Visit the exhibit at the City Hall Gallery in Ottawa until July 28th, and for more information click here. 

- Lee Jones

If you would like to view the original images and sounds encoded on the Voyager Golden Records, you can explore their website at: http://goldenrecord.org

- Daniel Cairns

Extreme sports and art don’t usually go hand-in-hand, but photographer Patrick Rochon has found a way to counter that. The area of photography in which Rochon specializes is light-painting, which in itself is its own artistic genre. Setting the camera to a longer exposure time allows light-painters to create photographs that, you guessed it, look like they have been painted with light. The result is mesmerizing.

In Rochons’ Motion to Light series, he attached LED lights to wakeboards, and allowed the professional athletes the freedom to create their own compositions, as he snapped away on the shoreline. This was the first time the photographer had ever done such a project, but the experiment was a success.

Not only did the LED’s mimic large, vibrantly-coloured brushstrokes, but the reflection in the water added to the texture of the overall piece. Like seeing two different, traditional, art styles come together in one photograph, through an un-traditional method.

It seems that even sports and technology, are able to inspire creative works.

-Anna Paluch

(Source: artandsciencejournal.com)

I first came acrossSadamasa Motonaga’s (1922-2011) Work (Water), 1956 (recreated in 2011 for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) whilst lazily perusing the Guggenheim Facebook page  one morning. Instantly, I felt a tension and infatuation with the piece and needed to feverishly begin deconstructing and attempting to answer the age old question, “what does it mean?” The contemporary version of the piece is constructed with multiple huge industrial-grade polyethylene tubing holding coloured water of varying hues, suspended in the rotunda of the Guggenheim above the heads of the gallery-goers allowing the light pouring in from the skylight to filter through the coloured water and create coloured patterns on the floor of the museum. Work (Water) was on display at the Guggenheim as part of the Gutai: Splendid Playground exhibition from February 15-May 8, 2013, an exhibition devoted to Japan’s most influential avante-garde and postwar artists. 

Instantly, the bright colours reminded me of Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) work with his bold use of colour and abstraction of form and figure. The plastic tubing of Motonaga’s piece acts like the brushstroke of the painter, separating each colour from one another and clearly defining each pool of water from the other in a sort of colour blocking. This allows the viewer to both appreciate each colour for its own value as well as how each colours plays off the other intensifying and contrasting with each other, harking to integral colour theory of visual art especially poignant for the modern art movement with its abstraction of form and bold use of colour.  Motogana breaks down colour theory to its essence: separating each colour to study singularly but on the same token, the array of colours can be considered collectively. The piece has almost a prismatic quality with the light constantly reflecting and refracting through the water and plastic tubing for the viewer to indulge in the colour. 

Not only does each colour work off of each other, but the select installation and choice of exhibition space is key. The original version of the piece (1956, seen in the third image above) had the plastic tubing suspended from the trees creating a sort of ethereal and almost surrealistic environment with a web of plastic and colour—a reflection of the growing use of plastics and bright hues of the 1950’s and 1960’s aesthetics. Since the tubing is such a large scale, the original site-specific installation was able to dwarf the viewer, allowing them to be completely consumed by the piece. Work (Water) (1956) holds a tension between the organic natural surroundings of the trees and outside landscape and the decidedly inorganic man-made plastics and dyes used to create the piece—one can infer, given our contemporary context of living green, a comment on our growing social awareness of man’s impact and imprint on our environment.  

On the other hand, the Guggenheim rotunda installation space is particularly interesting, then, given that the piece is housed in a completely man-made building in an expansive open space and therefore has the opposite effect on the viewer. Of course, one can appreciate the huge scale of the piece, but since Work (Water) (2011) is now suspended in a space that is more proportional to its size, the piece does not necessarily evoke the same consuming and overwhelming feeling of the original plastic web. Rather, one can simply walk up the ramps of the rotunda to get a better all-around view of the sculptural piece (giving a new outlook on the term, sculpture in the round) to get a better view from above and to figure out the logistics of the piece. Rather than focusing on the experience of the piece and its overwhelming nature, pushing us to consider the materials used and their own significance, we are instead focused on trying to “figure it out.”

Although it is incredibly enticing to look at, it is also this enticement that must be explored when considering site-specificity. There is no doubt that the curators and Board of Directors at the Guggenheim saw the commercial value in having a large, colourful, and, I would argue most importantly, “cool-looking-shiny-art-object” in the middle of their museum as the focal point for visitors. It is this quality that seduces the gallery-visiting consumer clientele, looking to stretch their legs from the long winter and step into spring at the Guggenheim, to view the fresh colours and textures with Motonaga. Not to commercialize Work (Water), in fact I argue that the piece is brilliantly progressive with it’s conceptual quality and use of material fused with classic colour theory, but it is quite interesting to step back from our high-art theory and criticism and to look at the work through the prism of the art market world to view the work entirely different. 

