Decades-old, decaying hardcover books have an intrinsic, stately beauty about them. This timeless charm serves as a departure point for Canadian interdisciplinary artist Guy Laramée, who transforms the pages of elegantly aging books into sculptures of mountains, lakes, and monuments. Although the effect is breathtaking, Laramée’s intention isn’t purely to give pleasure. Titled The Great Wall and often depicting Eastern architecture and iconography, his series of carved books envisions a future in which, “Having recently overthrown the American Empire in the 23rd century, the Chinese Empire set out to chronicle the history of the Great Panics during the 21st and 22nd centuries.” Click through for a gallery of our favorite images from the set, and then visit Laramée’s website to learn more about the project and explore the artist’s other work.
[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we'll spend the next two weekends revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published September 11, 2011.] Maybe it’s just us, but we feel like we’ve been seeing a whole lot of strange public art in recent months: for instance, Claes Oldenburg’s newest project, an enormous paintbrush, was unveiled last month in Philadelphia, Florentijn Hofman’s Big Yellow Rabbit was erected this summer, and a huge Marilyn Monroe sculpture was recently unveiled in Chicago (she also just turned up with an ugly tattoo — that’s adolescent sculptures for you). We can’t say we don’t like the idea of weirder and weirder public art popping up all over the world, so we thought we’d round up a few of our favorite examples here. Click through to see our gallery of bizarre public art, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorite exhibits in the comments!
Heather Jansch’s stunning, life-size sculptures of horses are made entirely of driftwood. The majestic and almost mythical looking beasts are composed by fashioning pieces of wood to a fiberglass-covered steel frame, complete with bronze or lead hooves. The results are incredibly breathtaking, with textures and form that resemble the actual musculature of the equine creatures. Click through for a closer look at Jansch’s impressive, beautiful work. Read More »
This past Thursday marked the 20th anniversary of cultural icon Freddie Mercury’s death of AIDS-related pneumonia. In some ways, however, it doesn’t seem that long — the Queen frontman is still an incredible influence in art, music and fashion, and has been frequently name-checked as one of the biggest influences of many musicians, including Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, two of pop culture’s current reigning queens. Indeed, something about the Zanzibar-born Mercury (née Farrokh Bulsara) is singularly inspiring — his incredible showmanship, his forward-thinking, his unimpeachable talent both for singing and songwriting, his independent attitude, that moustache — and he continues to have a hand in many forms of art today. On the 20th anniversary of Freddie Mercury’s death, we’ve rounded up a few artworks, both large and small, that pay homage to the man, the myth, the legend. Click through to see our Freddie-art, and let us know which capture him the best in the comments. Read More »
Artist Susan Stockwell weaves British history throughout her collection of extravagant paper-made gowns. Her life-size dresses, like her other installations, comment on global commerce and geography through makeshift fabric constructed out of a variety of currencies and antiquated maps that span the globe — showcasing the British Isles and the Scottish Highlands in particular. The silhouettes the English sculpturist recreates nod towards the Victorian era, with expertly worked ruffles, enormous puff sleeves, and the illusion of overflowing petticoats that were influenced by ensembles female British explorers donned during the 1870s. Marvel at a few of Scotwell’s creations below, and check out more of her work at her website.
What could you make with torn paper scraps and a bit of water color? If you’re like us, the answer is not much. But fortunately, Annawili Highfield is not like us, which is why she can take the most simple materials and create her own stunning animal animals. While she certainly has a soft spot for birds and horses, to the point where they dominate her body of work, she’s not limited to avian and equestrian creations. Here are some of our favorite pieces from her collection.
We might have moved on to Angry Birds and Mafia Wars in recent years, but everyone who owned a PC with Windows back in the ’90s is sure to remember the cheap thrill of winning at computer Solitaire, when the cards would practically bounce out of the screen to congratulate you. Now, Norwegian duo Skrekkøgle has recreated that win screen in the form of a 4.9 x 2.3 x 1.3-foot sculpture, using over 1000 foam-and-paper playing cards. We find it every bit as satisfying as we did 15 years ago. Click through to see a full view of the sculpture, then visit Designboom for more photos.
When we think of porcelain sculptures, a few related aesthetics come to mind: the genteel, romantic 18th-century Rococo stuff; German Hummel figurines of the ’30s; and the kind of kitsch crap you see in souvenir stores and on the Home Shopping Network — think Precious Moments. There is a certain saccharine, overripe wholesomeness to all of these styles. That is what makes the porcelain sculpture of Toronto artist Shary Boyle so strikingly unexpected and irreverent. Although her works embrace the classic, brightly colored, red-cheeked style and feature familiar subjects (scenes from mythology, fancily dressed women), they also delve into the grotesque: To Colonize the Moon shows an unnervingly young, serene Perseus holding a bloody dagger and staring at the severed head of Medusa. Another sculpture, Little Brown Bat, depicts five legs sticking out from a full, disembodied, pink skirt. See those and more of our favorite Shary Boyle sculptures after the jump.
When we spotted Korean sculptor Cha Jong-Rye‘s work over at Colossal, we were immediately entranced. To create these large-scale wall sculptures, she meticulously sculpts and sands hundreds of unique pieces of wood, fitting them together to build tableaus that look like fantasy-world mountain ranges, crumpled canvases, or aerial landscapes. The pieces are gorgeous, mind-bending and almost threatening all at once, wooden worlds to lose yourself in. Click through to see some of Cha Jong-Rye’s work, and be sure to check out more from her most recent exhibition at the Sunkok Art Museum.
When we first spotted French artist Daniel Firman’s work over at Lost at E Minor, we weren’t sure what we were looking at. Was it some kind of extremely uncomfortable performance art? Just one-off photographs of models posing with rubber? Wait – wouldn’t they suffocate? As it turns out, Firman’s strange and darkly funny pieces are 100% sculpture, which is impressive, considering how realistic his human forms look under all that rubble. His work investigates humanity’s interaction with its own environment – including its own trash – and seems to predict our loss in the battle against the junk. Click through to see more of Firman’s figurative sculpture, and see even more of his work here.
