Structural Patterns

ToxicSites an interactive data visualization and sharing platform exposing the worst toxic contamination sites in the U.S. launched today at Photoville.

Toxic Sites pieces together complex data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to explore the over 1300 Superfund sites, or the worst toxic contamination sites, in the U.S. The project is by media artist Brooke Singer and funded by the Open Society Foundations’ Documentary Photography Project.

Programming at Toxic Sites during Photoville:

Dr. Sarah Durand, Biologist
Saturday, September 12 from 2-4pm in the Toxic Sites tent at Photoville

The Greenpoint Bioremediation Project (gBP)
Sunday, September 13 from 4-6pm in the Toxic Sites tent at Photoville

Gowanus Canal Walking Tour with The Gowanus Canal Conservancy
Friday, September 18 from 10:00–11:30am at Union Street Bridge (Union Street between Bond and Nevins Streets, Brooklyn 11215)

Gowanus Canal Clean & Green Paint Out
Saturday, September 19 from 10am-4pm at The Salt Lot (2 Second Avenue, Brooklyn 11215)

Public Lab Ghost Stream Mapping
Saturday, September 19 from 12–4pm in the Toxic Sites tent at Photoville

“FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at the Brooklyn Museum is the epitome of hipster art. It’s fun, participatory, ambitious, cool, but lacks substance. I enjoyed the work visually and appreciated the nod to rock posters and arcades, but as with the video games presented, the work is not layered or nuanced or provocative. (The video games are worth playing for only a minute as they are more so about hip graphics and chirps, than game play or social commentary as much of game art is.)

“Temple,” a sculptural structure reminiscent of a classical temple or mausoleum in ruin is the most striking work. The ceramic and iron work is highly detailed. At the rear center where one might find an alter is a male torso with a horse head wearing goggles and an oxygen tank. It is an end-of-times idol. An ironic creature more foreboding than an object of worship. The beautifully detailed work is unfortunately riddled with kitsch and self-labeling as the name “FAILE” is embedded in the work. I suppose that the kitsch as well as the identity stamped throughout the work is a critique of consumer culture. Unfortunately the identity FAILE is so prevalent in the work that the art itself becomes objects of consumer culture, hip, cool to look at, but one walks away with nothing. Perhaps that is the goal.

Two recent sculptures “Wolf Within” and “Fantasy Island” are monuments to youth culture – white, hipster youth culture. Not surprisingly, FAILE – Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller are a couple white dudes based in Williamsburg.

There is so much craft and attention to detail that I want the work to tell complex tails, but it is also such a cacophony of stuff that the work lacks an anchor, a base to reflect upon and allow me as a viewer to traverse. As soon as I start enjoying one tableau, I’m jolted by some kitsch material lifted from a 50’s movie poster or pulp book cover.

This past summer, my son had lice for a second time in his life, not a good experience. Unfortunately we were traveling in Scandinavia and could not immediately turn to our Hisidic Lice Lady in Brooklyn, so we bought lice shampoo with a comb and got to work. After two weeks of combing through our hair each night as we traveled and a ton of laundry we returned home with bugs still in our hair. I immediately called the lice lady. She scolded me for having put poison in my son’s scalp and took all three of us into her home the following day. In under two hours, our heads were pronounced clean. I walked out with the lice lady’s formula and instructions which I’m likely to misplace or forget, so here it is:

Ingredients:

• Tresseme Conditioner
• Baking Powder
• Spray Bottle with Listerine & Vinegar
• Paper Towels

Steps:

1. Wet hair with spray bottle this will paralyze the lice
2. Take layer of hair starting from nape of neck and comb – North, East, West, South – each strand
3. Sprinkle baking powder and keep combing

Hopefully it will not happen again and I won’t need these instructions as the essential part can not be included: PATIENCE.

Although I travel to San Francisco at least once I year, I don’t get to see many friends as I’m in the City to spend time with family. However, this time, I made a point of getting in touch with Amera Rizk an old Carnegie Mellon University friend who is an editor at Pixar. This past Wednesday, Amera gave us the royal treatment as we got to tour the Steve Jobs Pixar building, pose with the Incredibles and even get a sound wave and microphone lesson in the Pixar sound recording studio. It was a huge treat for Iggy to learn about the steps that it take to produce a Pixar animation from initial concept sketches to creating models of the characters, story development, storyboarding, environment design, 3D movements… Amera took us through the elaborate animator studios and much more. I was amazed by the outdoor lap pool, it would be nice to work at a place that provides amazing exercise facilities. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures or see much of the Brooklyn building as that’s where the current projects are in production.

This past Friday, we made two San Francisco tech excursions. First was lunch with Brooke’s cousin Jimmy Singer at Google’s San Francisco building. At Pixar, Amera treated us to lunch, at Google, lunch was on Google as meals are provided! I only wish I had skipped breakfast. As we were not at the Google campus, the Google visit was not nearly as exciting as Pixar… It wasn’t a creative’s playground. But we did enjoy a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge along with a delicious meal with Jimmy’s company. Here’s Iggy’s cousin, Joaquin Zuniga making an around the world call in Google’s 4th Floor reception office.

