Firstindigo&Lifestyle

21-century art

Category: fine and contemporary art

  • Erwin Redl: ‘InMotion’

    Erwin Redl: ‘InMotion’

    Erwin Redl had his recent exhibition InMotion at Bitforms Gallery in New York City. He is known for works that emphasize perception, architectural space, kinetic elements, LED-installations, social space and corporeality. The Ohio-based artist visited the gallery himself, and spoke to visitors during the Armory Show week in March. It was fascinating to see how the ping-pong balls rise into the glass pipes in different rhythms making a specific sound-effect. Redl told that his background is in electronic music, which makes perfect sense. The glass pipes of ‘Levitate’ sculpture also reminds of an instrument like organ. It takes an entire wall, and has thirty-one vertically suspended glass pipes. Each of them has a fan installed on the bottom to propel a ping-pong ball up. The fans are then synchronized to create sequences. Acoustics in the small room is amazingly intimate fitting for the works.

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    Another incredible installation was ‘Breath of Light’  that is composed of structures each having nine acrylic plates on them. The installations hang in the air and reflect beautiful configurations with green-colored laser beam. The mode of these plates is to go from transparent plain to an origami of variations that radiate around with green reflections. If ‘Levitate’ is fun and sound-oriented, ‘Breath of Light’ is deeper and  more mysterious. ‘The third installation, ‘Swing’ is a series of floor sculptures made of spring-loaded metal rods. It raises curiosity as an engineering project. The fans installed on top of the rods make them move or swing back and forth in an airy manner. The rods swing in formation, which makes them seem robotic, and less human-attached. The fourth one, ‘Inclined Plane’ propels ping-pong ball upward with fans. It is the most minimalistic one, perhaps a script for the project.

    Erwin Redl is an Austrian-born artist, who is internationally acclaimed installation artist. His most large-in-scale public installation is Fetch (2010), which is a computer-controlled 580-foot long outdoor LED installation that he created for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio.

    …  InMotion related video at https://vimeo.com/86196863

    …  More info on Erwin Redl’s web-site at www.paramedia.net

  • VOLTA NY 14: Simeen Farhat’s ‘Alice’ and the language puzzles

    VOLTA NY 14: Simeen Farhat’s ‘Alice’ and the language puzzles

    simeen farhat she looses her temper
    Simeen Farhat, “She Looses her Temper”, 14 x 16 x 5 inches. Cast and pigmented resin & acrylic rods, 2014.

    Pakistani-born, Dallas-based artist Simeen Farhat has taken a classic novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ as a starting point for her new installation for VOLTA NY 2014 edition, which ran from March 6-9 in Soho. VOLTA is called as ‘invitational solo project fair for contemporary art’, so Farhat’s solo exhibition was equally presented by a gallery who is already endorsed multiple times by the fair. Her exhibition, curated by Christine Pfister of Pentimenti Gallery from Philadelphia, emphasizes a materiality of the language puzzles. The artist is known for creating poetic works with dimensionality and message, that come with the use of different languages and ways of communicating in our cultural encounters. This time, her colorful and even candy-colored sculptures and installation speak about the problematic nature of cross-cultural communication, showing the emotions and frustrations that are attached to the rules of using our languages. Farhat’s previous works have drawn from such languages as Farsi (RUMI poetry) and Urdu. Text used around the ”Alice” installation is English.

    The immediate surface of the words come across as part of the form, and the text intermingles with the sculptural transparency. This already creates puzzles as we see only fragments of language, which, when viewed from a distance, create aesthetical form. When we step closer to the sculptures, the objects invite us to perceive them from different angles. Pink and black cast resin wall sculpture “She Looses her Temper”, is an example of Farhat’s sculptures that emphasizes the multiplicity of the form when viewed from various positions. As it comes to the emotional statements of texts, the ”pointiness” of words structure dynamic messages.

    Philosophy is important element in Farhat’s artist statement:

    “Words – written or spoken, understood or misunderstood, poetic or prosaic, curvilinear or rectilinear, are what motivate me to create my visual narrative. I am fascinated by how, through language, we understand a great deal about ourselves and surroundings, and how ideas: simple, complex and abstract, are conveyed and understood using symbols.” (Simeen Farhat)

    simeen farhat_image2
    Simeen Farhat, “She Looses her Temper”, 2014
    simeen farhat _image7
    Simeen Farhat puzzles with languages, Pentimenti Gallery, VOLTA NY2014.

    ”Alice’s tears” create undoubtely the center of Simeen Farhat’s VOLTA installation. The blue teardrops in various sizes seem to flow effortlessly from the ceiling, pouring down from Alice’s eyes when she has grown tall.  The viewer can imagine Alice, by experiencing the shades of blue in the sculptures, some of them so light-colored that they are almost invisible towards the white backdrop, some darker. The shapes also vary from softer and rounder to sharper ones, and they accumulate and reshape closer to the ground. The tears are seen differently depending on the lighting conditions; the shadows are creating part of the narrative too. Farhat has sometimes included textiles into her previous installations to reference the (female) ‘body’. For Alice, the handcrafted cast resin has worked miracles. Different blue shapes and sizes embody the space leaving room for imagination and story.

    simeen farhat3
    simeen farhat2
    simeen farhat10
    simeen farhat4

    Simeen Farhat has exhibited in the United States and internationally, including Pakistan, London, the UAE, India, Finland and Germany. Her collaboration with Pentimenti Gallery will continue through 2014, and her solo exhibition will open in Philadelphia later this year.

    for more information visit: www.pentimenti.com

  • Fog in art by Fujiko Nakaya

    Fog in art by Fujiko Nakaya

    Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s environmental installations and fog sculptures have become widely known around the world.  According to her, fog represents an interactive medium which makes the audiences feel and participate in its pure natural wonder. Fog comes closer than clouds; although these are scientifically the same, fog calls for a different kind of dialogue with nature. The above fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya is at Toyota Municiple Museum of art in Toyota, Aichi.

    Born in Japan, Nakaya is a daughter of the physicist and science essayist Ukichiro Nakaya, who is credited for making first artificial snowflakes in the world. Inspired by natural weather phenomena, she created her first fog sculpture for Expo ’70 (Osaka Japan) to be presented at the Pepsi Pavilion. Ever since, Fujiko Nakaya’s works have been on display on international venues, including Guggenheim Bilbao and Australian National Gallery. In 2013, her Fog Bridge became a waterfront wonder for local and international audiences in San Francisco’s Exploratorium. The work was part of the year’s waterfront celebrations, highlighting the bay area and its special weather conditions (famous for its dense fogs).

     

    What makes ‘fog’ so dimensionally touching is that it as a natural phenomena varies in the circumstances. The fog sculptures live with the wind, temperature and humidity.

    Nakaya’s fog has also entered theatrical stages. She created stage sets for Trisha Brown, David Tudor, and Bill Viola.

    .