Even though she creates the likenesses of people, they’re not portraits in any traditional sense. Kumi Yamashita has worked with shadow, alphabet letters, and even shoe prints to render the delicate faces of individuals, using whatever obscure medium she’s working in to highlight every glance, wrinkle and shadow. Her portraits focus on faces and let the rest of the body fade away underneath, each face revealing a perfect, unique composition of nose, eyes, mouth, and cheeks.
Her two newest works were created in opposite ways – the first involves the stripping away of white threads from a single piece of denim, revealing the vertically oriented portrait of a woman who turns to look back at us in “Warp & Weft – Mother #2.” Her second latest work comes from her Constellation series – portraits made from a single unbroken thread that’s been wrapped around a dense forest of galvanized nails. “Constellation – Mana #2” reveals the nail-speckled face of a little Asian girl, her eyes cast down in wonder and her face glowing against a dark background.
“Warp & Weft – Mother #2”
The intricacies of Kumi’s Constellation works can only be fully appreciated in the detail shots that let you see how much intricate detail it takes to capture a likeness with just nails and a single piece of thread. One eye alone takes at least thirty nails, and who knows how many hours to create. According to Kumi’s website each Constellation portrait takes a process lasting many months to create, all the nails piercing through a wooden panel painted solid white.
Detail, “Constellation – Mana #2”
It looks like the little girl is discovering something for the first time, her face glowing and eyebrows arched with interest. In my mind she’s watching Kumi create this very portrait, lips parted in awe as the string is wound rapidly around the nails to create her likeness out of a single black thread.
A Japanese artist living and working in New York City, Kumi Yamashita has been showing her work all over the world since the early 2000s. Her piece “Constellation – Mana” was chosen as a finalist in the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Competition, and will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for almost an entire year, from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014. The competition asks artists to create a portrait from a living person they’ve had direct contact with.
According to Philip Kennicott’s Washington Post article about the competition, “Constellation – Mana” shows an image of Kumi’s niece, someone she described as “chatty, awkward and sometimes obnoxious.” Kennicott writes, “From a distance, the portrait appears to be a photograph that has been slightly altered to give its surface the look of a lightly crackled pottery glaze. Closer inspection reveals the astonishingly complicated method of its production: A single fine string has been wound around hundreds of delicate nails, giving a sense of the missing snapshot through the density of the web it creates.”
Photographs from recent years are given a splash of past – a figure or middle-ground cast in a hauntingly transparent black and white, an image that comes from a photograph of what stood in the exact same spot decades before. Usually this image from the past comes from a time of war, so that the dramatic differences between countries fighting and not fighting can be witnessed in their entirety.
Below sits a photograph of Berlin’s Strasse des siebzehnten Juni taken in 2004. A man casually talks on his phone in the foreground and a car speeds past on the left, but in the center of the image stand two men from 1989, and behind them running through the middle of the scene sits the Berlin Wall, turned gray and translucent by time. A man walks along the wall in the older photograph, his form framed by a crane building in the future.
On the Strasse des siebzehnten Juni, Berlin, 1989/2004
A peaceful scene in New Jersey is interrupted by the giant flaming Hindenburg blimp as it crashes to the ground, its second half already turned to collapsed rubble on the ground. This historical event that happened in 1937 is brought forward in time and crashes over the ground in 2004, as a man in a red coat walks his red dog in the foreground, completely unaware of the past happening behind him.
Lakehurst, New Jersey USA, 1937/2004
The series was created in collaboration with the advertising agency, Ground Zero, as part of a marketing campaign for the History Channel. The campaign also included tv ads in which black and white videos of the Berlin Wall falling are superimposed upon modern, ordinary scenes of people commuting.
The History Channel said the aim of the campaign is to “Motivate people to understand the history of where they live by watching the History Channel.” It’s easy to forget the people who came before us, and probably sat where we sit now and walked where we walk.
The terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1940/2004
Seth Taras is a self-taught American artist, born into a family of artists. He’s been named one of Luerzer’s Archive’s 200 Best Photographers Worldwide. “Know Where You Stand” won Taras a Cannes Lion, and the campaign has now been translated into 30 languages and published in 130 countries.
His website gives more information into how his photographs come to be, reading, “Nearly all pictures are direct prints from original film negatives with no digital alteration and taken largely hand-held.”
Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normany, 1944/2004
For more of Seth Taras’ work, check out his website.
Giant bold letters sit in a field. They should be easy to spot, but they’re covered in mirrors so from a distance they blend in, echoing the same colors and patterns as the grass that surrounds them. In a work like this one the photographer has all the power, because choosing an angle determines what’s reflected in the glass. In some photos you really have to search for it, but it’s always there – four giant letters that spell F-E-A-R. When we see the word from straight on, the outlines of the letters look like they’re just floating there, reflecting a shinier swirled version of the green-brown grass.
Up close you can see that the letters in “fear expanded” are plated in mirror that’s been cut into differently sized rectangles, which is what causes parts of the letters to reflect patterns differently when seen from far away. Fear doesn’t seem so scary when it’s just a few giant letters and not something deep inside us. Manifesting Fear as something this huge and unthreatening forces us to laugh at it, but at the same time the Fear is being sneaky with all those mirrors, lurking in the grass, and if you could see it up close in person you’d be faced with fragmented bits of your own reflection.
Ryan Everson is an artist from the midwest, who recently completed an MFA at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This work Fear Expanded was created in collaboration with artist Jason Garcia, who typically works as a painter.
