Anni Albers on Materials

Writings by Anni Albers from the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation:

Material As Metaphor here

Work With Material here

Tomás Saraceno Museo Aero Solar

 

Tomás Saraceno Museo Aero Solar video here

Artist Tomás Saraceno's works often defy optical logic: they seem to hover or hang impossibly in the air, sometimes creating a space for people to walk in, other times floating above them in a gallery or museum. Saraceno is a collaborator, working with scientists, the local community and other participants to enact his mindbending installations.

This summer, one of his works hovered over a Mississauga site, daily, for 10 days during the The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (written about by our senior writer Leah Collins a few days ago). Called Museo Aero Solar, the work was made from plastic bags, collected at various sites in the city and laboriously taped together by community members with instructions provided by the artist, before the show opened. The piece, as curator Christine Shaw points out in this video by filmmakers Istoica, provokes "thinking about plastic pollution, something that we absolutely have to address worldwide." It might make you think of magic, too — or the American Beauty-esque mystery of a windswept plastic bag. Museo Aero Solar has already drifted away from Mississauga, but if you happen to be in Paris, France before January 6, 2019, you can catch Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno while it's taking over the Palais de Tokyo with the biggest spiderweb you've likely ever seen.

Chun Kwang Young

 

Chun Kwang Young video here

In this video, Chun Kwang Young talks about his inspirations and the use of hanji, a traditional Korean mulberry paper, in his works. Chun’s work Aggregation10- SE032Red is part of the Korean collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum,

Doris Salecedo

 

Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel

Link to article here and video here

To create A Flor de Piel, Doris Salcedo sutured together hundreds of rose petals into a delicate shroud that undulates softly on the floor. Suspended in a state of transformation, the petals linger between life and death and are so vulnerable that they tear if touched. For Salcedo, fragility becomes the essence of the work as she sought to create an “image that is immaterial.” The title is a Spanish idiomatic expression used to describe an overt display of emotions. While that meaning is lost when literally translated, the phrase a flor de piel links flowers and skin, suggesting a sensation so overwhelming that it is expressed physically through a coloring of the body’s surface.

Salcedo’s installations and sculptures often employ minimal forms that subtly evoke the fragility of human life. Viewed in light of the brutal civil war in Salcedo’s native Colombia, this aesthetic sensibility takes on specific political resonances. Salcedo conceived the work A Flor de Piel while she was researching the events surrounding a female nurse who was tortured to death in Colombia and whose dismembered body has never been found. The artist has described the work as a floral offering to this victim of torture, as well as all of those who have been affected by violence. “Suturing the petals is very important because it was a way to bring together all these parts,” Salcedo has said. “Violence destroys everything. Torture destroys bodies. The idea is to bring them together and unite them and recover the force that they had.”¹

Lauren Hinkson

1. Doris Salcedo and Tim Marlow, “Doris Salcedo on A Flor De Piel and Plegaria Muda,” White Cube, May 25, 2012, accessed June 6, 2013.

Tara Donovan

 

Tara Donovan video here and reading here

Everyday materials like drinking straws, tooth pics and needle pins are elements used by American artist Tara Donovan, when she creates her amazing sculptural works: "Inspiration is a joke, real artists sit down and work" Donovan says. Tara Donovan (b. 1969) is fascinated by everyday materials, which she turns into sculptures. She regards herself as a kind of scientist, investigating the potential of different materials, transforming and shaping them, making them transcend themselves and turning them into holistic Gestalten of their own. The element of light plays an important role in Donovan's artworks, as her materials take light in and reflect it different ways. “My sculptures become activated by the movement of the observer” Donovan says. Her works vary in size, depending on the surrounding architecture and the size of the room, they are shown in. She goes on to explain how the magic happens within the sculptures, underlining that her sculptures are artworks rather than critical comments. “I feel like my work is mimicking the ways of nature, not necessarily mimicking nature per ce.” Donovan states. In the video we hear the voice of Tara Donovan, who doesn't like to be filmed. Her works are exhibited for the first time in Europe in February 2013 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Tara Donovan was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Camera: Mathias Nyholm Produced by: Mathias Nyholm and Marc-Christoph Wagner Music by: Trentemøller. Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2013

Robert Rauschenberg Mud Muse

 

View Mud Muse video here and part 2 here

The installation of Robert Rauschenberg's "Mud Muse" begins at The Museum of Modern Art with engineer/technician Gunnar Marklund from Moderna Museet at the helm. Rauschenberg's "Mud Muse" (1968-1971) consists of a large metal tank that contains nearly 1000 gallons of bentonite clay mixed with water. Sound-activated pneumatic tubes installed in its base pump air through the mud in response to a tape recording of the sounds of the burbling clay itself.

In 1966 Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy Klüver staged “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering”, a work that brought the worlds of art and technology together. After the success of “9 Evenings”, Rauschenberg, Klüver, the artist Robert Whitman and the engineer Fred Waldhauer set up “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T.). E.A.T. was a non-profit foundation that promoted interaction between engineers, artists and industry. Rauschenberg continued to experiment with technology. With the work “Mud Muse” he intended to imitate the blowholes that appear spontaneously along the shore. “Mud Muse” consists of a large metal tank that contains around 1000 gallons of bentonite clay mixed with water, which bubbles and spurts as air is released in response to the sound levels created by the mud bubbling. The work is part of Tate Modern's Robert Rauschenberg retrospective (until April 2, 2017.)

Robert Rauschenberg: Mud Muse (1968-71). Tate Modern, London (UK),.

Olafur Eliasson Ice Watch on Designboom

 

During COP21 (21st conference of the parties), artist olafur eliasson and geologist minik rosing transported twelve immense blocks of ice, harvested as free-floating icebergs from a fjord in greenland, to paris’ place du panthéon. named ‘ice watch paris’ the project is a continuation of the same public artwork installed in copenhagen back in 2014. both were arranged in clock formation, where they melted away.

Read more and watch video here

El Anatsui art21

 

Watch El Anatsui "Change" video on art21 17 min. here

In addition, watch watch El Anatsui "Studio Process" on art21 here

El Anatsui was born in Anyanko, Ghana in 1944. Many of Anatsui’s sculptures are mutable in form, conceived to be so free and flexible that they can be shaped in any way and altered in appearance for each installation. Working with wood, clay, metal, and—most recently—the discarded metal caps of liquor bottles, Anatsui breaks with sculpture’s traditional adherence to forms of fixed shape while visually referencing the history of abstraction in African and European art.

The colorful and densely patterned fields of the works assembled from discarded liquor-bottle caps also trace a broader story of colonial and postcolonial economic and cultural exchange in Africa, told in the history of cast-off materials. The sculptures in wood and ceramics introduce ideas about the function of objects (their destruction, transformation, and regeneration) in everyday life, and the role of language in deciphering visual symbols.

El Anatsui received a BA from the College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana (1969) and since 1975 has taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; British Museum, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among many others. Major exhibitions of his work have appeared at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown (2011); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2010); National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (2010); Rice University Art Gallery, Houston (2010); Venice Biennale (2007); and the Biennale of African Art, Senegal (2006). El Anatsui lives and works in Nsukka, Nigeria.