Poster-girl for organization

I worked at RxArt this past summer, and among many other things I created this poster for the fundraising gala. I was the only designer on staff and didn't have a ton of feedback from colleagues, which I found difficult after a two year program of endless feedback and critique. But sometimes it's nice to work solo, not all the time but completing this project on my own from initial concept to press check was quite fulfulling.

RxArt is an organization that curates contemporary art installations in hospitals around the US, and their annual fundraiser is a major event in New York City. This fall it was sponsored by Chanel Beauté, and featured an art auction with work from Dan Colen, Miranda July, Terence Koh, and Yoko Ono to name a few. A very cool organization doing very cool things, and I am so happy that I'm able to be a part of the family now. I have another project in the works, that is a redesign of the press package - an abbreviated version that has taken the form of a deck of cards. We'll see how it goes!

All of the current information about RxArt is found on the front of the poster, which folds out twice for the full read (or the two-page option shown above), then Rob Pruitt, who generously donated the zebra artwork for the cover of the Between the Lines coloring book, agreed to have it printed full-bleed on the back for an added bonus for attendees of the gala.

The poster was found in the Chanel gift bags as guests were leaving the gala. I thought it would be so fabulous for people to have a great time at the party, then get home and say, "let me read all about this amazing organization" ... And so my vision of this unconventional poster came to life. It is inspired by the immediacy of a newspaper (or newsletter) because it contains all of the most current news, and the poster on the back gives it that extra dimension. This is an organization devoted to great art, after all.

Play, Space and Place

I so thoroughly enjoy artwork that changes the way we view our cities. Similar to the artists I talked about in this previous post, Chris Martin and Arnaud LaPierre are two artists asking us to rethink our city experience. It's not about focusing on or changing small details in our environment, but more of a feeling of who we are as city-dwellers and how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings.

Chris Martin, "East River Williamsburg," Brooklyn, 2005. Image via Eflux,
Courtesy Chris Martin, KOW BERLIN, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Foto: Donna Alberico

With this installation Chris Martin used pop colors and unusual shapes to bring our attention to the comparison - artwork vs. skyline. We compare the colors and shapes of his work to the backdrop of the New York city skyline, and it offers the possibility of breaking from reality into a color-coded fantasy city. Yes please!

Arnaud LaPierre, "The Ring Installation"
on the Place Vendome in Paris

Images from MocoLoco

Arnaud LaPierre uses mirror cubes to emphasize the connection of people with their surroundings, and the results are this gorgeous funhouse in the middle of Paris. It transforms many Parisian's everyday walk, and gives them a chance to ponder who they are in relation to their city. I really need to see this btw.

The installation plays with the concept of place. As James H Kunstler tells us in this entertaining TED talk, "Your ability to create places that are meaningful ... depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are." LaPierre isn't defining space, instead he's distorting and fragmenting it, and placing us right in the center of the urban landscape, encouraging people to take a break from their usual routine and play with the sense of place.

How cool is this building?

Caixaforum is an art gallery and cultural center in Madrid, that I passed by today while taking photos of our neighborhood. In 2008 the architects Herzog and de Meuron coverted an 1899 power station, literally lifted it off the ground to create a covered plaza underneath. The higher levels of the structure are sculpted to reflect the roofscape of the surrounding buildings.

Gorg.

I love how the narrow adjacent streets are framed by the low
ceiling and fountain area below.

A vertical garden compliments the plaza in the entrance area,
reminiscent of the botanical gardens just on the other side
of the Paseo del Prado

An image of the original 1899 power station from Arcspace

 When you're standing in the covered plaza, the sensation of the amount of weight hanging over your head is unbelievable. The sides of the building literally appear to have no support. We didn't go inside the building this time but there are usually exhibitions and programming curated to promote cultural understanding. Read more about the Caixa Foundation here.

Elena Asins: An architect's dream artist

Yesterday I went to the Museo Reina Sofia here in Madrid, and in ten enormous rooms on the third floor was the exhibition of Elena Asin's work: Fragmentos de la memoria. She was born in 1940 in Madrid, and is one of the first artists in Spain to use the computer to assist her work, and somewhere along the way she studied semiotics with Noam Chomsky at Columbia. The seemingly endless walls of lines and planes reminded me a little of Sol Lewitt - The search for perfect geometric abstraction, and an investigation of mathematical principles in art.

In the artist's statement before you enter the exhibition, she explains that she doesn't create with the purpose of making art - she just systematically works on the problems of space that preoccupy her mind. I could see an architect walking into any of these rooms and finding endless possibilities of angles, shapes and viewpoints.




