Latest news with #artinstallation
BBC News
2 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Art installation inspired by ME coming to Bristol and Glastonbury
An immersive art installation that invites people to "disappear" inside a mirrored box to understand life with chronic fatigue syndrome, is coming to the West by Bristol artist Alison Larkman, Mirrorbox plays messages from ME and long Covid patients explaining why a particular location is special to them, and why their condition means they cannot be there Larkman, who has ME, said the concept came from "the idea of taking up space, of being seen and heard but also being invisible at the same time".The initiative, titled 'I would be here if I could', has seen the Mirrorbox travel all over the country and it will be in Bristol and Glastonbury in the coming weeks. ME causes extreme tiredness and can be so severe that patients are left bed-bound and unable to complete even simple symptoms include problems with memory and concentration, muscle and joint pain, dizziness and sensitivity to light and her illness is at its worst, Ms Larkman can only stay awake for three-hour windows."Your imagination is huge and you can lay in bed and travel to all sorts of places and think about things whereas you can't do them," she said. "That's one of the questions I would think - 'where would I be if I could?'"For Ms Larkman, the answer is always watching the hustle and bustle of London's Victoria Station from the top of the escalators on the way to visit her sister, but for others it was as simple as being able to see their children on the swings at the park."During this project I have met so many other people trying to manage what is essentially a fluctuating condition and also the shock of realising how bad ME is," she said."You just don't see people who are bed-bound, or who are on oxygen, and because you don't see them, even though I'd had it for years, it's been a real revelation." Some participants were unable to speak to record their messages, so wrote them down or sent them by text, but others were determined to be heard."We extended the project for a month because people wanted to wait for that day when they could send a message," Ms Larkman said."Knowing how important it is for people to have their voice heard in these places, it feels like a real responsibility." People who enter the box are invited to write a postcard to the person who recorded a message they listened will be at the top of Troopers Hill, Bristol, on 1 June, under an oak tree at Ashton Court, Bristol, on 4 June, and at the top of Glastonbury Tor on 18 June.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Leonardo Drew review – are these towers of debris the ruins of America?
This place looks like a storm hit it. The winds have ripped up houses, shops, factories and art studios, whirled the pieces in a mighty twister and smashed them to earth in pulverised fragments. Now they scatter South London Gallery, towering over you in two random heaps, with other pieces gathered in clusters, floating on the walls, thrown all over the floor. Crunch, crunch – you can walk on broken bits of wood carpeting the ground, negotiating your way around bigger debris, as you inspect the ruins of America – and, sadly, of American art. Seven decades ago, Jackson Pollock put America at the forefront of abstract art with looping and spiralling vortices of energy that he created by pouring and flicking paint on to a horizontal canvas. Leonardo Drew grew up in a housing project in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 60s and is consciously influenced by Pollock, whose work he first saw in a book at his local library. Where Pollock threw paint, Drew scatters splintered wood, yet his sculpture can also be seen as painting, since before breaking up many of the boards and planks in this show, he painted them. The entire installation can be seen as a huge action painting in 3D. Drew even numbers his works like Pollock did: the alternative title of Ubiquity II is Number 436. But if action painting in the 50s was a freewheeling image of the improvisational American spirit, this is the debris of a shattered American dream. You get a sense, contemplating Drew's crafted rubble, of surveying the aftermath of a cataclysmic weather event or walking the streets of a US town obliterated by the latest freak hurricane or tornado. This is painfully resonant given the Trump administration's policy of active climate crisis denial, including the withdrawal of government funding for research. And, as the eerie silence of this world in smithereens, broken only by the wood cracking under your feet, reminds you, some of the most traumatic indicators of climate emergency, from storms to fires, have hit the US itself. Drew doesn't claim his art is political in any direct way: it is abstract. I'm reading Trump into it. But although I could go on like this, identifying artistic echoes and urgent themes, it's forced. This artwork is disappointing. On paper, and in photographs, Drew's work seemed spectacular, yet as soon as I walked into the gallery my heart sank. There's a lumpen, flat, unthreatening feeling to this show. It's as depressing as a destroyed town but without the danger or horror. In fact, it's hard to feel anything at all about an assemblage that fails to suggest motion, energy or life. When you enter the long, tall white space, the first disappointment is the way wooden items are stuck around the walls. They don't look like flying fragments propelled through space, but decorations on a bedroom wall. Some resemble cricket bats. One looks like a gun. Whatever they are meant to be, they are as radical as wrapping paper. The second blow to anyone seeking artistic fun is the sight of the two tottering heaps with a valley between them through which you can pass. 'Tottering' is inaccurate, for they are clearly not about to fall. You can see the scaffolding on which the artist has built his Towers of Babel. Everything is safely, staidly stuck in place. I'm not saying it should fall, but where is the dramatic tension? The only hint of danger or dynamism is in the starbursts around the floor. One looks like a fist of rapidly expanding matter. It makes you think of the exploding enemy plane in Roy Lichtenstein's painting Whaam! – which is itself an ironic homage to Pollock's action art. Maybe the contrast is deliberate, for Drew says his art is a meditation on entropy. So the energetic, propulsive assemblages may be newborn stars or fragments of the big bang. But the sagging heaps of crap are the universe approaching its death, Earth under an avalanche of garbage, America at the end of its time. Maybe so. But it's dreary to look at. It's not just at the macro scale that the installation appears inert. Every small chunk you look at, in the heaps, on the walls, has an arbitrary wanness up close. Nothing seems to mean much, or matter much. Perhaps Drew is simply crushed by these times. But it seems to me this work, with its conscious echoes of Pollock that fail to recapture the excitement or surprise of America's modern art glory days, is a symptom of a nation in cultural as well as political decline. Trump's America is a shell of what it once was. Americans were creatively brilliant not so long ago, pumping out the best art, novels, music. But this exhausted art looks to me like the product of a decaying country. South London Gallery from 30 May to 7 December
