In an urbanizing world, our connection with nature is becoming weaker. To explore our disconnection from nature, Crystal Wagner has created a large, colourful installation called Urban Kudzu. With smooth lines and blossom-like details, the large structure looks as if it is growing inside the gallery, as intended by the artist. Although the structure appears almost natural, it is made purely from synthetic materials such as paper streamers and plastic tablecloths. Wagner explained that “’[w]ith Urban Kudzu [she] wanted to explore colors that seemed more artificial or synthetic’” (Hi-Fructose). 

To see more of Wagner’s work, click here.

-Janine Truong

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