She admired the work of Piet Mondrian and in an essay in 1969 she writes "For Mondrian this space-plane is a positive void, as it is an essential condition for objective existence. Creating the void is the main action and therein lies true creation, because this void is positive; it contains the germ of the absolutely new."

The space in-between is the most important - reminds me of meditation. Her work is a life-long methodical meditation on the structure of the plane.

Images from the Museo Reina Sofia

The eternal search for beauty

We visited Iceland after my graduation in May, and the highlight of the trip for me was visiting this tiny museum on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The museum is dedicated to the artist Ásmundur Sveinsson (b.1893) with a complete retrospective of his lifetime of work, and displays his artistic development with volumes and volumes of sketches. When the process sketches were placed alongside the sculpture it was a comprehensive experience of his work.

His house, which he designed himself, was transformed into the museum. The house is a nod to his interest in the Bauhaus and is a sculpture in itself. Fun fact alert: a view from above shows the footprint of the house makes a smiley face.

Sveinsson's most famous work is the Water Carrier, which is placed in downtown Reykjavik. He is considered a pioneer of sculpture in Iceland and much of his work was created for use in public space. Throughout his life he remained true to the belief that art should be created for the people, and therefore be among them.

In the sculpture garden outside the museum, I found this. Sveinsson created a form that uses its negative space so beautifully and fluidly that I had to move around to each angle to see how it framed the garden around his house.

From the curator's text: "To Sveinsson the eternal search for the essence of the subject is one of the most important attributes of each artist... and to emphasize this point he often quoted the words of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin: 'There is no such thing as beauty, only the search for beauty.' But Sveinsson added - from his own heart - that the search itself knew no boundaries."

Flux/S, Richard Galpin and Joseph Beuys

Flux/S took over an open urban space at Strijp-S in Eindoven that looks otherwise unappealing to do some pretty fantastic activities. Let's see, there's an open symphony (everyone brings their instrument and starts playing), hula hooping, twister, and other play date favorites.

This is the third edition of the arts festival and they chose this spot in response to recent developments. This reminds me of similar festivals in New York that I've talked about in recent posts on psychogeography, except this festival has a unifying principle. It is a commentary on the meaning of public space in our cities, and one of their main intentions is to start a dialogue. I, for one, have had many philosophical arguments about urban design while twisting myself into a knot on a large dotted mat. But seriously, I get it. I think the intentions behind this festival are strong, and reminiscent of the original political and social rebellion that was the intention of the Situationist International and Fluxus movements. Artbomb, above, is a good example of their quietly aggressive protest, and the festival itself feels like a collective demonstration by visitors and residents of Eindoven who choose to participate.

How can we rethink our city environment, and how can art create an entirely new experience? One of the answers that I'm exploring in my work is - how can we create an entirely new experience with what is already there? Whether people themselves form the artwork, or their stories, or offering a new lens through which to see the city.

Artist Richard Galpin installed Viewing Station on the High Line in May, and I was in the middle of a project in Times Square to frame certain elements in the environment to "quiet" the experience and to meditate on your surroundings, so I was blown away by this. He takes the geometry from separating layers of photographic prints to create the abstract cut-outs. The actual view that Viewing Station frames is an interesting choice - let's just say it's only interesting through a kaleidoscopic lens like this. The power of this installation to disconnect the viewer from everyday reality and see architecture in a number of ways - by focusing on the abstract geometry, or blocks of color - is a novel re-combination of our familiar surroundings. And really friggin cool.

New York City is an open air museum, and I especially love when artists can push that further to make it even more of one. Not necessarily in a giant oversized sculpture way, or even the Sol Lewitt retrospective in City Hall park, which I thought was conventional - disappointing because I adore his work, but something subtle, that makes us take a second look. This happened to me when I was walking on West 22nd street with a few friends. I saw large naturally carved basalt stones, each placed directly adjacent to an oak tree. I realized later that it was Lynne Cooke and Dia Art Foundation's continuation of Joseph Beuys 7000 Oaks. In his words: "My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same." 

The juxtaposition of regenerative tree with inert stone is a strong environmental message intended to shake people's consciousness, and he also wanted the work to grow and expand beyond its original inauguration at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany in 1987. The goal of this social sculpture was also give everyone the ability to create art by planting trees, and also to "extend the traditional role of the art gallery so the gallery extends out into the city”.

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks. West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in New York City.
Photo: Ken Goebel. From Dia