The always interesting David Byrne has created an interactive music-based installation created from a grid of 96 guitar effects pedals. The uber colorful creation rests simply on the floor and invites people to literally walk all over it. The pedals are wired together, along with a guitar and amplifier, creating various layered sound effects that build the more it’s experimented with. The piece is playful and quirky and everything you’d expect from the Talking Heads frontman. Step on it (in video form) past the break. Read More »
Using the architecture of Hot Springs, Arkansas’ abandoned Mountainaire Hotel, artist Jessica Wohl created an installation that features a staircase covered in hair. We can reassure you that the locks are indeed synthetic, but the creepy feeling you’re experiencing right now while thinking about trying to climb the staircase is the real deal. Wohl’s love for the uncanny is evident, and the way she’s transformed this rotting architectural space into something sweet (you’ll see why once you get a glimpse of the girly hair barrettes past the break) and sinister is pretty great. Click through for more.
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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are known for their all-encompassing installations — like the awesomely spooky one they did for Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Pandemonium. This 2008 piece, The House of Books Has No Windows, is an installation of a house, made entirely out of antique books. Commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Fruitmarket Gallery, the house was created to offer ” … a space of infinite possibility where nothing may be read yet everything imagined. The work has no windows and in the absence of external stimulation, we must imagine the worlds of the books, and hear the voice in our head that talks to us when we read.” The piece was constructed over three week’s time and is composed of four different library collections gathered from across Scotland. As the video after the jump details, these books were going to be pulped, but Cardiff and Miller have rescued them to use as bricks for their house. Click on to find out how it was constructed.
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Take a break from the bazillions of 8-bit recreations, and enjoy this installation created by Seattle company, Filter — a digital solutions group who were recently inspired by Super Mario Bros. for this shroomy work of art. They went postal (sorry) and covered their 6th floor windows in Post-it Notes, recreating the original level one of the Mario Bros. NES videogame. You can check it out in person on Pike Street, between 4th and 5th avenues if you’re a local. Otherwise, level up and enjoy these images after the jump.
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In Nordkreuz (“Northern Cross”), Berlin-based street artist EVOL has created a miniature, underground city in the fields of Hamburg, Germany. The installation — which took him eight days to complete — found the artist outside of his typical urban environment, digging into a picturesque meadow to create a grid that viewers could actually walk through. The buildings’ compound-like, grey facade provides a striking contrast to the scenic surroundings, complete with dirt “roads.” Click through below to see more of Nordkreuz, then check out the making-of the installation and the artist’s other work over here.
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Video artist Jennifer Steinkamp’s decades-long love affair with digital art is still as passionate as ever. Best known for gently swaying curtains of flowering vines, her large-scale video installations use pixels like a pointillist deploys pigment, creating immense images from millions of microbe-size dabs of color. The impact of her work is in large part due to her manipulation of CGI code simulating the organic movement of explosions, breezes, ocean tides, and the human body.
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Celebrated French artist Annette Messager transforms everyday objects into sculptural installations that bustle with creativity, memory, melancholy, mystery, and obsession.
Messager enshrines the images of deceased friends and family, and knits little sweaters for dead birds. Her frequently interactive works are elaborately hand-crafted, with the sacrosanct OCD quality of private archives. Describing herself as “collector, every-task-doer, artist, woman in love, tale-teller,” she fashions her shadowy monuments from an endless accumulation of textiles, stuffed animals, photographs, newspapers, and other detritus that speaks to her from beyond.
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Multidisciplinary artist MK Guth brings a homespun feeling to her video, photography, and sculpture pieces that act as channels of social exchange. She has braided fake hair into Rapunzel braids and driven a truck of red shoes around New York City; this fall Guth blends craft and narrative with a textile-based project in lower Manhattan. We went deep into the belly of One New York Plaza’s retail center to chat with Guth about her three-month residency “This Fable Is Intended For You: A Work-Energy Principle” — watch our exclusive video interview after the jump.
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What do Ellis Island and abandoned buildings have in common with sleeping, drawing, and cross-dressing? In the case of performance artist Nikhil Chopra, moonlighting as a Victorian draftsman named Yog Raj Chitrakar for a project at the New Museum, documenting the history of old places becomes a ritualistic spectacle when partnered with a peek into the artist’s everyday routine. (Bonus: this exhibition has nothing to do with Dakis Joannou and donor-related NuMu catfights.) Combining “self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality,” Chopra as Yog Raj is visiting New York landmarks throughout November in the process of creating large-scale charcoal drawings that form a panoramic view of a city in flux. Follow along on his journey with our exclusive behind-the-scenes image gallery, after the jump.
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The Château de Versailles, with its wedding cake buildings, Rococo fountains, toy-like hedges, and figurative gilded lilies, is a fairytale come to life, with little sense remaining of its storied and sometimes turbulent history. Bringing the grounds and buildings of the palace into the present is French artist Xavier Veilhan, whose large-scale installations form a contemporary counterpoint to the Louis (XIV, XV, and XVI) decor of the Ancient Regime. Hip domicile photographer Todd Selby turned his lens on Veilhan’s exhibition, up through December 13, and the results are, unsurprisingly, enchanting. Click through for more shots of an edgier Versailles than Marie Antoinette could ever have imagined.
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