Blog

  • Carly Waito at Narwhal



    Saw this today – beautiful little paintings for the magpie in all of us. Visit the link below to see more paintings (although they are far better viewed in person) and information on the artist.

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  • Pippin Barr’s waiting game


    The Artist is Present is a game in which anyone can pit themselves against a most formidable opponent—uncertainty—by participating in a virtual re-creation of Marina Abramovic’s 2010 performance at MoMA. I admit to losing the game almost immediately after starting it, but rather enjoyed game designer Pippin Barr’s own account of playing it, as well as his response to the avalanche of interest the game’s release brought his way.

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  • Thomas Jorion’s beautiful ruins



    Loved these photos by Thomas Jorion, from his Silencio series. Gaping, airless, monumental… like something out of a Kubrick film.

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  • Ursus Wehrli’s new world order



    Ursus Wehrli’s photographs propose an orderly, perhaps obsessive, way of looking at the world. Ranging in scale from the tiny (an inventory of pine needles) to the colossal (galaxies and stars ordered by size), they provide a vicariously pleasing, if transitory, sense of control over our environment.

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  • The mysterious Mr. W

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY]

    Enjoyed this.

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  • Dear Photograph



    Fun social project at Dear Photograph, which invites viewers to submit images for display on their website. Some poignant, some silly, all fascinating trips through time.

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  • A decade+ of Serpentine summer pavilions



    In 2000, the Serpentine Gallery in London initiated an annual commission for a temporary structure by an architect or design team who has not completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation. Over the past eleven years, the Serpentine summer pavilion has become an internationally-known site for experimentation by some of the world’s foremost artists and architects. Above, the 2001 pavilion by Daniel Libeskind; below, the 2009 pavilion by Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond from Arup.

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  • Super string: spectacular site-specific installations by Sébastien Preschoux



    Because we will always love string art, laser beams, spider webs, and Fred Sandback.

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  • The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 3: To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?

    continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

    Upstairs in The Power Plant’s North Gallery, a more poetic and less overtly political mode of curatorial inquiry is represented, one which serves as a counterpoint to the ground floor exhibitions (see links to related posts below). To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? is a group exhibition of young Canadian and American artists curated by Jon Davies, Assistant Curator at The Power Plant. Taking its title and cue from the poetry of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, this show features fantastical landscapes from the imaginations of artists Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, and Erin Shirreff.

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  • The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle


    continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 1: Thomas Hirschhorn

    Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video projection and installation, Phantom Truck + Always After, occupy the second main floor space at The Power Plant. Diametrically opposed to the overwhelming visual stimulation of Das Auge (see previous post linked below), Manglano-Ovalle’s work is no less political and confrontational. Through understated, enigmatic sound, video, and installation work, Manglano-Ovalle explores the metaphorical potential of the concept of “climate” as it relates to both meteorological and socio-cultural and political events that characterize our time. For the relaunch, The Power Plant has chosen two key works from Manglano-Ovalle’s oeuvre which focus on the aftermath of destruction. Always After (The Glass House) is a wall-sized projection documenting the sweeping up of shattered glass after Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, former home to the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, was ceremoniously destroyed to make way for renovation in 2005. Extreme close-ups of cracked, crystalline forms being slowly pushed and mounded by the broom are a meditation on the necessity and ritual of restoring order after a destructive event. An atmospheric soundtrack comprising dischordant notes and rumbling sounds interspersed with long intervals of near-silence gives the projection an unsettling, threatening tone, as if a storm has just passed or is brewing. The obliteration of the work of a modernist icon represents a critical shift with resultant underlying instability in the socio-cultural climate of our time.

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