Chris Dorosz creates these three dimensional furniture installations using blobs of paint suspended from filament, and uses a simliar technique to create human figures. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to affix viscous, acrylic paint to monofilament like this.
Armada is the latest exhibition by Jacob Hashimoto currently at Studio La Città in Verona. Hashimoto frequently uses acrylic, paper, bamboo, and nylon to create densely layered installations of translucent discs and other geometric shapes that are mounted on walls. Some of his much larger works fill entire gallery rooms or ceiling spaces. Unique to this exhibition he installed a large-scale kinetic sculpture of suspended sailboats affixed to three gently rolling lever mechanisms that cause the ships to roll gently along invisible waves. I hope dearly somebody shoots a video of this in action. (via wowgreat)
(click images for detail)
Last November German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann was named the winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize, a bi-annual award bestowed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art, with an attached honorarium of $100,000. In a unique gesture to the museum Feldmann proposed the idea of creating an installation that would involve tacking 100,000 $1 bills to the walls of a large gallery off the Frank Lloyd Wright ramp. Via the NY Times:
“I’m 70 years old, and I began making art in the ’50s,” Mr. Feldmann said in a telephone interview from his studio in Düsseldorf. “At that time there was no money in the art world. Money and art didn’t exist. So for me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to show the quantity of it.”
It took museum art handlers roughly 13 days to pin the out-of-circulation bills to the wall and to condense the surface area required by so much currency the dollars were slightly overlapped. The exhibition will be up May 20–November 2, 2011. The photographs above by David Heald were provided courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Canadian artist and designer Tobias Wong died last year at the young age of 35, or more specifically, 13,138 days. In tribute, his friend Frederick McSwain created this immense portrait of Wong entitled Die using 13,138 dice as part of the BrokenOff BrokenOff exhibition at Gallery R’Pure in NYC in memoriam to the artist during NY Design Week. McSwain via Core77:
The idea of a die itself was appropriate—the randomness of life. It felt like [a medium] he would use. Because [Tobias] was a very street-level force, I thought it was appropriate [to install] the portrait on the floor. Its not something I wanted to suspend on the wall; I wanted it to be right there on the floor where you almost interact with it.
The idea of every decision you make and everything you’ve done in your life, defines who you are. All of those days symbolically makes up the image of Tobi.
The dice were first meticulously organized into individual sheets of 361 pieces and then laid to rest free on the floor without adhesive. The time lapse above shows the process in detail. A big thanks to Frederick for providing the photos of Miller Taylor for this post. (via core77)
I’m a sucker for huge signs made with pencils, and this work from Spagnola & Associates is no exception. Via their web site:
In 2011 Spagnola & Associates faced the challenge of designing their new office space. They created a 20′ wide dimensional wall to stimulate ideas and complete the office. 2,804 pencils were hammered into pre-drilled holes in the panels.
(via quipsologies)
Photos by Roger Albani.
Photo by Eric Nelsøn.
Work by Rob O’Brien.
And of course Ephemicropolis by Peter Root.
Over the past few weeks I’ve run into a number of artists making awesome things with staples and decided to group them into on big post. All of the images above link to their sources, and there’s much more where these came from.
For anyone visiting Colossal frequently you’ll notice a theme present in dozens of posts here is the idea of multiples, that is things built with thousands of other things, repetition, and process art, where the process of creating something is often more significant than what it produces. This type of work has always fascinated me and based on reactions I get from many of you it seems to universally strike a chord. Of the top 10 most popular posts on Colossal (as we approach the 1,000th post this week!) a full 8 of them deal with multiples in some way. As far as my own personal obsession I attribute it to my taste in music. At the age of five when most kids were probably listening to regular children’s music and nursery rhymes I was already accustomed to—and requesting—music like Isao Tomita, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno (this last link is the first music I ever recall hearing). Music rife with repetitive tones, harmonic chord progressions, and electronic noise, that if manifested physically might look something like these towering staple buildings. So I guess all of this is to say, thanks dad for listening to really weird music so I can justify posting about staples on my obscure art blog.
A great companion post to last weeks toothpicks. Behold the sculptural (architectural?) work of Denmark-based Lene Rønsholt Wille, who recently spent six weeks constructing this immense circular structure entitled “Metaphorical Horizons” in the central hall of the World Trade Center in Amsterdam. On her web site she refers to the entire concept as part two of a graduation project.
Taking the playful use of horizontal lines further, I made a design which lies on the boundary between being an object and being a space. It grows in scale and functions partly as a bench, a desk, a wall and as an entire space. [...] Over a period of 6 weeks I built up the design from 270,000 white LEGO bricks in the Central Hall of World Trade Center, Amsterdam.
The project was sponsored by the LEGO Company and you can see a great “brick by brick” photo gallery that details how it was built, showing, admittedly, a number of individuals who helped with the project. Incredibly awesome nonetheless.
(click images for detail)
In his installation A Butterfly’s Eye View artist Eiji Watanabe eviscerates butterfly field guides, releasing the delicately cut insects and pinning them to the walls around the gutted textbooks. It’s almost as if he bestows life to these little paper creatures, and yet they often remain organized in a tight grid, an entire new species of butterfly. The images came via a number of Flickr accounts.
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© 2010-2013 Christopher Jobson, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. I try my best to attribute images, videos, and quotes to their creators and original sources. If you see something on Colossal that's misattributed or you would like removed, please contact me. The Colossal logo and name Colossal are the trademarks of Christopher Jobson.
