Monthly archives: May, 2010

Eco-Art News: Eco-Site-ings

May 26, 2010 0 Comment

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Environmental aesthetics have come a long way from Birkenstocks and macrame.  The web features a wealth of sites that feature ecological conscious design.  Here are several we like: HAUTE*NATURE is an eco-guide to creative ideas, art and green products that blend high style with sustainability like the  Sit Bag Suitcase chair by maybedesign. http://hautenature.blogspot.com Then there’s treehugger.com the Earth Mother of all eco-sites. The site has regular sections on Design & Architecture, which highlighted Gyöngy Laky’s environmental architecture in 2008. Also a Fashion & Beauty section, which this week covers the (Re)Fashioning Fiber: New Horizons in Environmental Art and Fashion exhibition http://abigaildoan.blogspot.com at Green Spaces Gallery, which includes work by Ceca Georgieva and Abigail Doan.  You’ll also find eco-news, games, green buying guides and lots of How-Tos. Ranked by the Times Online as one of the 100 Best Blogs of 2009, treehugger.com also offers the occasional odd take on the topic, from the photo essay: Clouds that Look Like Boobs (yeah, these do) to the celebrity report: Football Player Leaves NFL, Starts Interning At a Small Organic Farm to eco-pop quizzes like: Is Your Sex Sustainable? Fair warning You can start out looking for a local place to recycle batteries and find yourself an hour later still engaged. Also enjoyable is http://www.ecouterre.com/about which is devoted to the future of sustainable fashion.  It was there that I learned about a “sweat shop” in Paris where you can rent sewing machine time by the hour and sip coffee or tea while you work, got a first glimpse of “vegan style” and learned about the FEED projects great looking Guatemalan ikat totes that provide nutrition for malnourished kids.

 

Then you may want to bookmark the Sustainability and Contemporary Art blog http://artandsustainability.wordpress.com which aims to cover the deepening relationship between contemporary art and notions of environmental sustainability which can include everything from eco-critique to a report on sustainability summer school. If you want to do more than just read about ecology and art. Then the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Art website  http://www.sustainablepractice.org should be your next stop. The Executive Director is Ian Garrett who teaches Sustainability in the Theatre Department at CalArts University.The site covers conferences, grants and exhibitions and offers book suggestions, too.

 

 

Eco-Art News: Outtakes

May 19, 2010 1 Comment
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YEW SPHERES and photo by Chris Drury

Several of the artists that are included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned have created environmental installations and other works that could not be included in the confines of the exhibit at Artifact Design Group which continues through May 31st. Here’s a sampling:

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BREATHING VESSELS and photo by Britt Smelvær

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GRAFTED WILLOW by Dorothy Gill Barnes photo by Cynthia Tinapple and PROTEST by Gyöngy Laky

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THRU THE WINDOW and photo by Lawrence LaBianca

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SNOW BALL EXPERIMENTS AND LANDSCAPE FOR MEN, burdock Burrs and photo by Ceca Georgieva

 

Technorati Tags: Ceca Georgieva, Chris Drury, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Eco-Art, Lawrence LaBianca, Britt Smelvær

 

Dispatches: The 13th International Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz

May 17, 2010 0 Comment
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Identification by Aleksandra Stoyanov, sisal and cotton, 250×80, 230x180cm

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Morning Night by Nancy Koenigsberg, Size: 78″ x 88″ 15″, coated copper wire and glass beads

The 13th International Triennial of Tapestry opened this week at the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz, Poland.  The exhibition includes work by 130 artists from 51 countries.  Among the participants are Nancy Koenigsberg of the United States, Aleksandra Stoyanov of Israel and Anda Klancic of Slovenia.  The international jury, which includes Kyoko Kumai, Professor of the Nagaoka Institute of Art Design, Japan, has “highly commended” seven of the works in the exhibition.  One of the works commended by the jury was Footpaths, by Anda Klancic. During the Triennial, cities throughout Poland will present shows of fiberworks by local and international artists. The exhibition ends on October 31, 2010. Central Museum of Textiles. ul. Piotrkowska 282, 93 – 034 Łódź, Poland; (0 42) 683 26 84.

