UrbanicaBlog
by Israel Baumgartner
London-based artist Marine Hugonnier is best known for examining
the relationship between words and images. In her ongoing series,
‘Art for Modern Architecture’ (2004 – present), Hugonnier manipulates
the front pages of well-known newspapers like The New York Times and
The Guardian, replacing the photographs with colorful abstract images.
The effect is disorientating and thought-provoking –
headlines take on greater significance,
and the notion of the ‘media spectacle’ takes on new meaning.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac called his collection Fire on Ice, and invoked Iceland as the magical land of volcanoes that spawned Björk. It resulted in something enchanted and tribal, with a sometimes heavy-handed avian motif that the designer juiced up with primary comic-book colors.
Corita Kent, also known as Sister Corita, gained international fame for her vibrant serigraphs during the 1960s and 1970s. A Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she ran the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College until 1968 when she left the Order and moved to Boston. She graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1941 and then taught grade school in British Columbia. Corita’s earliest works were largely iconographic; known as “neo-gothic” they borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible.
By the 1960s, she was using popular culture (such as song lyrics and advertising slogans) as raw material for her meaning-filled bursts of text and color. Corita’s cries for peace in the era of Vietnam were not always welcome. In 1965 her “Peace on Earth” Christmas exhibit in IBM’s New York show room was seen as too subversive and Corita had to amend it. However, her work continued to be an outlet for her activism—in Corita’s words:
“I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.”
In Of Beasts and Super-Beasts, Indian-born Raqib Shaw created a universe inspired by the Empire style typical of European – and more specifically French – art from the early 19th century. The anthropomorphic figures have heads like birds, crocodiles or even tigers, somewhere between gods and heroes. They hold bowls with griffon bases, pitchers with swan neck handles, and other avian-adorned pieces. These mythological man-animal characters evolve within precious and fantastical settings, fitted and chiseled like the work of a goldsmith.
The exhibition Of Beasts and Super-Beasts is currently on view at the Parisian Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Raqib Shaw’s works on paper, presented in the form of an installation, superpose wonders, curios and vanitas. Each work is a line drawing repurposed with ink and paint and then enhanced with enamel, lead glass, rhinestones, and gilding.
Maries Georges Jean Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 and from a very early age he showed a particular interest in the arts which led, as a boy, to a place at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where Méliès showed particular interest in stage design and puppetry.
Méliès’ principle contribution to cinema was the combination of traditional theatrical elements to motion pictures – he sought to present spectacles of a kind not possible in live theatre.
In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene – objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.
Méliès discovered from this incident that cinema had the capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space. He expanded upon his initial ideas and devised some complex special effects.
He pioneered the first double exposure (La caverne Maudite, 1898), the first split screen with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tete, 1898), and the first dissolve (Cendrillon, 1899).
Méliès tackled a wide range of subjects as well as the fantasy films usually associated with him, including advertising films and serious dramas. He was also one of the first filmmakers to present nudity on screen with “Apres le Bal”.
Faced with a shrinking market once the novelty of his films began to wear off, Méliès abandoned film production in 1912. In 1915 he was forced to turn his innovative studio into a Variety Theatre and resumed his pre-film career as a Showman.
In 1923 he was declared bankrupt and his beloved Theatre Robert Houdin was demolished. Méliès almost disappeared into obscurity until the late 1920’s when his substantial contribution to cinema was recognised by the French and he was presented with the Legion of Honour and given a rent free apartment where he spent the remaining years of his life.
Georges Méliès died in 1938 after making over five hundred films in total – financing, directing, photographing and starring in nearly every one.
“Postiche” the adorning of one’s manly jowls with patchwork or quilted beards (often handed down through the generations!) “Postichery” is actually the invention of Julian Wolkenstein, who teamed up with Paul Sharp to stage this act of bold fakery – presenting their “historical findings” in a faux-exhibition catalogue from the imaginary Museum of Helsinki. Julian calls his work a “metafiction…sitting on the knife’s edge of believable/unbelievable.”
The geographic coordinates ”69.13 ° N 51.06 ° W” mean on the globe the exact position ofthe fjord Sermeq Kujalleq west Greenland. Along the bay, where men live, the houses andwooden churches decline their facades red or brown, the boats waiting to be repaired, theplants have settled.
Facing the sea, man contemplates the ice blocks that slide slowly to the surface during the melting of the ice. It’s summer. Around him, in the silence of the North, the space is hugecrack in the blocks that break off and sink into the water. Only the man to dream this white desert where the heart of an endless sky rightful echo a thousand times repeated falls. The summer is ending soon. Beneath the surface of the gray horizon, where sea and sky merge, water noise may be ice begins to form again, the elements that continue their slow evolution. In the distance, behind the facade of the houses, the man looks his ships breakthe ice and get lost on the horizon.
Facing the sea, man contemplates the ice blocks that slide slowly to the surface during the melting of the ice. It’s summer. Around him, in the silence of the North, the space is hugecrack in the blocks that break off and sink into the water. Only the man to dream this white desert where the heart of an endless sky rightful echo a thousand times repeated falls. The summer is ending soon. Beneath the surface of the gray horizon, where sea and sky merge, water noise may be ice begins to form again, the elements that continue their slow evolution. In the distance, behind the facade of the houses, the man looks his ships breakthe ice and get lost on the horizon.
In this series, I see the decay of the Arctic world: in a soft light, diffused and virginal, thetraditional ways of life give way to a consumer society. The sketch of shapes and colorsthen puts highlight a dazzling show the irreparable damage that result: the living mute, climate change, the ice break up. In a slow torpor, Earth and Man crack, it’s a white deathannounced.
Vitus Saloshanka:
Every time I thought more in my country, I pass a border. A boundary that separates two worlds have long been. Previously she was a part of the Iron Curtain and now a unified force barrier between Europe and the East. It must be mentioned that the next checkpoint is located further east at the first Russian-Japanese border. Why should I not be surprised that in conversations about my background, the ”white” before “Russian” is often ignored.
The urban landscapes that form the core of my book ”Dreamland”, are a variety of old andnewly created habitats, and describe new social structures and contradictions in what is now Belarus - a country that is due to the tense political External Relations for the Western media largely closed.
The focus of my analysis is a conflict with the often bizarre architecture of the suburbanlandscape. These newly-trained aesthetic of private living space bears the traces of time of rapid socio-economic development of the country in recent Jahrzennten and in search of lost cultural identity in today’s Belarus.
Ansonia, Connecticut – 1884
Cincinnati, Ohio – 1904
Charlottesville, Virginia – October, 1907
Washington DC – 1903
Indianapolis, Indiana – 1914
Spartanburg, South Carolina – 1923
Manhattan, New York – 1911
Springfield, Missouri – 1910
Allentown, Pennsylvania – March 1885
Allentown, Pennsylvania – 1911
