Billboard Advertising Clean Air

A provocative new sculpture has opened at the U.S.-Canada border crossing near Vancouver, BC. It’s a billboard advertising...well, nothing.

The creator, Daniel Mihalyo from Lead Pencil Studio says:

Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape... this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.

WOW

Farewell Louise Bourgeois

Feminist icon artist Louise Bourgeois passed away today at age 98. A French woman who lived in New York, she hit her stride as an artist in her seventies with 3 story high sculptures of spiders.

See her life in pictures - taken by Brassai, Warhol etc at the Guggenheim.

Photograph: Louise Bourgeois by Annie Leibovitz

War and Peace and In Between

Anyone who vaguely loves surrealism is gonna love this artwork. The monumental equestrian sculptures out the front of the agnsw that no-one notices have moved inside. There is a horse standing rather gallantly on the bed, yet the sheets are not muddied.

Someone should film visitors' faces as they enter the rooms. Apparently everyone says "Wow". They did the day I went. There were also queues and comments about the scarcity of decent real estate these days.

The installation artist is Tatzu Nishi. The artwork is called 'War and Peace and In Between' and will be in situ until Valentine's Day next year.

source: agnsw

Kabul

This statue is a painted clay Bodhisattva that was part of the Kabul Museum's 100,000 collection. The photograph is all that remains of the artifact, one of thousands destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.

Fortunately many items such as 2000 year old Bactrian gold jewellry and ornaments, ivory statues of water goddesses and Buddhist terracotta statues were spirited away for safe keeping during Russian occupation and the Taliban regime. These are now reappearing around the globe and being returned to the Afghan government.

The travelling exhibition 'Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul ' is showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in 2009.

source: Pakistan Times and Kabul Museum and National Geographic

Sea-side Hounds

It is once again time for Sculpture by the Sea in Sydney. Every October half a million kids, mums, dads, teachers, joggers and sculptors converge to walk from Bondi to Tamarama to see the wonderful exhibition. Works from local and international artists are viewed, photographed, sketched, clambered over and sold.

Many of the artworks are site-specific. They relate to the ocean and life by the sea. There are lots of dogs and rusty iron this year. Giant scrabble letters spell IMAG_NE on the clifftop. The song by John Lennon in conversation with one by Yoko Ono called 'A Hole to See the Sky Through' are referred to. The missing 'I' is representative of the individual, says artist Emma Anna, and the artwork is about creativity being the key to freedom.

http://www.sculpturebythesea.com/

Diggin' For Truth

Artist Jennifer Khoshbin carves sculptures using actual books, talking about her process she says:

"In a series of small, self-contained, conceptual pieces entitled The Book Project: diggin’ for the truth, my focus has turned to the sculptural use of books. I methodically carve each page to create a “depth of thought”, and minimally design the surface with mixed images of birds, insects, botany, women, or children, with hints of the inorganic- manufactured objects, advertising, or text.

In these experiments I am trying to delve into the books, into facts and knowledge, as a way to understand my world. Using the surface space to express what I “dig-up”, I seek some resolution between the organic and the inorganic, hoping for the authentic."

Lots of Little Stitches

I have been hopping between some of Sydney's smaller galleries lately and today stumbled upon a fabulous exhibition at Legge Gallery on until 19 July by Catherine Hearse called Lots of Little Stitches.

Made using tiny crochet thread and pieces of driftwood, the artist makes women morphing into sea creatures who resonate with personality and hidden stories.

Young Octopus Woman in latest inter-tidal fashions 2008

Sweet Mama

Tonya Solley Thornton is a sculptor and installation artist who makes sugary sweet forms that are organic in shape yet are more likely to be found at a six year old's birthday party than in a forest. The sense of distaste I experience seeing the bright whimsical colours and kitsch flowers is usurped by tenderness about the way her creatures interact with each other, suggesting emotionally evocative relationships such as mother and child.

Easter Pageant

One Sheet of Paper

Danish artist Peter Callesen creates a white, hyper-aesthetic universe of puns-in-paper, often making use of a tragic-comic slap-stick humour with a melancholic tinge. His paper cutouts are intricate, revealing a painstaking craftsmanship. With great care and immense patience. Instead of drawing, Callesen cuts, folds and suddenly a world appears. 2D becomes 3D, which is quite a heroic gesture in and by itself. A gesture of basic transformation you might call it, initiated by the artist/creator.

Callesen’s sculptures are neither heavy, nor monumental. Rather, through their delicate materiality, their flagrant fragility evokes an ‘aesthetic of possible failure’, as if they are always on the verge of collapsing, of falling apart or being flattened by an awkward hand. In this way Callesen reformulates sculptural practice, querying as well as queering in a way, the monumentality of the medium.

Holding on to Myself, 2006 47,5 x 37 x 7 cm
Acid free A4 80 gms paper, glue, acrylic paint, and oak frame

Fiona Hall

This birds nest was made by Fiona Hall as part of an installation titled Tender. There are dozens of fragile nests made with shredded American dollar notes precisely mimicking the nests of a variety of birds. The work provides commentary on the effects of modernisation, global markets, deforestation and the impact on natural wildlife habitats. We question the value of profit over diversity and wildness.

Fiona Hall is one of Australia's most prolific and most interesting artists. Born in Sydney (1953) and based in Adelaide, Hall began her career in photography but has extended into diverse media including sculpture, installation and garden design. Her work is characterised by its use of ordinary objects and materials which are transformed into complex and allusive objects.

Her work provides oppertunity for audiences to consider that which we have collectively accepted as 'normal' by causing a kind of double-take when we look at the objects she has made.

Louise Bourgeois

One of my favoutite artists, Louise Bourgeois currently has a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern. Bourgeois' lengthy career spans seven decades: she was born in Paris in 1911, moving to New York in 1938 where she still lives and works. Over these momentous years, she's been associated with many of the big art movements, such as surrealism and abstract expressionism, but still, her work crosses boundaries, defies categorisation and makes it's own definitions.

Bourgeois has drawn her own path through this timeline. She’s developed her own approach and attitude to art, sometimes familial, sometimes womanly, sometimes terrifying. In 2002 when asked about art's future role in an interview in DIE ZEIT magazine, she answered, “Making people see reason”.

Junk Lovette

'Junk Lovette' is an exhibition of art and design objects made using recycled materials at M.A.D (Make a Difference) Gallery in Newtown run by the guys from Reverse Garbage in Marrickville.

Reverse Garbage has been operating since 1975 and is a great resource for teachers, set designers and artists. They stock industrial excess such as plastics, stationary, fabrics, old computers and wood. Odd stuff can be found like a bin full of wooden doorknobs, swathes of leather and rolls of paper as well as display mannequins and shelving.

Reverse Garbage aims to decrease human impact on the environment while developing imagination and creativity.

All That Remains

Julie Shiels has a background in print making. Back in the 80s she was a member of Another Planet Posters, a group that made silkscreens with a clear political message. These days her work is more whimsical, somewhat gentler.
She describes three different sorts of practice: discarded, boxed in, and postings. All still happen on the street and they're entirely ephemeral: words like You Never Think It Will Happen To You stencilled on a discarded mattress, Back Soon and On the Brink on cardboard boxes.