. His most recent work is for the upcoming album from Bon Iver.
