Justin McCurry talks to artist Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama has created an estimated 50,000 works during a career spanning half a century, is feted in her native Japan and in the US - yet in Britain she remains relatively unknown.
Kusama turned 80 in March, but when we meet at her Tokyo studio, she is a vision in a bobbed, blood-red wig and a red one-piece dress covered in her beloved polka dots. It is impossible to discuss Kusama's work without making mention of those dots and the omnipresent lined meshed patterns she calls "infinity nets".
They appeared in her early paintings, on "living" installations comprising her own naked torso and those of her friends, and, more recently, wrapped around tree trunks in Singapore. Later this month, trees along the Thames will also be given the polka-dot treatment, as part of a collaborative exhibition with nine other artists at London's Hayward Gallery. The motifs first came to Kusama in childhood. Hers was an unhappy childhood. Immense paper cut tapestries by Tomoko Shioyasu. (click for detail) Japanese artist Tomoko Shioyasu was born in Osaka in 1981 and majored in sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Arts.
Her immense floor-to-ceiling tapestries are meticulously cut by hand from enormous sheets of paper using utility knives and soldering irons. Her work evokes some of nature’s most complex creations: the organic patterns of cells, the flow of water, and the forces of wind. How these are hung without tearing seems nearly impossible. Liquid Sculptures By Shinichi Maruyama. Carnovsky. RGB Color est e pluribus unus RGB is a work about the exploration of the “surface’s deepness”.
RGB designs create surfaces that mutate and interact with different chromatic stimulus. Carnovsky's RGB is an ongoing project that experiments with the interaction between printed and light colours. The resulting images are unexpected and disorienting. The colors mix up, the lines and shapes entwine becoming oneiric and not completely clear. See the Wallpapers collections available: Lightpainting. Ninaki: [no title] Mushroom Death Suit Consumes Body of Person After They Die. Rainbow Toy Car Installation Made from 2,500 Cars.
Lying on a Giant Bubble. Last week, Alice told us about Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno's interactive installation called Cloud Cities.
The display consists of twenty clear orbs of varying sizes being suspended at different heights. Within each orb is a different organic material like water or plant life. New photos have emerged which show its real appeal - viewers can interact with all of the bubbles! Whether you choose to climb on top or go inside, there are ladders available to guide spectators to a globe of fun. Another neat feature is that every orb is connected. If you're in Berlin, you can climb into an orb yourself because Cloud Cities will be at the Hamburger Bahnof (Museum of Contemporary Art) until January 15, 2012.
Tomas Saraceno's website via [inhabitat] EnBW Spamrecycler. Steen.jpg (JPEG Image, 680x453 pixels) When art meets taxidermy. Art & Design Shocking but mesmerising artworks by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
Dornbracht. Duct Tape Spider Web. Packing tape has gotten MacGyver out of many a jam, but he never managed to make an entire home out of the stuff.
So he could probably learn something from Viennese/Croatian design collective For Use/Numen. The team uses nothing but packing tape to create huge, self-supporting cocoons that visitors could climb inside and explore. Installed three times in the past year, the next deployment will be next week from June 9–13 at DMY Berlin's International Design Fair, which is now in its 8th year. The installations, which look like the work of horrifyingly large arachnids, grew in scale and scope as the year progressed, first deployed inside a small Croatian gallery, then an abandoned attic during October’s Vienna Design Week. At the last installation inside Odeon, a former stock exchange building in Vienna, the group used nearly 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape. Vivid Sydney's Dazzling Light Installations.
We first wrote about Vivid Sydney a few days ago when we asked you to watch Urbanscreen's transformation of the Sydney Opera House and now we have some photos from the whole event.
The 18-day extravaganza is all about turning Sydney into a canvas of light, music and ideas. For those of us who can't make it out there by the closing date of June 11, 2012, we can enjoy these photos from some of the highlights including The Electric Canvas' large scale projection of the Customs House and The Buchan Group's ghostly, subaquatic mapped water projection called sub|version! (See immediately below.)
“An array of visual geometries and interplays punctuate the narrative and explore the relationship of light, water, perception and the unexpected in this strangely submerged, inverted reality,” said Buchan Group Associate Director Gary Edmonds. Theo Jansen - Kinetic Sculptor. VANGUARQ. Theodore Watson - Funky Forest.