Sarah Sze

Born 1969, Boston, MA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Known for her intricate site–specific installations combining natural and artificial plant life with the miscellany of everyday life, Sarah Sze creates a fantastical urban garden and her whimsical arrangements, comprising thousands of objects, become imaginary miniature ecosystems that borrow from the visual vocabularies of archaeological digs, construction sites, and pastoral oases. At once architectural and organic, intimate and epic, her installation suggests complex strata of an imagined ecosystem lying just below street level, which might be revealed if the walls of the space were peeled away.

Even the details in Sarah Sze’s sculptures have details. All her installations are extraordinarily ambitious and are constructed with fastidious precision, consequently, her output is relatively small compared with many other artists. Sze’s model-making methodology is both practical and structural. She makes sections in her studio, combines prefabricated parts on-site according to exact specifications, and supplements these with elements sourced on location, like a film director looking for props. Her works are carefully crated, tagged and marked for reassembly.

Sarah Sze online links:
Marianne Boesky Gallery
The Summer Villain Muses
Anal-Retentive Warrior Princess by Jerry Saltz

December 31, 2005

Loretta Lux makes pictures of children that are as charming as they are creepy—a sweet-and-sour combo that proves surprisingly hard to resist, even if you suspect the work is little more than kitsch of the most sophisticated and unnerving sort. Like Rineke Dijkstra crossed with Margaret Keane, Lux turns ordinary children into alluring aliens—icons of innocence so tainted by experience (or maybe just curdled nostalgia) they already feel antique. Because the work is strangely unmoored in place or time—drifting off into the idyllic past while hinting at a vacuous, sci-fi future—it manages to conflate memory and dread, sweetness and blight, in a dreamscape whose specificity reads as utterly imaginary.

Read more on Lorettalux.de

December 30, 2005

Pisellino, the disarmingly cute cotton swab holder designed by Stefano Giovannoni for Alessi, has a name that means "little pea" in italian. we're not sure if this makes more sense in the italian translation, but one thing is for certain: it is the first anatomically correct cotton swab holder. it has the same storage format as the magic bunny toothpick holder: lift the head and cotton swabs pop out! available in 3 colors for alessi's fall 2005 collection. acrylic. dimensions: 2.75"dia x 6"h

Alessi online

December 29, 2005

Bill Viola (b.1951) is widely recognized as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 30 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. His single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologized for international readers. Read more here: Bill Viola

SFMOMA

December 20, 2005

Crafted by the world-famous designer Ora-Ïto, the new Brick expresses a ludic playfulness in a user-friendly high-performance hard drive. Stack & Play multiple LaCie Bricks together to brighten your desktop and your mood (they’re even stackable with LaCie Mobile Bricks). With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder. Available desktop models are: 160GB (white), 250GB (red), 300GB (blue) and 500GB (red).

Lacie.com

December 19, 2005

Playground, as you could mean by looking at it and interpreting the word as it is, and this has to be said, is not just a virtual back flash into the playroom in which you've been spending hours building towers with wooden bricks or something called lego back in the old times, it is much more a psycho-social experience (I've just invented this to make it sound more dramatic, so don't blame for using non existing expressions). Read more on Playground's website. Playground was built by christian schneider with processing.

December 14, 2005

Jasper Morrison was born in London in 1959, and graduated in Design at Kingston Polytechnic Design School, London (1979-82 BA(Des.) ) and The Royal College of Art for Post Graduate studies (1982-85 MA(Des.) RCA). In 1986 he set up an Office for Design in London. His work was included in the Documenta 8 exhibition in Kassel in 1987, for which he designed the Reuters News Centre. The following year he was invited to take part in “Design Werkstadt”, a part of the “Berlin, Cultural City of Europe” program, where he exhibited “Some new items for the house, part i” at the DAAD Gallery.

Jasper Morrison Ltd. currently based in London and Paris, have worked and in most cases still do for the follwoing companies: Alessi Spa, Italy; Alias Srl, Italy; Canon Camera Division, Japan; Cappellini Spa., Italy; Flos Spa, Italy; FSB GmbH, Germany; Magis Srl, Italy; Rosenthal AG, Germany; Rowenta, France; Sony Design Centre Europe; Vitra International AG, Switzerland; Samsung Electronics, Korea.

