Blue Trees by Konstantin Dimopoulos. Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos uses environmentally safe pigments to paint the trunks and limbs of trees in urban areas to help raise awareness of the nearly 32 million acres of forests lost each year around the world.
Via 4culture he says: Through my work I am striving to address global issues and provide a visual platform to effect change. LED Mushroom Lights by Yukio Takano. Cars Swallowed by Grass at CMP Block in Taiwan. Forget hover cars, when do we get our compostable ones?
I love these buried vehicles being reclaimed by nature at CMP Block in Taiwan that seeks to merge “art, aesthetics, and nature”. 100,000 LED Spheres Flowing Down a Japanese River. As part of the recent Tokyo Hotaru Festival, 100,000 illuminated blue LEDs were released in the Sumida River.
The massive installation of solar-powered spheres was meant to mimic a swarm of fireflies that twisted and bobbed along the river by moonlight. For those of you worried about pollution or safety, the lights were later caught downstream by giant nets. See much more over at Spoon & Tamago. A Beached Whale in the Forests of Argentina. Argentinean sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas creates enormous sculptural works that seem like remnants of a science fiction movie set, or bizarre moments from a surreal dream.
One of my favorite pieces is My Family Dead (2009), in which he created a life-size blue whale in the woods outside Ushuaia, Argentina. The beached cetacean is pockmarked with tree stumps, making me wonder if it’s being slowly claimed by the forest or perhaps it’s a native resident. Beautiful. Starry Night: Light Installations by Lee Eunyeol. Photographer Lee Eunyeol constructs elaborate light installations that appear as if the night sky was flipped upside down with glowing stars and planets nested inside tall grass or between deep earthen cracks.
Though Lee does not have a website I can quote his artist statement I received via email: Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. Gravity-Defying Land Art by Cornelia Konrads. German artist Cornelia Konrads creates mind-bending site-specific installations in public spaces, sculpture parks and private gardens around the world.
Her work is frequently punctuated by the illusion of weightlessness, where stacked objects like logs, fences, and doorways appear to be suspended in mid-air, reinforcing their temporary nature as if the installation is beginning to dissolve before your very eyes. One of her more recent sculptures, Schleudersitz is an enormous slingshot made from a common park bench, and you can get a great idea of what it might be like to sit inside it with this interactive 360 degree view. What you see here only begins to sratch the surface of Konrad’s work. You can see much more on her website. All imagery courtesy the artist. Update: Post updated 10/18/2016 with new photography. Eerie Mirrored Sculptures by Rob Mulholland. Scottish sculptor Rob Mulholland creates these eerie mirrored sculptures out of Perspex, a kind of acrylic glass.
The pieces create the uncanny effect of blending into their surroundings, at times appearing almost completely camouflaged and yet jumping out at you suddenly as your perspective shifts around them. Mulholland’s largest installation of six figures, Vestige, is currently installed at David Marshall Lodge in Scotland. The artist, via his website: The essence of who we are as individuals in relationship to others and our given environment forms a strong aspect of my artistic practise. In Vestige I wanted to explore this relationship further by creating a group, a community within the protective elements of the woods, reflecting the past inhabitants of the space. [...] Illuminated Landscapes by Benoit Paillé. Montreal-based photographer Benoit Paillé has been working on a fascinating series of landscapes using a bizarre lighting method involving a suspended glowing square.
The images above are not photoshopped, the 1×1 meter light is instead hung in the center of each photograph and the resulting image shows the unique form of illumination that creeps into the surrounding area. The Camera Gardens of André Feliciano. New Brunce Munro Light Exhibition at Longwood Gardens. Impermanent Sand Paintings by Andres Amador. San Francisco-area landscape artist Andreas Amador etches massive sand drawings onto beaches during full moons when his canvas reaches its largest potential.
Using only a rake and often several helpers the geometric and organic shapes are slowly carved into the sand, often interacting with the physical topography like the stones in a zen garden. Clear Cut: A Mirrored Forest Installation. This summer artists Joakim Kaminsky and Maria Poll went deep inside the forests of Medelpad in northern Sweden to create this uncanny installation entitled Clear Cut using a mirror-coated fabric.
However eternal it may seem this is not a natural forest. Like 90% of the forests in Sweden it is used for forestry consequently being continuously grown and chopped down in a 60 years life cycle.Joakim and Maria wanted to connect these trees to time. They wanted the installation to visualize a memory of earlier generations of pine trees that had stood here and forecast the clear cut that will soon replace them. Perhaps the mirrors could absorb the light, colors and smells of this place and save them for the future? It really looks almost as if forest has been severed in half, the treetops hovering above the bottoms. Monumental Plant Sculptures at the 2013 Mosaicultures Internationales de Montréal. Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal is an international mosaiculture competition held in Montréal, Canada.
According to their website, mosaiculture “is a refined horticultural art that involves creating and mounting living artworks made primarily from plants with colourful foliage (generally annuals, and occasionally perennials).” The 2013 competition and exhibition opened June 22 and runs through September 29 at the Montréal Botanical Garden and features some 22,000 plant species and cultivars distributed throughout 10 exhibition greenhouses and 30 themed gardens. You can see hundreds more photos over on Flickr, however all photos here are copyright Guy Boily courtesy MIM.