Thursday, October 5, 2023

Eric Kogan Captures Coincidence and Chance Around New York City in His Playful Street Photography

A photograph of a cloud that appears to be cradled in a building's architecture.

All images © Eric Kogan, shared with permission

Wispy clouds nestle into architectural niches, drip down walls, and sway in nets in Eric Kogan’s serendipitous street photography (previously). During commutes around New York City, he spots playful and coincidental interactions between nature, light, and the human-built environment.

“Walks have always been a big part of the process,” he tells Colossal, sharing that being able to observe the city at a slow speed and stop when he notices a tantalizing scene is essential. He continues, “If there is a place that I have to be in my city and I could get there by foot, I would take it over using transportation. Not just for photography’s sake but also for the simple act of moving at my own pace.”

Find more on Kogan’s website and Instagram.

 

A photograph of a shadow of a tree cast on a wall, appearing as though a tree is growing out of a small pile of dead leaves.

Two clouds peek over the top of a building, situated so that it appears they are dripping paint down the building.

A photograph of the side of a brick building with pigeons perched on every single one of a series of jutted-out bricks.

A photograph of a cloud that appears to be captured in a net.

A photograph of a slice of sunlight on the corner of a brick building, with steam coming out of the top, as if the slice of light is a pipe.

A photograph of a cloud captured in the frame of an old sign.

A photograph of two plants that appear to be reaching out to touch each other.

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 Eric Kogan Captures Coincidence and Chance Around New York City in His Playful Street Photography appeared first on Colossal.



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Indigenous Cultural Abundance Overflows in Dana Claxton’s Vibrant Portraits

A portrait of a woman covered in Indigenous American beadwork, holding various accessories and emblems.

“Jeneen” (2018-2019), LED Firebox with trans-mounted chromogenic transparency, 60 x 40 inches. All images © Dana Claxton, shared with permission

In the vibrant, enigmatic portraiture series titled Headdress, Vancouver-based artist Dana Claxton celebrates Indigenous cultural abundance. Intricately stitched feathers, embellished baseball caps, and elaborately beaded jewelry spill over five figures, almost completely obscuring their faces. “In these portraits, the beadworks cover and espouse the womxn’s silhouettes, becoming more than just objects,” Claxton says in a statement. “The beadworks are cultural belongings, and the womxn are cultural carriers.”

The artist photographs each individual with her own possessions, such as Jeneen’s collection of accessories spanning three generations of Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation ancestry in Old Crow, Yukon. Dee and Dana wear pieces from an inter-tribal collection made by artisans from the Four Directions. Connie, who Claxton describes as a “matriarch of beadwork,” dons her own hand-beaded works, and Shadae includes a variety of caps, including a Coast Salish woven cedar hat, and her husband’s ceremonial powwow fans known as peyote fans.

Claxton’s work is included in the recently published book An Indigenous Present, and in 2024, the artist will present a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. You can explore much more work on her website.

 

A portrait of a woman covered in Indigenous American beadwork, holding various accessories and emblems.

“Dana” (2018-2019), LED Firebox with trans-mounted chromogenic transparency, 60 x 40 inches

A portrait of a woman covered in Indigenous American beadwork, holding various accessories and emblems.

“Shadae” (2018-2019), LED Firebox with trans-mounted chromogenic transparency, 60 x 40 inches

A portrait of a woman covered in Indigenous American beadwork, holding various accessories and emblems.

“Connie” (2018-2019), LED Firebox with trans-mounted chromogenic transparency, 60 x 40 inches

A portrait of a woman covered in Indigenous American beadwork, holding various accessories and emblems.

“Dee” (2018-2019), LED Firebox with trans-mounted chromogenic transparency, 60 x 40 inches

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 Indigenous Cultural Abundance Overflows in Dana Claxton’s Vibrant Portraits appeared first on Colossal.



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Wednesday, October 4, 2023

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

a mammoth octopus sculpture made of straw

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.

 

a mammoth bird sculpture made of straw

a mammoth beckoning cat sculpture made of straw

a mammoth dragon sculpture made of straw

a mammoth octopus sculpture made of straw

three dolphin sculptures made of straw

three dolphin sculptures made of straw

a mammoth tree sculpture made of straw

a mammoth beckoning cat sculpture made of straw

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

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 Nicholas Rougeux Painstakingly Restores Hundreds of 19th-Century Hummingbird Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.



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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.

 

A kinetic sculpture that moves across a beach using piping and sails in the wind.

All images © Theo Jansen

A gif of a kinetic sculpture that moves across a beach using piping and sails in the wind.  A detail of a kinetic sculpture that moves across a beach using piping and sails in the wind.

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



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Tuesday, October 3, 2023

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

A portrait of a lavish woman among the flowers

“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.

 

A hand with a slithering snake, with white flowers

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

A portrait of a lavish child holding a pink flag

“Pink Flag” (2023)

A delicate hand holds a small painting of an eye with a pearl border

Two hands holding each other with butterflies resting upon them, in front of a water landscape.

A lavish child portrait.

A delicate hand wears a small painting of an eye with a pearl border. The hand rests on a book titled "Promises."

A lavish portrait of a man

“The Troubadour” (2023)

A marmoset sits on a relaxed hand with florals.

A gentle hand reaches for chrysanthemums

Two hands interlocked, holding a large red flower and a bird

“The Nightingale and the Rose” (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 Grandiose Characters Pose Before Enigmatic Sceneries in Fatima Ronquillo’s Beguiling Paintings appeared first on Colossal.



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

An installation of hundreds of emergency blankets hanging from the ceiling of a gallery

“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.

 

A large-scale installation of black inner tubes in a red-lit space

“Zeros” (2023), Beijing, China

A metallic orb sculpture in front of the Great Pyramids

“Orb” (2022), Cairo, Egypt

Black discs illuminated by red light in a long hall

“Eclypses” (2022), Oviedo, Spain

Black disks suspended from the ceiling in a long hall

“Eclypses” in daylight

Thousands of strips of red and white barrier tape draped over a city plaza

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

Thousands of strips of red and white barrier tape draped over a city plaza

“Barrier Tape”

Thousands of strips of red and white barrier tape draped over a city plaza

“Barrier Tape”

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 SpY Challenges Perceptions in Monumental Installations That Reframe Everyday Objects and Historical Sites appeared first on Colossal.



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A Knotted Octopus Carved Directly into Two Pianos Entwines Maskull Lasserre’s New Musical Sculpture

“The Third Octave” (2023). All images © Maskull Lasserre, shared with permission Behind the hammers and pins of most upright pianos is a ...