Gargantuan Straw Creatures Rise from the Fields of Japan’s Annual Rice Harvest

All images courtesy of Wara Art Festival

In Japan’s Niigata prefecture, cooler weather marks the advent of enormous straw creatures materializing from the fields and stalking the changing landscape. Every year around the rice harvest, art students repurpose the crop’s leftover straw, or wara, into mammoth characters for the Wara Art Festival. Recent editions have brought dragons, a bonsai-like tree, and the widely popular maneki-neko, or beckoning cat, to the autumn terrain.

On view now at Uwasekigata Park, this year’s festival is themed Echigo no Umi, or Sea of Echigo. Several works envision marine creatures that would emerge from the water or fly above its surface, including an octopus with raised tentacles, diving dolphins, and a crested ibis, which, according to Spoon & Tamago, is said to have a symbiotic relationship with the sea.

If you’re in Niigata, you can see the thatched beasts through the end of October. Otherwise, check out the works in the 2021 edition on Colossal.

 

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Nicholas Rougeux Painstakingly Restores Hundreds of 19th-Century Hummingbird Illustrations

Poster design © Nicholas Rougeaux, shared with permission

Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux is fascinated by early encyclopedic publications, from a 17th-century Dutch manuscript dedicated to mixing watercolors to Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture. Most recently, he took an interest in ornithologist John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds.

Published between 1849 and 1861, the beautifully illustrated five-volume series contains 360 hand-colored lithographic plates made in collaboration with his assistant, Henry Constantine Richter. “The monograph is considered one of the finest examples of ornithological illustration ever produced, as well as a scientific masterpiece,” Rougeux says on the project’s website, which provides context about the original publication.

Gould’s wife, Elizabeth, was also an accomplished artist who captured the likenesses of more than 600 birds, many of which were new to science. Her role in her husband’s publications was rarely credited, but a forthcoming book aims to change that, celebrating Elizabeth’s nearly forgotten contribution to natural history.

Rougeux spent nearly 150 hours scanning and digitally restoring hundreds of full-color plates from the original 5 volumes and a supplement that was published after Gould’s death, between 1880 and 1887. Rogeux color-corrected each image and conceived of an interactive, 21st-century way to reproduce the comprehensive tome in its entirety, linking to archival scans, and organizing the illustrations in the order they appeared in the original texts. Visitors to the site can deep-dive into every scientific detail captured in the original publication.

Taking the artworks one step further, Rougeux extracted 422 hummingbirds and arranged them into a dramatic poster, which you can purchase on the project site. See more of the designer’s work on his website, Behance, and Instagram.

 

Threnetes cirvinicaud

Detail of Rougeaux’s poster

Sternoclyta cyaneipectus

Phaethornis fraterculus

Leucippus fallax

Phaethornis superciliosus

Glaucis mazeppa

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A Wind-Powered Herd of Beach Animals Merge Into a Storm Defense System in Theo Jansen’s Latest ‘Strandbeest’

A brand new 18-meter-long Strandbeest scuttles across the sands of a beach in The Netherlands in a short video by Dutch artist Theo Jansen (previously), who has been releasing his otherworldly creatures into the world each year since 1990.

Throughout the summer, Jansen experimented with connecting several units together, which could work in succession. “Animaris Rex is a herd of beach animals whose specimens hold each other as defense against storms,” he says. “As individuals they would simply blow over, but as a group, the chance of surviving a storm would be greater.” Propelled by the wind with a series of large sails, the individual modules move in tandem to form a single entity.

See more on the artist’s website and YouTube.

 

All images © Theo Jansen

 

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Grandiose Characters Pose Before Enigmatic Sceneries in Fatima Ronquillo’s Beguiling Paintings

“Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all” (2023) All images © Fatima Ronquillo, shared with permission

Shrouded with an air of mystery, Fatima Ronquillo’s enchanting oil paintings redefine the long-established style of Europe’s Old Masters. The subjects of her canvases are opulently-adorned, paired with a mélange of Catholic icons, flora, fauna, and magical realism that are bound together by motifs evocative of Colonial-era art. In her forthcoming solo show, Amore: An Ode to Love, Ronquillo accentuates a dream-like world where symbols of history, love, and longing come together.

Based in Santa Fe, the self-taught artist creates her paintings with a deep passion for art history, literature, and opera. Coupled with her lived experiences and the desire to depict worlds of the past, much of Ronquillo’s work seeks to reflect the timelessness of overarching dualities such as man and nature, the old and new, and masculinity and femininity. She tells Colossal:

We are all creatures of the sum of our experiences. I could not paint what I do without exploring the threads of my past and present. My childhood in the Philippines and immigrant experience in the U.S. has naturally given me a lens of seeing images and reading literature from the point of view of someone in between two worlds. Spanish Colonial Art imagery has been a connecting thread from the places I have lived in.

Amore: An Ode to Love opens this week at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Italy. For more updates and artwork, visit the artist’s Instagram and website.