His artist statement reads:
My most recent work comes from abstract emotional states stirred up from specific self reflective moments. These moments arise as I become more aware of myself in the present and my inability to control the future. (continue reading on Everson’s website)
UPDATE for all those close to the Denver area: Ryan has a new show titled Long Lost that just opened last week at Denver’s Gildar Gallery. Long Lost will be on view from April 12 – May 11, 2013.
Paul Friedlander is both a physicist and a light sculptor, using applied sciences to create art that’s both beautiful and interactive. He constructs kinetic light sculptures by quickly rotating a rope stretched from ceiling to floor through white light. The vibrating string becomes invisible, but the white light that’s being reflected off the rope becomes visible in an exchange that let’s our eyes see magic, as real as science can make it.
The colors change and twist, forming double-helixes that stem from the shape of the swinging rope. Some of these light sculptures are small and handheld, but many of the larger ones include touch screens that allow viewers to adjust the beams. All of them are spinning at very high speeds that result in a constantly moving body of light.
The light dances and vibrates before you, creating spectrums of color that turn science into performance art. Some of the lights spring from clear bowls that make them look like long shiny ribbons reaching down to us. In this video, the ropes of light spin rapidly, changing from one dense color to one another as the each seems to melt off in succession.
Friedlander wrote that he’s been obsessed with machinery and movement since he was little – with the memory of spending six months as a child in New York, surrounded by the skyscrapers and cars and busses developing in the 1950s. He came to New York because his father was a mathematician who was offered the chance to spend six months researching for New York University. (Even though it’s a huge school, having just graduated from NYU myself feels like I have one little thread of connection to the development of this Englishman who’s combined art and science.)
It’s interesting because after graduating from Sussex University, and learning under Sir Anthony Leggett who later was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on superfluidity, Friedlander attended art school but found its culture completely backwards and its mindset surprisingly small. No one was interested in beauty, he wrote, apparently it was out of date, “passe”:
“The big new thing was conceptualism. I came to consider the art world as some kind of strange fashion following cult. Members of the art world all shared the same views, talked nonsense and froze out any one who dared to consider their own talent more important than following what every one else was doing.”
On a personal note: I find this incredibly interesting, because it’s that exact attitude I want to spend my life trying to change – people shouldn’t think that art can be this over here, but not that over there because it’s already been done. To me, art is the greatest because each time a different pair of hands make something, even if it’s intended to be a copy of something else, it will always be a completely different interpretation of what came before. Art, by nature, should always by new, instantaneous – capturing one brush stroke or one moment in time that deserves to be shared with the rest of us. And we should always be expanding our idea of what art is, since some of the best art sits right on the edge of nonsense.
But I guess in Mr. Friedlander’s case, his art made too much sense.
String Theory II
Now, Friedlander has shown his light sculptures in four continents and fifteen countries, his work having the unique benefit of blending it at both science and art museums. After a brief stint in stage lighting and starting a family, and after feeling a deep sense of being unfulfilled he began experimenting with light in his own way.
Once he “discovered the chaotic properties of spinning string and chromastrobic light,” Friedlander organized a group of artists for an exhibition they titled “Chaos” and he found that his kinetic light sculptures were actually in when it came to contemporary art tastes. He’s been creating, exhibiting, and winning awards ever since.
If you’d like to read Mr. Friedlander’s story for yourself, he wrote a bio page from which all of this information was gathered.
And for more kinetic light sculptures, see his website.
These are the walls painted by German street artist Dome, who first discovered spray paint in 1995 and his works have been shown in exhibitions all over Germany and Italy since 2001. He studied communications design at the Academy of Art in Mainz, Germany, and in 2010 he moved his focus from spray paint to drawing in ink. His website includes a page of pictures of Dome working in his studio in Karlsruhe, Germany – a city located near the country’s south-west side close to the French border.
His works all have the same dark, satirical style to them – black broken up bodies detailed with simple white lines that hint at the bones underneath, heads usually covered by the head of an animal, and the animal heads all have strings coming from their bases so that we know they’re just masks. There are lots of umbrellas and keys, and most have a sense of humor that eases the lament of the central figure that seems to symbolize what we’ve lost.
“ark istanbul”
Freedom is Painful 5m x 7m mixed media on wall at Leoncavallo in Milano/Italy May 2012
Body parts float like they’d been cast as part of a voodoo fortune charm, hovering and just for a second tricking your eyes into believing that magic is real. The floating sticks of black arrange themselves into a posture, lunging forward so that it’s tied on elk’s head can scream into a megaphone. There’s no one there though, just a pile of upturned umbrellas. Above his head, skeletons hold a ribbon reading “Freedom in painful,” and on the bottom of the framed scene lies another ribbon that commemorates a life lived from 1975-2012. (if you know the word or its translation, please comment!) Leaves fall around the entire scene – they’re a delicate white at the top, but at the bottom they’re black and roughly outlined.
Des Todes Bruder (death’s brother) 2,3m x 8,2m Karlsruhe/Germany-Entenfang-an der Alb 2012
“no titel” 3,5 m x 1,8 m stencil on wall june 2012 Vienna/Austria at Sabotage Films
“Holding Hands” shows a simplification of Dome’s aesthetic that integrates with the environment – street art at its best.
A giant hand reaches up, formed by the base of the column supporting the highway above, and long skinny fingers stretch on to the concrete’s underbelly with wrinkles and nails outlined in rough, swirled lines of white.
“Holding Hands” Karlsruhe/Germany Acrylic on concrete 2013 -04
