Photo Friday with Eleanor Bennett

Eleanor Bennett is 16 years old and has already become a successful photographer. She’s won first place with National Geographic, and been published in Telegraph, The Guardian and BBC News. But enough with the resume, what is her art about? As she states, “Mainly of how great things can be destroyed , health and environment awareness. Beauty in the ugly and trying to make ordinary look extraordinary.” Her works make the world a little more mystical, a little more beautiful. For more of Bennet’s photographs, click here. 

- Lee Jones

Takanori Aiba

Aiba, a former maze illustrator, founded his own company in 1981 and expanded his practice as an “art director for architectural spaces.” In this new role, Aiba showcases his knowledge of maze illustration and architecture by creating intricately detailed, miniature, worlds wrapped around bonsai trees, lighthouses, cliffs, and constructed on vertical islands. His works explore our involvement with the environment and his use of the bonsai recalls the Japanese tradition of the bonsai as a work of art. Expressing “the magnificence of nature,” Aiba’s inclusion of the bonsai in this series is seen as almost an act of updating history as various narratives can be drawn from each individual detail in his works. 

In addition, Aiba uses a variety of materials to craft these installations, including craft paper, plastic, plaster, and paint. 

For more information about Aiba’s work, please visit his website. 

- Victoria Nolte

Wendy: Dance and neutralize pollutants all in one space

Meet Wendy, a dynamic partyscape in Queens, NY that was designed with an environmental conscience. It provides an edgy, spacious, fun space to party in — all the while cleaning the air.

Architects Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner (HWKN), winners of this year’s MoMA Young Architects Program (a competition to build an outdoor partyscape for its PS1 location in Queen’s) were encouraged to work within guidelines that addressed issues of sustainability and recycling. As Hollwich said, “Architecture is entering a new period where buildings have personality, rights, and responsibility. Wendy is testing these grounds on a social, ecological, and humanisitic level.”

Their design consists of a ginormous scaffolding to support 1555 square yards of fabric coated in a solution of titania nanoparticles, which neutralizes airborne toxins. In this way, HWKN designed a rooftop partyscape that contributes some part in cleaning the air. As described by Hauke Jungjohann, director at Wendy’s structural engineering consultant firm, “Wendy is the perfect synergy of architectural aesthetics, systems efficiency and structural creativity. The magic of Wendy lies in the usage of something simple like a scaffolding system and reinventing its usage so that something new appears that has never been seen before.”

If you need any more proof that this is an awesome design, it is expected that Wendy’s impact on air pollution during the summer of 2012 will be equivalent to taking 260 cars off the road. And those spiky arms in the design? They shoot out blasts of cool air, music and water. With temperatures reaching the mid-thirties in Ottawa within the last few days, Wendy sounds like the awesomest summer party space ever.

To help fund the construction of this ambitious and complicated structure, HWKN worked with graphic designers to design merchandise (bags & T-shirts), all of which are also coated with the same pollution-neutralizing solution used on the structure itself.

Click here to visit Wendy’s website, where you can learn more about the design, watch videos, and even buy some titania nanoparticle-soaked, pollution-fighting merch if you are so inclined. If you are near Queens at any point this summer, check out Wendy! We’d love to hear your opinions about it.

- Gabrielle Doiron

Leonid Tsvetkov

Amsterdam-based artist Leonid Tsvetkov’s cityscape models make use of old motherboards (or what is left after valuable metals are stripped from them) and other computer innards. These models, depicting oil refineries and cityscapes dominated by large industrial complexes in muted hues, illustrate a quasi-dystopian environment.

In some works, the metals are rusted and the paint is chipped, amplifying this theme of the eventual deterioration that renders modern technological materials useless. In another sense, however, by recycling these materials Tsvetkov is suggesting that they can be made to have other uses, suggesting a more resourceful future.

Some of his models are even submerged in aquariums of sorts, surrounded by mysterious fungi that grimly resemble clouds of dark smoke or even natural phenomena such as tornadoes. In this sense, Tsvetkov alludes to the organisms that exist around and that are affected by the technology and machine-centric environments that facilitate modern living. As Tsvetkov describes it, “My work focuses on reshaping cultural waste and exploration of social and physical processes. I am interested in the moments where the hard edge geometry of the city becomes organic or there random activity begins to take a highly organized form.”

What I like most about Tsvetkov’s works is how much meaning lies in his use of the materials themselves. Not only do the models depict harshly industrial complexes and lots, but they do so with materials that draw attention to the ever-advancing world of computer technology. By using now ineffective and useless materials, once essential to the function of a computer product, Tsvetkov’s works illustrate that the constant improvements in the world of technology come at the price of the fast and consequential incompetency (and decreasing quality) of technological products. 

Tsvetkov recently participated in the exhibit MärklinWorld at Kunsthal KAdE  in the Netherlands, in which forty international contemporary artists who shared a demonstrated interest in depicting urban and rural landscapes contributed their work. Tsvetkov’s work was featured around a 60-metre model railway layout, where a train with a camera attached travelled. This gave visitors, who otherwise could only see the models from a bird’s eye view, a way to experience the landscapes as though they were passengers on the railway themselves. 

Normally I’d suggest a site where you could learn more about Tsvetkov, but unfortunately there’s not much to pick from. If anyone has a tip-off on a biography or artist statement, send it our way! To see the article where I first found out about his work, click here.