 

“My love is like to ice, and I to fire” (2023)

“Pink Flag” (2023)

“The Troubadour” (2023)

“The Nightingale and the Rose” (2023)

 

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SpY Challenges Perceptions in Monumental Installations That Reframe Everyday Objects and Historical Sites

“Blankets” (2023), Chengdu, China. All images © SpY

From hundreds of metallic emergency blankets suspended from a gallery ceiling to a series of giant inner tubes that engulf an entire room, SpY’s monumental kinetic installations (previously) invite viewers to lose themselves in kinetic choreography and dramatic lighting. In both “Zeros” and “Eclypses,” for example, bold, black shapes are cast in red light, dwarfing the visitor as the forms slowly sway. Many of the works require the viewer to activate them by moving through the middle or interacting with various passageways and perspectives.

In “Orb,” SpY interpreted the surrounding landscape of Egypt and its rich history by literally reflecting the present moment using an ancient design technique. The artist incorporated the concealed geometry within pyramids using pi, which can be found when dividing the perimeter of a structure by twice its height. He says, “The sphere is an invisible part of the resulting geometry, since a sphere with a radius as high as the pyramid would have a circumference very close in length to the pyramid’s perimeter.”

SpY is known for utilizing utilitarian materials like scaffolding or barrier tape, reframing the context of objects that are often loaded with meaning. In Amsterdam, the artist draped thousands of strips of red-and-white striped tape over a public walkway, contradicting its purposes as a barrier and inviting visitors to wander through a patterned forest. A through line of his practice explores “stark conceptual contrasts between the aesthetics of his artworks and the difficult connotations of the objects they are built with—often elements used to condition people’s behaviour,” says a statement.

Discover more of SpY’s work on the artist’s website and Instagram.

 

“Zeros” (2023), Beijing, China

“Orb” (2022), Cairo, Egypt

“Eclypses” (2022), Oviedo, Spain

“Eclypses” in daylight

“Barrier Tape” (2022), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“Barrier Tape”

“Barrier Tape”

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Thandiwe Muiru Confronts Notions of Value in Her Vividly Disguised Portraits

“A Cycle of Joy” (2023). All images © Thandiwe Muriu, shared with permission

Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu (previously) questions conceptions of disposability in You Thought You Could Throw Me Away. On view this month at 193 Gallery in Paris, the exhibition includes a selection of Muriu’s striking portraits that camouflage her body amongst vivid, kaleidoscopic backdrops. Vibrant and disorienting, the photos emphasize the artist’s limbs, hair, and eyewear made of everyday materials and ask viewers to reconsider who and what are thought of as expendable.

Many of the works shown here are part of Muriu’s Camo series, which envelops the artist in Ankara wax fabrics common in Central and West Africa. She also dons accessories made of objects frequently used in Kenya, including sieves, plastic bottle caps, and flat spools of thread, that are created in collaboration with local artisans and makers. Each work reimagines portraiture traditions and what it means to be a modern woman, especially as it relates to notions of value and importance.

You Thought You Could Throw Me Away will run from October 14 to December 30. Until then, find more of Muriu’s works on her site and Instagram.

 

“Our Collective Beauty” (2022)

“Call Me Please” (2022)

“I See You” (2022)

“Victorious Dreams” (2023)

“Circles of Love” (2023)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Thandiwe Muiru Confronts Notions of Value in Her Vividly Disguised Portraits appeared first on Colossal.

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A Forthcoming Book Turns a New Leaf On Remarkable Photographs of Trees From Around the World

Photo by Marc Alcock. All images © the photographers and Hoxton Mini Press, shared with permission

For centuries, a lone tree grew in a gully known as Sycamore Gap along Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, one of England’s most beloved landmarks. Last week, an act of vandalism reduced the stalwart icon to a stump, generating shock and sadness for its loss. While the National Trust works to protect the remains to see if it can regrow, the story sheds a light on trees’ vulnerability while at the same time standing as emblems of strength and resiliency.

It is timely, then, that Looking At Trees, a forthcoming book compiled with an introduction by artist Sophie Howarth, encourages us to reconnect with our natural surroundings. Images by more than two dozen contemporary photographers, including Beth Moon, Marc Alcock, and Myoung Ho Lee, explore a range of different species, ecosystems, and landscapes. From enigmatic plantations to lofty dwellings, the volume explores the diverse ways in which the woody plants are an important part of our daily lives, even if sometimes we have to remember to notice them.

Pre-order your copy on Hoxton Mini Press’s website, and if you’re in the mood for even more trees, you might also enjoy Neil Burnell’s photographs of moss-draped forests.

 

Photo by Paul Hart

Photo by Robert Voit

Photo by Nicholas J R White

Photo by Marc Wendelski

Photo by M’hammed Kilito

Photo by David Spero

Photo by Daniel Ballesteros

Photo by Alexandre Miguel Maia

Photo by Anna Beeke

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