From Google we headed to the California Academy of Science to enjoy the rain forest environments and then to the Otherlab to have beer and pizza with Brooke’s old collaborator Jamie Schulte and his family. Saul Griffith the founder of Otherlab likes to throw the garage door open, blow up the jumpy castle and have a party on Friday afternoons. It took me a while to get Iggy out of the jumpy castle in order to head upstairs and box by controlling the pnuematic robots. Once the boys were up there trying to knock the head off the opponent’s robot, they forgot all about the jumpy castle. It was great to get a peak at all the interesting work going on at Otherlab.

I don’t know what this project is all about, but I love the concept:

There’s so much amazing work being done in such a tiny area of land that is the Bay Area!

It has been a couple weeks since returning to the United States from Iceland – we got back FridayJuly 3rd. However, since the second or third day of arriving in Iceland, I’d been thinking about this blog post title – “Who Needs Art in Iceland” since I was so overwhelmed by the landscape and natural beauty. In traveling around the Golden Cirle and to southern Iceland to see melting glaciers, I was not searching at all for a cultural fix as I found myself doing in Copenhagen and Stockholm. (Of course, on our last day in Iceland, walking around Reykjavik, I did go into an art gallery and found some very funny video art by Ragnar Kjartansson.) So here are a few images on why I did not search out for interesting art in Iceland and view more herePinterest Iceland

My illustrated series of dictators is up at the Art Student League of Denver. The series has six dictator pairings from dictator to liberator or reformist turned dictator… Stalin/Putin, Somoza/Ortega, Idris/Gaddafi, Smith/Mugabe, Batista/Castro, Hirohito/Kim Il-sung with current day repercussions. Ah, the effects of power…

“Unfolding” – the solo show by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatri on Vimeo at Moderna Museet, Stockholm consists of written documents, videos, films and photographs that appear to capture memories and observations of his city Saida.

In the initial gallery, a film opens with a pair of hands typing on a Mac laptop. From the keyboard and hands, the film cuts to two men sitting in a dark room looking down at the Apple laptop (perhaps the artist and his father). The man on the right is middle aged wearing a charcoal hoody with a Japanese geisha and gambling cards. He is typing into the computer. To his right is a little old man wearing a white shirt, a tie, a sweater or scarf and a warm black jacket and black hat. As the man on the right stops typing, he leans back; they both wait staring at the glowing screen. A white light behind them to their right shoots across the room. The white light is reminiscent of a film projector. As the two men continue to watch the computer screen, colored lights alternate in the background – blue, red and yellow. At one point the lights dance about as in a discotheque. Eventually, the room goes black and the film ends.

I imagine that the film portrays the cinematic experience enjoyed through streaming video as most people enjoy films today. I did not catch what the fingers at the beginning of the film typed, perhaps YouTube. As simple as the film is, it has an elegance, an elegance that persists throughout Akram Zaatari’s exhibition “Unfolding” at the Moderna Museet.

Adrián Villar Rojas at Moderna Museet in Stockholm

While seeing Adrián Villar Rojas’s “Fantasma” exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, I was immediately reminded of Gabriel Orozco. The work, the objects, the installation and presentation were a second coming of Orozco’s efforts, however, unfortunately much more affected.

With Orozco’s work, I tend to be presented with a sense of discovery by mistake or happenstance. Many of Orozco’s photographs document a visually engaging observation that is about to fade or capture a playful intervention. And the objects as well, may be found objects with slight interventions or playful ideas that have been produced at human scale. Although Villar Rojas’s objects harken to Orozco’s sculptures, they appear entirely artificial and do not have a sense of playful discovery. They seem entirely manipulated and in the end not very interesting or engaging.

I wish that the large installation of objects were all in the vein of the defeated Robotech diorama in the stark white space preceding the larger hall (pictured above). At least this piece has more fun with the Fine Art museum setting than the pretentious tall island of stuff in the main gallery.

The museum presents an interview with Adrián Villar Rojas in which he unfortunately comes across as a bit pretentious. I’ll be surprised if this work is worth restoring and preserving.

Sculptures by Emil Toldbod at Gether Contemporary

Gether Contemporary’s “Beneath the Surface” features the work of five young artists from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; Esben Gyldenløve, Oskar Jakobsen, Christine Overvad, Emil Toldbod and Nicky Sparre Ulrich. The only work that caught my imagination were the mixed-media sculptures by Emil Toldbod that comprise a series titled “Second Dive: Entering Another World”. Apparently the sculptures are employed in a film in which he wears and uses the sculptures to walk the surface of the sea digging through it’s ground. Below is what I imaging to be a test video in which he wears weighted boots to try and walk along the bottom of a swimming pool. The shoes in the video are pictured to the left.