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FOOTPATHS II by Anda Klancic photo Francesco Montenero

Technorati Tags: Tapestry, Triennial of Tapestry

Technorati Tags: Tapestry, Triennial of Tapestry, Kyoko Kumai, Nancy Koenigsberg, Aleksandra Stoyanov

Eco-Art News: World Beach Project

May 14, 2010 0 Comment
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Pattern made by Sue Lawty on a south Devon beach

Sue Lawty World Beach Video

If you have ever aspired to be an Eco-Artist, the World Beach Project is your chance. A global art project devised by Sue Lawty while she was artist-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the World Beach Project is open to anybody, anywhere, of any age. Building on the experience many of us have of making patterns on beaches and shorelines, this project combines the simplicity of making patterns with stones with the complexities of shape, size, colour, tone, composition, similarity and difference. Lawty’s idea for this project has always been based around patterns made with stones. That means no seashells, seaweed, driftwood or other flotsam and jetsam commonly found on beaches.

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Lawty has explained her inspiration: “The idea for the World Beach Project arrived in my head fully formed and in an instant. It popped up by way of responding to the response to my work using small stones, which in its turn, is a response to the land – specifically, rock. Whether a line of quartz splitting a rock face or a huge folded mountain range, the structure of rock talks of the structure of our planet. It is like a map of time – the earth drawing itself on a massive scale. And whether stones are satisfyingly smooth… or like long thin fingers… or beautifully, almost purely round; whether they are knobbly, shiny, dull, crinkly, holey, patterned or plain, black or white – they reflect the language of their making i.e. how they look in this de-constructed state is as a direct result of their construction, probably millions of years ago. I find this exciting. World Beach was conceived as a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch. Drawings made on shorelines all over the world, which although erased by the next tide or rains, would be collected within the V&A to become a permanent record of the individual human desire to make pattern. To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time. That’s why.”

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‘Hells Mouth, North Wales ‘ Jess Hutchinson

It’s easy to get involved.  More than 800 people have participated from Ross Island, Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa.  Go to the map and pick your favorites. (Some of ours: Rarotonga, Oceania, Mt. Hood, Washington, Klive Beach and Eastbourne.) Watch Sue Lawty explain how to get involved in the project by watching the World Beach Video . Then go to the V&A website for instructions on adding your art http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/lawty/world_beach/ for instructions on adding your art

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Technorati Tags: Art Installation, Sue Lawty

Eco-Art News: Green by the Foot

May 10, 2010 0 Comment
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

Field is a magical installation by Dominic Wilcox made of 500 eco-friendly shoes whose laces rise in unison and grow toward’s the window’s light. View the video at the artist’s website: http://www.dominicwilcox.com/field.html or see the installation in person at the Salone del Mobile at Entratlibera c.so indipendenza 16 / 20129 milano / italy / tel. +39 02 70006147 until July 2010.
 
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

 

Eco-Art News: Entre glace et neige exhibit in Italy

May 7, 2010 0 Comment

 

lake Concordia by Chris Drury

Land artist Chris Drury is one of more than 30 international artists included in the exhibition, Entre glace et neige. Nature’s processes and energies, which opens at the Centro Saint-Bénin in Aosta, Italy on May 15th and runs through October 26, 2010.  The exhibition, curated by Laura Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla, investigates the relation between art and nature, focusing on elements such as ice and snow, icons of the natural transformations of matter. Valle d’Aosta, the exhibitions locale, offers an exemplary perspective on the dialectical shifts between water, ice and snow – in their aesthetical, scientific and ecological aspects.

 

 

 

Using different techniques and expressive strategies – from painting to photography, from film to sculpture and installation – the artists in Entre elace et neige have dealt with natural phenomena representing the solid states of water. Work by established artists such as Anish Kapoor, Mario Merz, Salvatore Scarpitta, Hamish Fulton, Lawrence Carroll and Salvo will be present alongside work by younger artists such as  Elisa Sighicelli, Massimo Bartolini, Hans Op de Beeck, Christian Frosi, Lucy+Jorge Orta and Loris Cecchini to investigate the way art reflects on natural energy, in its dual aspect of a dangerous, and currently endangered, universe. In the exhibit, Jana Sterbak’s Dissolution creates impractical ice chairs, while her videoFévrier depicts a Montreal ice-skating rink with clear Brueghel quotations. Anish Kapoor celebrates sun and moon with a white marble mountain. Walter Niedermayr portrays the huge emptiness of mountains, punctuated by tiny figures. Chris Drury captures the life of an iceberg and offers the equivalent of a glacier’s electrocardiogram.

 
Drury’s work, Basket for the Crows, is included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned, at Artifact Design Group in Wilton, Connecticut through May 31, 2010. He is a Curator’s Choice artist in The Green Museum.

Technorati Tags: Chris Drury, Environmental Art, Eco-Art