Jasper Morrison LTD

December 13, 2005

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948, and lives and works in New York and Tokyo. His interest in art began early. Central to Sugimoto’s work is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. This theme provides the defining principle of his ongoing series including, among others, "Dioramas" (1976-); "Theaters" (1978-); and "Seascapes" (1980-). Sugimoto sees with the eye of the sculptor, painter, architect, and philosopher. He uses his camera in a myriad of ways to create images that seem to convey his subjects’ essence, whether architectural, sculptural, painterly, or of the natural world. He places extraordinary value on craftsmanship, printing his photographs with meticulous attention and a keen understanding of the nuances of silver-print making and its potential for tonal richness in his seemingly infinite palette of blacks, whites, and grays.

Sugimoto’s portrait series
Hiroshi Sugimoto online
Represented by Sonnabend Gallery
Cinema Screen Series
Interview
PBS Documentary

December 12, 2005

The name of this unlikely new restaurant in the Rivington Hotel is an acronym derived from the words The Hotel On Rivington. Thor also happens to be the Norse god of thunder, of course, and like so much on the Lower East Side these days, the Rivington, and the restaurant in it, seems to have been flung down among the old bodegas and unisex hairstyling parlors like some thunderbolt from the sky. The big, airy room is decorated by the Dutch designer Marcel Wanders in sleek, Euro-modern fashion. The wallpaper is patterned with tiny kaleidoscopic black, white, and yellow squares, and the rows of black café tables are set with tiny white calla lilies. A steady nightclub beat thrums ceaselessly from the dimly lit lounge area, and dinner proceeds under a giant skylight, through which you can observe the fire escapes of ancient tenement buildings, lit up in the night sky like old Greek ruins.

Read more in New York Metro review
Hotel on Rivington
Marcel Wanders

December 11, 2005

Miranda July makes movies, performances, recordings and combinations of these things. Her short movies ( Haysha Royko, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Getting Stronger Every Day) have been screened internationally at sites such as the Moma and the Guggenheim Museum. Nest of Tens and a sound installation, The Drifters, were presented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. July participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with learningtoloveyoumore.com, created with support from the Creative Capital foundation and in collaboration with artist Harrell Fletcher. July's multi-media performances (Love Diamond, The Swan Tool, How I Learned to Draw) have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and The Kitchen in New York. July's stories can be read in The Paris Review and The Harvard Review and her radio performances can be heard regularly on NPR's The Next Big Thing. July's first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (IFC Films / FilmFour) premiered in January 2005 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a special jury prize for originality of vision. It debuted internationally at the Cannes Film Festival where it was awarded with four prizes, including the Camera d'Or. The movie and will be released theatrically in Summer 2005. See full bio and work samples on: Miranda July

December 10, 2005

British, born London, England, 1963. Since the late 1980s, Rachel Whiteread has used resin, rubber and, as in Untitled (Library), dental plaster to cast overlooked domestic spaces. Like earlier works by Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys, Whiteread presents the cast of the negative space defined by an object as the final artwork, rather than replicating the object itself. Her simplified, abstract transformations of familiar forms, including bathtubs, chairs, and mattresses, often recall Minimalist sculpture.

See & read more online at:
Artnet.com

December 9, 2005

Designed by Mark Mckenna, the DEK (designer emulation kits) series is an homage to some of the finest lighting designs of the twentieth century. as mckenna states, "we revere these objects, but they are also a bane and a challenge. how can we ever measure up to the genius of castiglioni, or the sheer concentrated emotion of maurer? the truth is we can’t. we have to find our own voices, our own vision."

All designer emulation kits run off of your standard 9 volt battery. one 9 volt battery should last for about 120 hours of use. all DEKs use led lighting giving them the ability to stay relatively cool and also allowing for operation around room temperature. led lighting has a life expectancy of five and half years of constant use.

Buy them here:
Emulation Kit
Mark Mckenna's website

December 8, 2005

Architonic – an international and independent selection of the best products, materials and informations to meet the discerning demands for architectural design and lifestyle. Chosen by architects and designers.

Includes 4 main sections:
1. Product Catalog: A Collection of the best products to meet any need.
2. Design Collector: A collection of objects that have made history in the design world.
3. Material Research: A database that deals with new design materials.
4. Tonic Magazine: Covering contemporary topics.