At the bottom left of the image is a helmet that Emil wears in his film and to the right is a shovel that he pushes along the sea’s bottom. To the right of the helmet, are concrete rings that he wears on his thighs and in the back concrete weights that he drags along to help him remain below the water surface. The sculptures immediately brought to mind the literary genre Speculative Fiction as the artist crafted survival tools from found objects to allow him to trove the bottom of the sea after the waters have risen over much of the continents. These are make-shift tools assembled and crafted by impoverished survivors of a not so distant future that will help them continue living from the debris of past civilization. As I know nothing about the film or “Second Dive: Entering Another World” other than seeing a few sculptures on view at Gether Contemporary and a still on the Gether site, I’m just making all this up in contemplating Emil Toldbod’s work.

1. Første skridt i min søgen efter det omvendt drejede sneglehus. from Emil Toldbod on Vimeo.

Above Gether Contemporary in Copenhagen’s Meat Packing district is Galleri Bo Bjeggard where I enjoyed the whimsical exhibition “Flowers for Poul” (PDF catalog for “Flowers of Poul”). “Flowers for Poul” celebrates the 90th birthday of deceased artist Poul Gernes by presenting the work of John Armleder, Cosima von Bonin, Paul Fagerskiold, Callum Innes, SUPERFLEX, Janaina Tscape and Eriwn Wurm as well as work by Poul Gernes. Flowers for Poul The exhibition is beautifully installed and visually engaging as large colorful works keep the viewer engaged from room to room. The works that stood out to me are SUPERFLEX’s “Information Machine” and “Commons Machine”. Although these pieces are simple and don’t function very well, particularly the make shift tops of “Information Machine” the pieces allow for simple interactivity that inanely reflect on our networked society.

SUPERFLEX’S “INFORMATION MACHINE” “models the struggle between the desire to share information and the desire to contain information. Player A (represents the desire to share information) plays against Player B (represented by the pole in the middle) to choose between sharing information or containing information. The player with the most rings on the pole wins. If there are no rings on the pole the people do not have to choose between sharing information or containing information. The game is endless.” As described by SUPERFLEX, the players are our desire to share as well as contain information and their goal is to have us engage.

COMMONS MACHINE, I would enjoy a lot more if the tops actually worked. Built for 2-10 players acting as “software programmers are working together to develop an open-source system. The programmers are contributing by launching their SPINNING TOPs with open source codes (the spinning top). The source code must not end up in the proprietary domain area (the yellow area) but remain in the common area (the purple area). If any source code ends up in the proprietary area, the operating system is no longer free.” Unfortunately, the tops don’t really spin, it’s art.

From Bo Bjerggaard we walked over to V1 Contemporary Art Center which featured the art of two artists who began their careers as grafiti and tag artists in the Eighties – Barry McGee and Todd James. Their work is well documented and critiques, so I’m only including a few images more so for my own visual archive. I love Barry McGee’s patterns and the simplicity of Todd James’s fantasy drawings in his zine “Beyond the Gates” of viking-like warrior women.

Todd James’s drawings are powerful in their printed comic format, I do not find the paintings at all interesting.

Boring…

Crumpled $500 bill featuring Angela Merkel made from felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg

Today, my second day in Copenhagen, art work in the gallery Specta caught my eye while wandering about the city, so my son and I walked in. The gallerist immediately greeted us and even gave us a tour of the show (as a New Yorker, I was immediately taken aback). The woman explained that the exhibition titled “Money Makes the World Go Round” (May 9 – June 13, 2015) features four international artists that use money as the subject of their work. All of them with a critical bend toward the power of money and yet featured in a swank art market gallery, of course.

Money Makes the World Go Round II by Carlos Aires

The central piece upon walking in to the space is “Money Makes the World Go Round II”, by Spanish artist Carlos Aires who cuts iconographic silhouettes from the currency of the 30 wealthiest countries to create a sphere strewn with what appear to be fruit flies. The sphere is formed by pining the cutout silhouettes and flies to a white canvas surface.

Also by Carlos Aires are a grid of collages that cut news print figures into the country’s currency.

Money Collage by Carlos Aires

In his multi-tiled piece titled “Domino” Swedish artist Lars Arrhenius represents the flow of a piece of currency from an ATM withdrawal to any number of exchanges until it is redeposited in to a bank.

Domino by Lars Arrhenius

Domino by Lars Arrhenius

Domino by Lars Arrhenius

Domino by Lars Arrhenius

South African artist Frances Goodman has created bills from woven beads, beads once functioning as currency in various cultures. And in a separate series Goodman creates drawings from fake eyelashes.

South African currency made from braided beads by Frances Goodman

South African currency made from braided beads by Frances Goodman

My favorite and most striking work is by Danish/German artist Andreas Schulenberg who has created giant dollar bills from felt and in them replaced the portrait of a president with that of the “losers” in American society.

Paper airplane bill featuring Osama bin Laden made from felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg

Dollar bill featuring poor man made in felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg

$50 dollar bill featuring Sitting Bull made in felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg

$20 – Slavery, $10 – Burglary, $5 – Drug Addiction bills made in felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg

Felt chicken holding $1 bill while laying a money egg made in felt by artist Andreas Schulenberg