Paper Reefs

Some artists use materials related to the subjects they paint when creating art pieces, but artist Amy Eisenfeld Genser doesn’t pick up found object at her local beach when she creates her reef pieces. She takes pieces of coloured paper, rolls them up, and positions them in a way that the final outcome looks like a natural formation of barnacles or sea sponge.

Her pieces are visually mesmerizing, with a hint of something magical! It is like entering into a new world when you look at her work. The mosaic of shapes and colours created by the rolled paper, juxtaposed onto an already painted canvas, stimulates the senses. The artist herself claims her work is both irregular and ordered, using texture to mimic natural motifs.

It is amazing how paper, a material traditionally made from trees, can be manipulated to recreate the basic structures of a reef, which to some, may be considered a tree of the sea. Nature once again creates a connection within itself through art practices.

-Anna Paluch

Landscape Revisited

The ability for people to go into space has opened many doors in terms of exploration and knowledge of the universe, yet it has also given us a chance to look at our Earth from a different perspective.

Col. Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, currently onboard the International Space Station, who takes pictures of the Earth while on his mission in space. It is a new style of landscape photography. Previously, our only options in terms of ‘landscape’ photography were to take a picture of the Earth, on Earth, or capture the vast expanse of space via astrophotography.

Now, we can take into account the scale of the Earth; how massive desserts are, how tiny cities are. We can see both natural beauty and industrial devastation. His images are reflections of the various societies in this world, and its history. Like all great photographs, they tell stories, either about lost civilizations, daily routines or environmental changes.

Though not everyone can just get into a spaceship and take pictures all day, what Col. Chris Hadfield is doing, is opening doors for future artists, scientists, and explorers, to see the different ways in which we can capture our surroundings, through photography.

-Anna Paluch

Dillon Marsh’s South Easter

Each South African summer (between August and April) welcomes a strong, dry, and unrelenting wind that travels from False Bay down the coast to Capetown through to Blouberg. Known colloquially as the “Cape Doctor”, the wind is thought to be so consistent that it actually clears Capetown’s air of pollution and impurities. In places where the wind is strongest, like Cape Town Peninsula, trees lean permanently after having grown with these annual winds. Artist and photographer Dillon Marsh has captured the uncanny elegance of some of these trees, reminding us of the physical traces left by this invisible force.

For more fascinating work by Marsh, including photographic series about resourceful birds’s nests in the Kalahari and cell phone towers masquerading as palm trees, visit his website here.

- Erin Saunders

Tails of the Comet

Housed in a darkened room at Centre Clark in Montreal, Claudie Gagnon’s installation, Les queues de cométe (2013), dazzles and enchants with its mysterious sculptural formations and echoing sounds. Test tubes, elastic bands, sprouting potatoes, fishing line and steel wool: consumer detritus is the stuff of Gagnon’s installation. The work comprises seven large chandeliers, each built of a different material. Swaying slowly, the chandeliers are a fusion of the natural and synthetic, cavernous stalactites of the uncanny and the everyday. One of four walls within the room is littered with tiny holes; the light from outside creates a constellation of stars. In addition to the ominous sculptures, the soft sound of chimes can be heard and the gentle fluttering wings of taxidermy butterflies, speckled throughout the installation, create the illusion of life.

Gagnon’s re-imagining of everyday objects skillfully creates an oscillation between that which is familiar and the grotesque, submersing the viewer in an alternative, fictive world. In this world a sort of pseudoscience is the rule: biology, taxonomy, and astronomy hold no currency within the work, as it undermines the rigid systems of scientific classification. Is this perhaps a hint that all such systems are transient and bound by their inherent limits? The borders of science-based knowledge are always policed, however within this work a brief moment of unraveling is experienced- a small reminder that all discursive systems are ultimately limited.

- Natasha Chaykowski 

Mary Patricia Warming

In this series Mothpossible Mary Patricia Warming created 33 translucent graphic prints with images from Vladimir Nabokov’s lepidoptera collection. Warming then overlapped them with images from Neuroscience and graphs on the Psychology of Aesthetics from 84 international researchers. This installation is now permanently installed in the beautiful Freie Universität Berlin library. For more information on the project, and for more pictures, click here. 

- Lee Jones

Christopher Varady-Szabo

Christopher Varady-Szabo began his career in architecture before moving over to fine art. In his drawings, he complements photographs with his own drawings with a focus on the environments and physical spaces of plant life.

From February 8th to April 7th, his work will be shown with artist Lorraine Gilbert in the exhibit Arbor vitae at the Ottawa City Hall Gallery. The show revolves around the idea from Norse mythology that humans are merely trees to whom the gods have granted the breath of life, the ability to walk and a face.

To see more of Varardy-Szabo’s work, you can visit his website here. 

- Lee Jones

Luke Jerram’s Aeolus: an Acoustic Wind Pavilion 

Luke Jerram Aeolus allows viewers to experience the changes in the wind. The title of the work comes from Greeky mythology and means the ruler of the four winds. As the artist describes the work,

“The sculpture a giant aeolian harp, designed to resonate and sing with the wind without any electrical power or amplification. Vibrations in strings attached to some of the tubes are transferred through skins covering the tops, and projected down through the tubes towards the viewer standing beneath the arch. For those tubes without strings attached, the tubes are tuned to an aeolian scale and hum at a series of low frequencies even when its not windy.”

You can listen to the artwork below:

For more information on Jerram’s works, click here. 

- Lee Jones

p.s.! Aeolus is now up for auction with a starting bid of just £1 plus the costs of delivery and installation. Individuals, businesses, organizations and institutions from around the world can participate in this sealed bid auction. The deadline for your sealed bids is 1st July 2013. Click here for more information.

Carly Wall

In this poster series, Fig. 3, Carly Wall focuses on the structures of animals. In these works, the start of what is to be a longer series, Wall uses elements of illustration inspired from 1950’s anatomy books. As she states,

“I recently became somewhat fascinated by animal anatomy. While visiting my grandparents I found a vintage 1950’s illustrated animal anatomy book, and that’s where it started. Fig 3. was inspired by an illustration series featured in the book, which I recreated digitally using a tablet. With inspiration from the book, I’m hoping to create a series of posters.”

Wall’s design work communicates through a combination of illustration and text. In another one of her works, Design, blocks create a staircase up to the piece’s title. As with most of her pieces, Fig. 3  is a quirky image that is both art and graphic design.  To see more you can visit her Society 6 page here, or her professional website here. 

- Lee Jones