Architonic.com

December 7, 2005

In February 1995, The Menil Collection, in collaboration with the artist Cy Twombly and Dia Center for the Arts, opened the Cy Twombly Gallery, in Houston, Texas. The gallery, designed by Renzo Piano, has a sophisticated roofing system that allows for an even diffusion of natural light. The building houses more than thirty of Twombly’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. Among these are a number of his key, large-scale masterworks such as The Age of Alexander, 1959–60, Triumph of Galatea, 1961, and the monumental painting Untitled (Say Goodbye Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994. Twombly‘s painting combines elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, and writing in a very personal expression.

The Cy Twombly Gallery is a joint project of The Menil Collection, Dia Center for the Arts, and the artist. Currently Cy Twombly lives in the US and has a show up at Gagosian Madison Avcnue, New York until December 23rd, 2005.

December 6, 2005

Play-Create is an interactive media initiative that sees a vision of publishing entertainment multimedia in the same way that we consume music, film and other formats. Born out of a principle that computer-game technology need not just pander to superficial violent and hyper-active pursuits, Play-Create poses the hypothetical questions: What is the interactive equivalents of classical music? What is to a plasma screen what paint is to a canvas?

Online samples:
play-create.com
showstudio.com
danielbrowns.com

December 5, 2005

The Dutch designer HELLA JONGERIUS works on the cusp of design, craft, art and technology to fuse traditional and contemporary influences, high tech and low tech, the industrial and artisanal.

Standing in the Design Museum Tank on the riverfront was a wooden table laden with food and illuminated by five lamps with ceramic bases and silk shades. On closer inspection it was apparent that the 'food' - a loaf of bread, fish, fowl, sausages and artichokes - was made from hand-blown glass and the lamps were embroidered with images of the animals, inspects and birds printed on the silk. Stranger still, the floor was covered in rich brown soil.

It was The Silk Menagerie, an installation created for the Design Museum by the Dutch designer-maker Hella Jongerius. Inspired by a visit to Hermes' silk archive in Paris, it combines many of the themes that have dominated Jongerius' work over the past decade by juxtaposing the old and new, craft and industry, high tech and low tech.

Born in De Meern in 1963, she studied industrial design at the Eindhoven Design Academy and has since combined elements of that discipline with those of traditional craftsmanship in products, textiles and ceramics. Many of her early designs were manufactured by Droog, the influential Dutch design collective, and she now puts her own work into production through Jongeriuslab, her Rotterdam studio, as well as developing products for manufacturers such as Maharam, Royal Tichelaar Makkum and Vitra.

See Hella Jongerius' work at:
http://www.jongeriuslab.com

Interview on Designmuseum.org

December 4, 2005

Pipilotti Rist was born in Rheintal, Switzerland. She studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and the School of Design in Basel. Her work was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum for Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1996; Venice Biennial, Kwangju Biennial, SITE Santa Fe and Kunsthalle, Vienna in 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstwerke Berlin in 1998; Museum Ludwig and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris in 1999; ZKM Karlsruhe, Hirshhorn Museum, Istanbul Biennial and Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2000; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst and Luhring Augustine in 2001.

Represented by:
Hauser & Wirth in London
Luhring Augustine in New York

PipilottiRist.com

December 3, 2005

"The design offers a rarefied sensibility that is fresh to New York." – New York Magazine

View onto new building from the southwest corner of Prince Street and Bowery
Visualization: Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA

The New Museum is New York's only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art. As an international art capital, the City is long overdue for the truly world class contemporary art museum we will become when we open our new, 60,000 square foot home on the Bowery. The cutting-edge, Tokyo-based architects, Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA have designed a stunning facility that will feature beautifully proportioned galleries, our renowned bookstore, a theater, a comprehensive learning center, and a café. SANAA's design was named one of the top ten architectural projects of the year in the US by The New York Times in 2003.

New, New Museum Online - Press, interview + more images

December 2, 2005

On view December 9, 2005 - March 26, 2006
Organized by the Kyoto Costume Institute, Fashion in Colors explores color as a design element through 300 years of Western fashion.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum believes that design shapes our objects, environments, and communications, making them more desirable, functional, and accessible. The Museum celebrates the nature of design and explores its impact on the quality of our lives.

Cooper Hewitt - Fashion in Colors website
Kyoto Costume Institute

December 1, 2005