- Gabrielle Doiron

Philips Bio-Light: Bacteria as Energy Source

Philips’ newest Microbial Home concept is a resourceful and visually dynamic bio-light that uses bioluminescent bacteria, fed with methane and composted material (poop and waste) as an energy source. As you can see, this light is not only an achievement technologically and scientifically, but it is pretty impressive aesthetically as well.

For Philips, however, this is more than a light — it is a life-changing idea: “Potentially biological products could be self-energizing, adaptive, responsive, self-repairing, act as biological sensors to environmental conditions, and change the way we communicate information.”

So there’s waste, and then light, but how does it work? In scientific terms, bioluminescent organisms produce luciferase, an enzyme, which interacts with a molecule called a luciferin, which emits light. This type of light is produced at low temperatures (unlike incandescence, where light is produced as a result of high heat).

Luminescent light is consequently less intense, described as “more suitable for … ambience and indication than functional illumination”. It is slower than conventional light sources, and its functionality depends on the living material’s life itself. What’s cool about that, though, is that the light emitted is susceptible to change, and likely to react to its environmental setting. Essentially, it’s an ambiance-creating light source with a life of its own. 

Philips sees a more practical future for this concept in night-time road markings, warning strips on flights of stairs, informational markings on cultural institutions, and the like. As well, they see potential in its ability to create new genres of atmospheric interior lighting, that could potentially have therapeutic effects. All of this said, there are no plans to sell this light as a Philips product. Instead, it is intended to spark discussion: “this concept is testing a possible future — not prescribing one.” Oh well… we can dream!

In the meantime, you can have a look at some other Philips Microbial Home concepts here. For more information on the bio-light, click here.

- Gabrielle Doiron

Mathilde Roussel: Living Art

The works of Paris-based artist Mathilde Roussel revolve around the themes of life and decay in nature. Using vegetation and other living organisms as media in her work, Roussel explores the cycle of life and death.

Homo Arboretum is one of these living works, wrinkling and filling out with the changing weather conditions. Designed in the shape of human organs, it is a symbol of the lungs that breathe life into the heart of the city of Nashville. What is most heart-warming (no pun intended) about this piece is that it was a collaborative effort — it is composed of red clothing donated and stitched together by Nashville residents. It has received positive response in Nashville, and appeared so huggable to young children that the artist eventually had to have a guardrail built around it. (Can you blame the little ones? It is a veritable pillow play structure.)

In another work, entitled Echology, Roussel filled etched glass jars with natural substances that represented human body fluids and substances. With time, the living substances slowly changed, echoing the process of metamorphosis and decay that our own body parts, substances and fluids undergo when their life source is cut off. [To see the before and after shots of the substances, click here]

Similarly, her series Lives of Grass is another metaphor for the transformation of the human body over time. As described on her website, “Time sculpts the forms, makes them change and then decay”. These sculptures also draw attention to the fact that food (here represented by the wheat grass) has a profound impact on living beings, becoming a component of our body and affecting every single organ system once ingested. With this work, Roussel hopes to make viewers more sensitive to food and nature cycles and, on a greater scale, to the issues of abundance and famine, so that we may be more aware of our global reality.

For more fantastic living art, I encourage you to visit Roussel’s website here.

- Gabrielle Doiron

Matthew Brandt: Lakes and Reservoirs

From a photographer who will step on strangers’ balconies and hike to the top of hills to capture the perfect photograph comes Lakes and Reservoirs, a series of prints that were created using the water of the lakes photographed.

Matthew Brandt, an experimental photographer, is no stranger to taking more than his subjects’ images home with him after a day of photographing. Be it a friend, a tree, a bee or a lake — Brandt makes certain that the subject is as involved in the process of the development of the image as it is present in the image itself.

When capturing the images from his photographic series entitled “Lakes and Reservoirs” Brandt carried two things with him: his camera and a five-gallon jug to fill up with lake water. The process, quite simply, is as follows. After taking the photograph, collecting a generous water sample, and making his prints, Brandt pours the water into a large tray and submerges the print in the water. As he describes it, “from this point I wait for the water to break down its own photographic image. Depending on the image density and water, this breakdown time can take days or weeks”.

In addition to lake water, body fluids and bugs have also been used in his dark room. Brandt once made salted-paper prints of a portrait of his friend using the salt from the subject’s tears (I wonder how he made him cry?). In his series entitled Honeybees, Brandt used an emulsion of crushed bees as an ingredient to develop his photographs of the insects (to be clear, he did not kill the bees, but rather reportedly found hundreds of them dead and dying along the California shoreline).

In his work, Brandt aims to explore the idea that his images are mirrors of themselves, constituting themselves physically of the subject that they reflect visually. For Brandt, this series also attempts to parallel two examples of obsolescence— that of the lowering waterlines of the lakes (and consequently degrading water quality) and that of the c-prints he makes, outdated by more efficient photo printing technologies. 

In many of his images, the calm surface of the lake is violently distorted by the chemical constituents of the water, interrupting its seemingly flawless facade, and in some cases, obliterating more than half of the original image. Read into them what you will, but I would argue that there is something undeniable in these images that taps into our modern eco-consciousness. If the constituents of the water can cause such noticeable chemical reactions in the dark room, how does this affect the natural environment to which the water belongs? 

Matthew Brandt’s series “Lakes and Reservoirs” is currently featured in his exhibition “Lakes, Trees, and Honeybees” at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, NY. For more of Matthew Brandt’s work, click here.

- Gabrielle Doiron