RNZ News
3 days ago
- General
- RNZ News
The Panel with Claire Amos and Alan McElroy (Part 1)
Tonight on The Panel, Wallace Chapman is joined by panellists Claire Amos and Alan McElroy. They discuss the Government cracking down on school truancy and the controversial removal of an art installation at a Nelson gallery. An artwork of a flag stencilled with the words 'Please Walk On Me' has angered the local RSA who has labelled it an 'insult' to veterans. Photo: LDR / Max Frethey
CBS News
4 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Liberty Bells coming to every Pennsylvania county for America's 250th birthday
Across Pennsylvania, counties are getting ready to celebrate America's 250th birthday with an impressive statewide art installation. Bells Across PA will see 67 fiberglass Liberty Bells placed in each county, designed with images of the people, places and things that make that county so special. The Liberty Bell is not only an iconic symbol of America, but it's also an enduring symbol of Pennsylvania. It's so popular that soon the state's license plates will be ornamented with it. And starting this summer, each and every county in Pennsylvania will have a unique bell of its own. Westmoreland's bell is currently being worked on by artist Mandy Sirofchuck at her studio in Ligonier. Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, the director of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, says when the Westmoreland bell is finished in August, it will sit right outside the museum for all to see and experience. "When something is outside and it also represents a community that it is in, people can connect to it on a different level," said Filippini-Fantoni. "And I have to say that this bell will be doing exactly that. It is going to invite people to come, and I am sure that people will walk around the bell and try to figure out what buildings are what, what river is what, what animal is what and there will be a conversation, there will be stories that are shared and that's what makes art special." And while the bell that will sit outside the museum in Greensburg is currently being worked on for later this summer, event organizers are seeking a local artist in Westmoreland to make a second bell with the theme: "MORE Energy in Westmoreland: Powering our Past and Energizing our Future." This second bell is being sponsored by First Energy, and they are looking for images associated with coal, solar, wind, gas, hydroelectric and more. Submissions for this paid position are currently being accepted, so if you think you have what it takes to make a memorable bell design, click here for more information.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Building a Home From 100 Miles of Cord
The artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale — a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognizable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 23 feet from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in East Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings — a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair — with a spectacular flock of paper, some 6,000 sheets, fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled 'Home Less Home,' opened Thursday under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain on view through Sept. 1. 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed, as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Shiota's immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in East Boston near the shipyard, once the second largest point of immigration in the United States after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it.' Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords — she calls them 'threads' — entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, like shoes or beds that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden rowboats — objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage, afterlife. A midcareer retrospective that opened in 2019 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, 'The Soul Trembles,' has toured Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris — with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira (the show travels next to Italy and Canada). Mami Kataoka, the director of Mori Art Museum who organized the retrospective, said by email that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it.' Shiota left her own home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter but early on shifted to 'painting in the air,' she called it, using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times I'm using red string, the color of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion, survival.' In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history, and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is 18. 'Now I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. For the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the U.S., she has also adapted her 2014 piece 'Accumulation — Searching for the Destination' near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage, dangling inside another shower of red threads, lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases are packed with an internal motor, making them bob as though adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase — they're ready to go but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York this fall at the Japan Society and Templon gallery. 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story,' said Ruth Erickson, the chief curator at the ICA. She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge.' 'Home Less Home' comprises around 100 miles of cord, roughly the distance from the Watershed to Cape Cod. Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what's printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on front lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line, 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her own falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home and what the connections are to a place could never be more at the forefront of our minds,' Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analyzing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who so often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in 'Home Less Home' are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.'
