Friday 30 November 2012

PB

 Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly), Vik Muniz, 1999

Peanut Butter Platform, Wim T. Schippers, 2011

Portia Munson










Pink Projects

The “Pink Projects” are an exploration of the color pink, a culturally loaded color that has been projected onto girls and women. The “Pink Projects” are made up of thousands of inexpensive products that are either produced or packaged in the color pink. These pink plastic objects --Fake nails, tampon applicators, hair clips, makeup, cleaning products, mirrors, baby pacifiers -- seem to be trying to imitate and perfect the body, perfect nature. 

In these installations, the discarded items assume new value and meaning, showing the marketing of femininity and how our culture infantalizes women.

Thursday 22 November 2012

Thursday 15 November 2012

Joana Vasconcelos - Versailles






“Joana  does not seek to fit into Versailles, but to confront it. Her work made up of redirections, metamorphoses and displacements of objects, cuts across time and shifts the symbols. Inspired by the mythological and aesthetic force of the palace of Versailles, Joana Vasconcelos questions notions of luxury and beauty by proposing new works especially designed for the palace.”

Friday 9 November 2012

Amy Stevens









Confections
"Cakes are the centerpieces of celebrations and symbolic trophies evoking nostalgia and awe. Historically, cake has played a significant role in women's lives. Women have used cake as both an outlet of creativity and a symbol of female power politics. In my constructions of these photographs, I am commentating on not only cake itself as a rich cultural symbol, but of the domestic fantasy world of contemporary home decorating and cooking magazines and television shows. It's a fantasy world where entertaining, cooking and decorating unite. It's a place where one needs to have a beautiful home, decorated seasonally, in order to entertain friends with gourmet meals and elaborately concocted desserts."

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Annet Couwenberg



Jennifer Angus




“We don’t have very many ‘Wow!’ moments anymore in this age of Internet. We’ve become a bit jaded,” says Angus, “I am trying to capture in my work the magic we experience as children. I would like people to discover it once again and for a moment just stand there and say ‘Wow!’” Inspired by the tribal dress of the Karen tribe in Thailand’s Golden Triangle—a region bordered by China, Laos and Myanmar—Angus combined her passion for pattern and textiles with a newfound fascination for the often overlooked (even maligned) insect. Using no endangered species, Angus creates her distinctive patterns without utilizing dyes or destroying natural resources.
Naturally electric blue, emerald green, pink, purple and red insects coalesce on the walls to create an immersive Victorian-era room that recalls an age of excitement, exploration and scientific discovery. Complementary small-scale dollhouses covered in beeswax are home to anthropomorphized insects that provoke viewers to revisit their own relationship with the eco-system.

For Angus, pattern is associated more with meaning than decoration. Her works call to mind themes of death, cultural association and ideas about collection. “ Although insects are common all over the world, insect collectors share the same passion, rigor and attention to display as many art collectors,” says director Suzanne Isken, “You will find that Angus’ work reflects the world’s infinite cache of unexpected beauty and diversity, a view that we at the Craft and Folk Art Museum hope to share with Los Angeles.”

Alastair Mackie


Alistair Mackie, Untitled (sphere) (2000-9) mouse skulls, glass, wood 26cm x 26cm x 26cm, image courtesy All Visual Arts, photography Tessa Angus


Ghada Amer




Le Salon Courbé, 2007, wallpaper, embroidered furniture, silk and wool carpet

Friday 2 November 2012

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec







As part of the London Design Festival, French designers Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec filled the Raphael Court of the V&A museum with fabric covered foam– 240 square meters of the gallery floor are covered with the Textile Field, to encourage visitors to lie down and look up at the Renaissance art.
An invitation to lascivious reverie. Our intention is to propose a different, casual approach to freely experience what can be a quite intimidating environment, such as a museum.
We conceived an expansive, coloured foam and textile piece with gentle inclinations to produce a sensual field on which to comfortably lounge while meditating on the surrounding Raphael Cartoons. Everyone can immerse into this temporary installation, for a minute, an hour or more, that is the idea. No efforts, no apprehension just contemplation.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Monday 15 October 2012

Tim Etchells



Art Flavours 2010

Art Flavours reflects Etchells' interest in the encounter between different discourses and cultural frames, exploring the potential for communication and miscommunication between them. Produced for Manifesta 7, in Italy, Art Flavours sees Etchells organising a meeting between the Italian critic and curator Roberto Pinto and the ice-cream maker Osvaldo Castellari. Pinto was entrusted with summarising art historical practice through four main categories: The Body, Memory, Spectacle and The Archive. Castellari's role was to translate the concepts into four ice-cream flavours. The video shows the conversation between the two men in which the critic/curator attempts to convey the art historical themes to the ice-cream master, who for his own part grows more and more sceptical, anxious and daunted by the task ahead of him. As Etchells comments: "Staging an encounter between popular confectionery and art practice, Art Flavours plays with the possibility (and impossibility) of translating the academic/specialised language of the art world into new edibles for the public."

