The city of Leeuwarden has something new in the town square. If you like your eggs sunny side up and you live in the Netherlands, you're in luck.
Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has taken care of everything. In a big way. His newest art environment is called "Art-Eggcident Leeuwarden." Each of those eggs is 100 feet wide.
via the Wooster Collective
My friend Ann Sieber sent me a link this week to Jiyeon Song's site Experiential Typography, saying she thought I might like it. I do!
"The One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow. Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilionâs surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, whichâduring specific times of the yearâtransform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar...."
The poem Song chose is a sijo, a form from classical Korean poetry. Here's the breakdown:
You can learn more about this form here or here. And you can see the pavilion through time-lapse photography on YouTube.
Song did this project as part of a master's thesis at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Hello Lucky presents Flora and Fauna featuring work by Rene Cruz, Woody Golden, David Krueger, Dana Pike, and Christine West.
Flora and Fauna will open Thursday April 24, with a reception from 5 - 7:30 pm.
Hello Lucky is located at 1025 Studewood Street, Houston, Texas 77008.
via SpaceTaker
Feminism meets fairy tale in this art concept. Read more about The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics on the YBCA website. This piece called "Our Rapunzel" is by MK Guth. Other artists represented in this show include Nao Bustamante, Eve Fowler,Taraneh Hemami, Miranda July and Shauna McGarry, LTTR, Aleksandra
Mir, Shinique Smith, subRosa, SWOON and Tennessee Jane Watson, The
Counterfeit Crochet Project organized by Stephanie Syjuco, and others.
(story via Rhizome) 
Watch Jim Lambie's dream become real in this video.
From the MoMA website:
Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine;" the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that."
Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.
(Thanks, Jack and Long, for this one!)
Who's going to AWP? Please let me know.
Note: This art = "New York is my Oyster" by Kay Rosen
I got to see Babka performed by Suchu Dance this past weekend at Barnevelder in Houston. It was very amazing. I wish I had better photography to share with you, but here's a link to a slide show from Suchu. The word "slide show" sounds so antique, but this one actually does a good job of recreating the feel for the odd reality created by the work. Congrats to Jennifer Wood, the troupe, and the staff at Suchu Dance.
At the MFAH in Houston, you can see an exhibit of the artistic origins of Japanese anime. This still is from a short film by Chiho Aoshima, done in collaboration with Bruce Ferguson. In Aoshima's work, we see an amalgamation of pop art, anime, manga, and the Japanese "cult of cuteness" (think Hello Kitty). Here is a summary from the MFAH website about the history leading up to work included in this exhibit.
In 1996 Tokyo artist Takashi Murakami established the Hiropon Factory (later renamed Kaikai Kiki), a studio dedicated to producing his increasingly large-scale sculptures and paintings. Working with a select group of extraordinarily talented young assistants, Murakami promoted a fresh approach to art and commerce. His efforts produced a dynamic new wave of Japanese Pop, embracing the pictorial style of manga (comic books) and anime (cartoons), all within the spirit of kawaii or cuteness. Japanese Pop has since become one of the most vital currents in today´s international scene and many of Murakami´s assistants have emerged as important artists in their own right.
Chiho Aoshima began working with Murakami in the late 1990s, and in 1999 she began to exhibit independently as well. Using the computer as a compositional tool, Aoshima realizes her images freely in various media, including sculpture, mural design, prints, clothing, and, in collaboration with animator Bruce Ferguson, video. Her imagery draws upon traditional Japanese scroll paintings as well as contemporary sources, blending landscape and narrative to create a vision of our planet´s potential for both creation and chaos.
City Glow, 2005, is both monumental and playfully engaging. Spanning five monitors, it opens in a garden, filled with fantastic foliage and creatures. Slowly a modern city with living skyscrapers grows from this Edenic paradise, and then as night falls, nature takes over once again. Aoshima populates this landscape with both the forces of good and evil: a graveyard filled with demonic ghosts is ultimately banished by fairytale spirits and a new dawn.
Aoshima´s poetic evolutionary cycle can be understood as a commentary on the perils of global warming. Ultimately, however, City Glow offers a promise of hope and regeneration. Aoshima´s witty animation is a delight to all ages, uniting the vivid graphic conventions of contemporary anime with ancient traditions in Japanese art and thought.
If you're in NYC this month (you lucky dog you), check out the exhibit Interference, celebrating the 10th anniversary of E Y E B E A M, a "lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time."
(via rhizome)
What would Ernie say about this gigantic art object?
It is floating in the Loire river in France this month, and people gather to gawk at Florentijn Hofman's "Rubber Duckie."
(via the Wooster Collective)
"When the social elevator is broken you have to know how to bounce."
To see more from La Chute, Denis Darzacq's magical portfolio of photographs, click here.
My sister is in Barcelona today so I chose a photo by Daniel Herrera. He lives and works there, and his pictures remind me what the city was and is becoming.
We just got back from a week of vacation in L.A. Here are two art images that represent.
David Hockney's print "Melrose Ave" lives in an ornate gold frame. The print and the frame are scrapping over who's the diva. It's early Hockney, but I'm a big fan of his.
Here is a mixed media work by Alexandra Grant. It suits my memory of Santa Monica, where we spent most of our time out there.
Houston
gets
it.
Tonight.
Domy Books will host an opening reception for the show, "Give Up v.s Yar!"
Here is all the information:
Friday, July 13, 2007 at Domy Books
1709 Westheimer, Houston, Texas 77098
map
7 - 9pm
[Show runs through Friday, August 17, 2007]
