For the past several years Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have been collecting tons of plastic debris off a small stretch of beach near their Norther California home. The plastic is cleaned, categorized and stored before its utilized in their assorted projects including sculptural work, photography, large-scale museum installations, jewelry and art prints. Learn more here. (via vimeo)
I love the subtle effect of this installation by Patrick Bérubé. At a distance it looks simply like a white toy container ship resting on the gallery floor. On closer inspection you realize the entire gallery floor has been modified, the gaps between the wooden floorboards mimicking the ocean wake behind the lumbering toy vessel. The piece is part of the Fenêtre sur cour exposition at Gallerie SAS in Montréal that runs through January 12.
Doors was an enormous 10-story public art installation made from 1,000 reused doors by South Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa. From what I can tell it appears the piece was installed somewhere in Seoul in 2009. Choi discusses his process over on the Creators Project where he talks about becoming a public installation artist because he was unable to draw or paint, but would instead spend much of his time walking around the city discovering interesting trash and discarded objects and photographing it. (via ju est fou)
Photographer Thomas Jackson (previously) has been working on a new series of images based on the idea of swarms, shooting large hovering masses of objects in locations around New York. He says the idea is still a work in progress and that some of these photos should just be considered “sketches,” but I think they’re really fantastic already. See them a bit larger on his site.
Measuring Angst is a robotic sculptural installation by artist Jonathan Schipper that simulates the mundane act of throwing a glass bottle across a room into a brick wall. The event happens in slow motion, taking nearly 12 minutes to complete as the bottle rotates slowly through the gallery space and then gradually explodes into smaller fragments before rewinding and starting again. Schipper also famously (and somewhat infamously if you’re a car aficionado) crashed two muscle cars over a period of six days in his pieces entitled The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle.
For a second year, street art collective Mentalgassi has partnered with Amnesty International and Wieden + Kennedy creative team Lisa Jelliffe and Kirsten Rutherford to help highlight some of the year’s most prominent human rights abuse cases playing out around the world. Via Unurth:
This year the German street art collective have created work that appears in 26 sites across Wales, Ireland, Germany and Denmark. The 6 individuals highlighted in this year’s work include Fatima Hussein Badi, who faces the death penalty in Yemen after an unfair trial, Jabbar Savalan, who is in prison in Azerbaijan for his peaceful anti-government activism (including comments he made on Facebook), and Natalia Estemirova, a Russian human rights activist whose murder has not been brought to justice.
Mentalgassi transformed large portaits of each individual into segmented strips that are applied to the slats of fences. At first the images aren’t readily visible and only come into focus suddenly from extreme angles, reinforcing the campaign’s theme, ‘making the invisible visible‘. (via unurth)
Welsh-born artist and photographer Olsen Zander has been wrapping trees in white fabric around the UK for the better part of a decade. In this series entitled Tree, Line, Zander uses the fabric to reveal the horizon lines as they disappear behind the surface of trees. Really amazing work. If you liked this, also check out the mirrored tree installations of Joakim Kaminsky and Maria Poll. (via it’s nice that)
For his latest exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, German artist Wolfgang Laib poured over 30,000 piles of rice and seven piles of pollen to create one of his largest installations ever entitled Unlimited Ocean. Laib worked with several SAIC alumni during a ten day residency in October to pour each small mound resulting in an enormous grid that covers much of the expansive Sullivan North Gallery in downtown Chicago. The work will be on display to the public through December 23, 2011. Photographs by James Prinz courtesy SAIC.