Anthony Gormley







BREAD WORKS, 1979 - 1982
BED started as a drawing. I lay on the floor and my wife drew around me. I made this silhouette into a contour map, making an approximation of the volume of my body divided into two identical halves, mirror images of each other.
The piece is roughly the same size as a king-sized double bed. I began a programme of eating that lasted three-and-a-half months, during which I ate my own volume in bread.
Before I began using my teeth I had been using bread to make marquetry collages within the crust of a slice. BREAD LINE is a loaf of bread laid out one bite at a time, taking a common object which is close to life and presenting it in the way in which we experience it. I used the most commonly bought processed white bread in Britain: 'Mother's Pride'.
Bread and settled human life go together. BREAD LINE is a measuring of life, the distance we go, the distance we travel in a body, a moment at a time. Bites of bread laid out on the floor, footprints in the snow, bites in bread, traces in time.
At the same time I was making simple silhouette pieces from a single thickness of bread pieces stuck on the wall. CONSUMPTION was a play on the Assumption, and a materialised reversal of transubstantiation. MOTHER'S PRIDE imposes the memory of the foetal body on a manufactured life-supporting material. MAN MADE is a late-20th-century version of Mantegna's dead Christ.
Sculpture has traditionally been about imposing mind over matter by an act of intelligence and will. I was looking for a more natural process, and eating is the primal process by which matter is transformed into mind.
BED started as a drawing. I lay on the floor and my wife drew around me. I made this silhouette into a contour map, making an approximation of the volume of my body divided into two identical halves, mirror images of each other.
The piece is roughly the same size as a king-sized double bed. I began a programme of eating that lasted three-and-a-half months, during which I ate my own volume in bread.
Before I began using my teeth I had been using bread to make marquetry collages within the crust of a slice. BREAD LINE is a loaf of bread laid out one bite at a time, taking a common object which is close to life and presenting it in the way in which we experience it. I used the most commonly bought processed white bread in Britain: 'Mother's Pride'.
Bread and settled human life go together. BREAD LINE is a measuring of life, the distance we go, the distance we travel in a body, a moment at a time. Bites of bread laid out on the floor, footprints in the snow, bites in bread, traces in time.
At the same time I was making simple silhouette pieces from a single thickness of bread pieces stuck on the wall. CONSUMPTION was a play on the Assumption, and a materialised reversal of transubstantiation. MOTHER'S PRIDE imposes the memory of the foetal body on a manufactured life-supporting material. MAN MADE is a late-20th-century version of Mantegna's dead Christ.
Sculpture has traditionally been about imposing mind over matter by an act of intelligence and will. I was looking for a more natural process, and eating is the primal process by which matter is transformed into mind.

Dieter Roth


The Bathtub for "Ludwig van" 1969
zinc bathtub, filled with worked-over Beethoven busts made of chocolate and hard fat,
 54 x 180 x 65 cm,

Ins Meer, Schimmelberg (Into the Sea, Mold Mountain) 1969
Plaster, molded food stuffs, folded paper ship, pyramid of 9 steps made of plaster, poured over with chocolate, yogurt and fruit juice, mounted on metal pedesta
l
7 7/8 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches; 20 x 30 x 30 cm

Friday 12 October 2012

Pinar Yolacan




Meat Dresses from the Perishables series
2002-2003

Thursday 11 October 2012

Flatten



Flatten,  2012
Hugo de Kok and Kay van Vree

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Rachel Whiteread


More Roni Horn


Asphere
1986
Solid Copper


Untitled
2009
Solid Cast Glass


Paired Gold Mats (for Ross and Felix)
1994
Two Pure Gold Mats

Monday 8 October 2012

Pae White


Porcelain popcorn with gold glaze