J-E-L-L-O

When life gives you Jell-O, you make edible cities. Or at least that's what Liz Hickok does with this wobbly food found most often in school cafeterias and hospitals.  Liz  is a San Francisco-based artist who transforms Jell-O into fun, colorful cityscapes, complete with wobbly buildings and edible bridges. San Francisco, New York, Wilmington. Liz has constructed each one out of Jell-O.••••

Damian Ortega at the Boston ICA

I saw the Damian Ortega show that Boston's ICA last week. My thoughts, in a word: unimpressed. The biggest and best piece there was a deconstructed, suspended VW bug (above). I was able to walk through it and around it, some people were even knocking it a bit! He took apart every last piece of the car, resembling a diagram in a car manual. I'm not sure most artists would let people get within 1 foot of that piece, so I have a lot of respect for that. The other pieces included balancing chairs, blown glass and pieces of leather that were too abstract for me to comprehend. I went home and googled him, convinced that I had heard his name before, and I came across a piece that reminded me of something else I had seen. I went to Zurich a few years back and saw a piece that had all these weapons suspended in mid-air and forced the viewer to walk through them. There was also a soundtrack playing in the background of little clanging metallic sounds. Nothing too haunted-house-y, but just enough for me to think a gun might accidentally go off or a sword might come loose from it's hold. It was awesome and resembled the piece below. If anyone knows what artist I am referring to, please let me know because I have googled every possible combination of terms to no avail. Anyway, Google proved to me that Damian Ortega has a lot more meaningful and interesting work than was exhibited at the ICA, but at least it was Free Thursdays. ••••

2010 Olympic Medals

Today, VANOC and Vancouver 2010 Official Supporters unveiled the Olympic and Paralympic medals that will decorate the gold, silver and bronze medallists of the 2010 Winter Games.

Their undulating forms evoke British Columbia’s mountains, ocean and snow. Their faces are drawn from West Coast First Nations artwork depicting the orca and raven. Each is unique. And their substantial size gives them a significant presence.

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Chris Gilmour

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving break! Here is a little inspirational Monday morning sculpture. Chris Gilmour's work is made entirely of cardboard and glue. The attention to detail is wild! ••••

The Magnetic Curtain

Not your typical window covering, the magnetic curtain, developed by Florian Kraitli, is a very unique idea. I love the multiple forms this curtain creates; almost like a sculpture piece in your room. ••••

Tara Donovan at the ICA

After the Anish Kapoor exhibit, I was thrilled to see the ICA in Boston hit yet another home run with a show of Tara Donovan's work. I had never heard of Donovan or seen her sculpture prior to this exhibit opening, so I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. Donovan works systematically by piling, weaving, clustering, or otherwise building single units of an everyday object into something all together new. She explores "how a single action applied to a single material countless times can transcend our expectations." It's how I imagine bees make honeycomb from wax— only she does it with things like Styrofoam cups (above) or paper plates (below).
Much of the work is site specific, or had to be created on the spot for the show— one example being the cube below, made entirely of toothpicks. True story: it's held together by gravity alone, and not a dab of glue. The show is up until January 4th, and is definitely worth checking out. ••••

Battery Reef

I love the use of batteries as a medium for this sculpture by Michel de Broin. Great way to recycle and create art.

"Dead Star is made from residual battery at the end of their duty. Left to itself, the sculpture will slowly cool down since there is no longer electronic activity taking place in it. The hundreds of batteries were once used to power appliances before they finish their cycle in a recycle facility. Retrieve from death, they were assembled again in this whole structure." ••••

Speaking of Food and Art...

Jeph Gurecka uses bread as his material of choice for this sculpture exhibition, entitled "Bread, Salt, Water".

"Jeph uses simplistic and organic materials to ground the world of illusion to the physical. Much like Mandela paintings and street graffiti murals,Gurecka’s work exists to reflect on the absurdity of the moment, the preciousness of the past and the impermanence of the world." ••••

Passing the Torch

The New York Times has a very interesting interactive article dedicated to the evolution of the Olympic torch. Every city that hosts the Olympics is expected to design a unique logo, a signature building, as well as torch to represent the local tradition and national character.



The red curve of the 2008 Beijing torch is inspired by the shape of a traditional Chinese scroll. The swirling graphics are meant to evoke the phoenix--a key totem of the games and "clouds of promise." ••••

Peter Jansen

A personal favorite sculpture of mine at the MOMA is the Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931). A picture does not give this sculpture justice.

It comes as no surprise that Peter Jansen's work caught my eye. "Based on his ideas on transposition and movement the artist Peter Jansen uses shapes of the human body to create energetic spaces. In his earlier works he focused on open spaces, created almost free of matter and weight. In his recent sculptures he captures sequences of human movements in space and time, in a single frame."


I could barely cast a self portrait of my own head in school, so seeing works like these amaze me. There is a clear inspiration from Boccioni, but with a modern interpretation. ••••

Colored Pencils

My friends in high school used to joke that I was going to major in colored pencils. What can I say, you can do amazing things with a box of Prismacolors. That being said, I never thought about using the material in sculptural form. Artist Jennifer Maestre had developed a unique approach to using colored pencils. Her sculptures are inspired by the form and function of sea urchins...read more about her technique and process here. Ok, so they kind of make me a little uncomfortable, but they're definitely intriguing. ••••

Anish Kapoor at the ICA

Tonight I had the lucky opportunity to attend a sneak peek opening for Anish Kapoor's exhibit Past, Present, and Future at the ICA in Boston. I felt very fortunate to be able to hear the artist speak about his work tonight, and then to be one of the first to see this rather exceptional showing of sculpture. Although modern sculpture does not always interest me (sometimes I can't help but find it sterile or elitist), I truly loved this show. I think it was Kapoor's humble, playful, and genuine approach toward making art that most impressed me— he spoke about this tonight, but you also got a real sense of it just by looking at the work. It was a bit like being a kid in a fun house— the reflective surfaces on some pieces were like those crazy warped mirrors at a carnival (but times ten), and the "void" pieces were some seriously amazing optical illusions.The British Kapoor is perhaps best known in the US for his "Cloud Gate" in Chicago (pictured below), and from September 19th—October 7th, he will be temporarily showing a "Sky Mirror" in front of Rockefeller Plaza (simulated photo at bottom). As for the exhibit in Boston, this is his first show on the East Coast and it is a retrospective of 14 works made since 1980. It will be open to the public from May 30—September 7th. Thanks again to Chung for inviting me to see it with him early! ••••