Type : Lighting Installation Curator : Hin Bus Depot for Urban Xchange 2015 Location : Butterworth, Penang Year : 2015 Project Team : Jun Ong, Ronald Lim, Steven Lay, Eeyan Chuah, Gabi Grusaite, Khing Chuah
Inspired by the notion of “glitch,” a dodecahedron - a 12-sided star-shaped installation appears almost as an error or a temporary irregularity, suddenly finding itself lodged within the concrete superstructure of an unfinished building by the street of Raja Uda.
The term “glitch” was used to describe a spike or change in voltage in an electric current, first recorded in a space program. It is a manifestation of the sterile conditions of Butterworth, a once thriving industrial port and significant terminal between the mainland and island. The odd juxtaposition of “Star” with its “host” creates new relationships, tangible and intangible. It is an accumulation of digital and analogue irregularities, becoming a transient portal to a new dimension.
Comprised of five hundred metres of steel cables and LED strips, the “Star” abstracts kitsch street decorations with electrical cables and transposing them into a formal, recognizable entity. The cables are anchored to ground, slabs, cantilever beams and adjacent buildings to form the overall shape. As one steps closer, the installation segregates itself into several floors, each becoming its own spatial experience. The form breaks down into glowing lines, each fragment holding its own electrical and structural characteristic.
The installation of Higher Goals was a performance and ritual that recalled a tribal ceremony. Hammons and his collaborators came to the site with their faces painted and bodies adorned with feathers as they ceremoniously carried and then erected huge poles with basketball hoops attached. These actions recall the Native American Sundance, where participants cut a tall thin tree down from the forest, carry it ritualistically, and reinstall it at the dance site. Hammons pointedly paints high-contrast patterning on the poles—sometimes identified as Islamic patterning, but also akin to Australian aboriginal painting, famous for the abstract depiction of Dreamtime, a concept of reality formed in one’s nighttime dreams. Hammons is quite aware of the potency and realities formed in Aboriginal Dreamtime. These basketball hoops and poles rise 30 feet high in their elegance. They are completely unattainable: not even the tallest player can make this basket—such is a metaphor for a knife that cuts both ways on the spectrum of dreams.
Robert Fludd drew The Nothingness Prior to the Universe in 1617 for his Utriusque Cosmi. Google Images, when challenged, suggests it might also be a vintage chenille rug or overdyed strech denim from J. Crew. [via Public Domain Review: “indelibly modern”; more]
“Et sic in infinitum” means “and so on without end.”
The Venezuelan sculptor heavily inspired by pre-Columbian artefacts, famed for her unique, often satirical, abstract works.
Recent years have seen her included in ‘MoMA at El Museo’, an exhibition of Latin American artists displayed by the Museum of Modern art in 2004, and a major retrospective hosted in 2014 by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee.
We Love:
Sebastian Smee, ‘Revisiting Marisol, years after her heyday’, The Boston Globe (July 5th, 2014), for an excellent and readable summary of her imaginative, tongue-in-cheek work.
[Images display the works, Dinner Date (1963), John Wayne (1963) and a photograph of the artists herself, respectively]
Throughout the decades that Beverly Buchanan lived and worked in the American Southeast, she gathered what she termed “groundings”: histories, folklore, transcribed conversations, photographs of unmarked ruins, and models of vernacular architecture. These diverse references—which speak to African heritage as much as to life under Jim Crow and during the Civil Rights Movement—became the source material for extended series of works in sculpture, photography, and text.
Some of Buchanan’s best-known works are her shack sculptures. These later works are studies in Southern vernacular architecture and portraiture. Buchan’s shacks combine folk aesthetics with a clinician’s precise examination of culture. Often categorized by architectural style (such as shotgun houses, saddlebags, dogtrots, and elevated low country homes), the sculptures are frequently paired with what the artist called “legends,” patchwork narratives about the structures and the people commemorated. As Buchanan explained, “I think that artists in the South must at some point confront the work of folk artists… [in terms of] being of and from the same place with the same influences, food, dirt, sky, reclaimed land, development, violence, guns, ghosts.”