Click here for more information on Gutai: Splendid Playground

-Katlin Rogers

Portraiture is an art genre that has classically been defined as an artist painting or creating the likeness of the subject of the portrait. This is usually achieved by depicting the features of the person that everyone sees - the outside of their body. Angela Palmer’s work, consisting of both self-portraits and general portraits, challenges the notion of the portrait by depicting the inside of the body. Each portrait is created by drawing or engraving the resulting details of MRI and CT scans of the subject onto glass sheets. The portrait is built up layer by layer on multiple sheets, creating a subject that can be viewed only from certain angles. From above and from the side, the image vanishes and the viewer is left to contemplate space. 

Angela Palmer has stated that her concept for this series of works has developed from a love of maps. By marrying medical technology with her artistic practice, she has managed to visualize the ‘inner anatomical architecture’ of the human body, revealing the intimate structures that make up the outer features that typical portraiture depicts. It also allows for fascinating contemplation of the human body itself, showing what is going on beneath the surface on both a functional and psychological level. Angela’s work has also been used for the benefit of science and history, using her concept to scan the and recreate the body of a 2000-year-old Egyptian child mummy without removing his wrappings. The scans even allowed doctors to determine that the little boy had probably died of pneumonia, due to a thickening of his lung. The resulting work is on 111 sheets of glass, and is displayed next to the boy himself in the Ashmolean Museum Collection in Egypt.

To read the artist statement, which includes more information about Angela’s work, click here.

-Lea Hamilton

(Source: artandsciencejournal.com)

See more of Hazelton’s projects at his website here. 

- Erin Saunders

The recent Sakahàn exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada is an amazing collection of contemporary art created by Indigenous artists from around the world. Installations, photographs, sculptures, videos, paintings; there is something for everyone. What about new media? Well, there is some of that too!

Tlingit artist Doug Smarch is a conceptual artist whose piece Lucinations (2010) is one of the many amazing projections on display in Sakahàn. What is intriguing about this piece is that the materials combined are near polar opposites of each other; both natural and technological elements. The ‘screen’ used for Doug’s work is made up of hundreds of white feathers, while the video projection is a collection of various computer-generated images, done through the computer program Maya. His piece tells the story of a man, looking for a lost relative, and asking for help from a medicine man. After being turned into a fox by the medicine man, the protagonist of the legend finds his relative in the next village, but also a dark cloud above the village, an omen. This omen became known as the Alaskan Highway.

In a way, the materials specifically reference the legend. The feathers, a natural material often featured in traditional art and regalia, can be seen as a symbol for life before the highway, while the juxtaposition of a new media projection can be seen as the highway, paving over the traditional way of life. taking over it.

If you would like to see his work for yourself, Lucinations (2010) will be on display at the National Gallery until the 2nd of September.

If you’re interested in other works found in the Sakahàn exhibit, please read my fellow A&SJ writer Lea Hamilton’s post on another video piece, currently on display at the National Gallery.

-Anna Paluch

In 2010, artist Ferruccio Sardella installed a living sculpture in the Welcome Court of the Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, named Watershed Consciousness. The structure lives by the rainwater that runs through it, feeding its plant wall. It serves as a representation of the Toronto area watersheds, mapping the passage of water from the Oak Ridges Moraine to Lake Ontario.

Evergreen Brick Works is the place to be for exploring what’s new in urban sustainability. Nestled in an oasis of forest next to the Don Valley Parkway, this social enterprise is bringing nature back to cities by means of inclusive community programming. At the inauguration of Watershed Consciousness, one of the sites many public art pieces, Geoff Cape, Evergreen’s executive director, explained: “We hope that through this watershed wall, we help re-connect Torontonians to the natural forces that sustain us.” 

Recently, Evergreen Brick Works hosted the Grey To Green Conference, an event focused on greening urban infrastructure. Hot topics at this conference included living walls or roofs and storm water management, two things that are realized in Sardella’s public art piece.

Sculpted stainless steel pipes imitate the Lake Ontario tributaries that run throughout the Toronto area, transporting rainwater through forested arteries such as the Don Valley. A large plate of rusted cor-tan steel delineates the highly urbanized region of Toronto, perforated by winding rivers. Rainwater flows down into the structure and trickles out along a sheet of steel at the bottom, creating a waterfall wall effect.

If this piece serves as a map of Toronto, it breaks the convention of metropolitan cartography, reminding us to acknowledge the geography beneath our paved roads and city blocks.

“Instead of the repetitive criss crossing of city streets, the piece depicts ghostly homages to the lost rivers of Toronto etched into the rusted steel. To consider this work as a map is to confront Toronto’s ecological essence. “Where is your watershed address?” is the question the installation asks the occupants of the region.” –Ferruccio Sardella

- Meriza Martel-Bryden