Courtesy of www.illy.com

illy collaborated with artist/architect Adam Kalkin to create this amazing work of living art – the illy Push Button House, a five-room home with a kitchen, dining room, bedroom, living room and library constructed within a standard industrial shipping container.

The home, which transforms at the push of a button, is created from recycled and recyclable materials. So what about the relationship to illy? It is supposed to be a physical representation of illy’s dedication to sustainability, art and innovation.

Hong Kong artist Li Xiaofeng, creates clothing from porcelain fragments from the Ming, Qing and Song dynasties and even more amazing are that they are wearable. Lacoste included his work in their Collector’s Series – a limited edition polo to wear right off the rack. Since China forbids the export of artifacts, Xiaofeng hand painted new ceramic bowls and added the Lacoste logo to them. Lacoste challenged him to create two different polos for the 2010 Holiday Collector’s Series. For the limited edition printed polo, he chose blue and white shards with lotus and children designs from the Kangxi Period (1662 – 1772 AD) of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911 AD). The lotus grows from mud underwater to emerge as a flower, symbolising purity and rebirth. Images of babies represent fertility, as during that period the high infant mortality rate meant that people decorated ceramics with babies hoping they would be blessed with children.

It took Scott Weaver over 30 years to build this toothpick model of San Francico. He started building the toothpick structure at age 17  and 3000 hours later, he completed his toothpick city. It stands 9 feet tall and 7 feet wide. Talk about obsessive dedication!

Photo credit: Susan Gittens on Flickr

Photo credit: Tyler Ingram on Flickr

Vancouver is undeniably beautiful in the summer, but it’s even prettier when the sky is lit up like it was last night at the 20th anniversary of the Celebration of Light festival in English Bay. Don’t miss the next explosion of loveliness by Spain on Saturday, July 24th at 10pm.

Newly transformed by Nuno Sottomayor and  Sam Baron, we can see why this Portugalian escape has been re-named Hotel FAVORITA.

photos (c) Pedro Lobo

Hotel FAVORITA

YEKPARE

Yekpare is a story teller to narrate 8500 years’ story of Istanbul. The story has symbols by from Pagans to Roman Empire, from Byzantine Empire to Latin Empire, and finally from Ottoman Empire to today’s Istanbul.

A building which we play on is Haydarpa?a Train Station has brilliant architectural forms. Connection between middle east to west as Istanbul since 1906 was formed by Haydarpa?a. In 50’s; it was a door millions of emigrant. Internal migration triggered chaotic order of Istanbul dialectical daily life scenes. Either its conceptual and political and geographical position or its location’s depth of field to watch the entire show from Kad?köy coast; Yekpare is dramatic as a representation.

First day of the performance is also 47th death day of famous Turkish poet Naz?m Hikmet Ran. We started with his quote:“At Haydarpa?a Train Station, in the spring of 1941, it is three o’clock. Sun, exhaustion and rush lay on the stairs” (from his epic novel Human Landscapes from My Country).

Art Direction & Visuals:
Deniz Kader – Canda? ?i?man

sourced from: Nerdworking

Susan Collis represented by  Seventeen Gallery, London

Installation view of ‘Don’t get your hopes up’

Areas of the gallery walls appear to have been left unfinished after the de-installation of the previous show. Unusually the behind-the-scenes paraphernalia of display such as screw-heads, nail holes, rawl plugs and pencil marks are still in evidence, together with seemingly unintentional marks associated with the movement of art work. A bucket catches drips from the ceiling and a general air of neglect pervades.

Within Susan Collis practice, everyday objects and surfaces are presented splattered and stained with the marks of wear and tear, and the viewer might, upon further investigation, realize that the timeworn flecks of paint that cover an old broom, are in fact delicate and precisely inlaid pearls, jasper, turquoise, garnets and black diamonds. Initially, the demarcations seem to be the secondary results of a primary activity, seemingly worthless and easily ignored. Collis is interested in the shift of perception that takes place upon discovery that they are, in fact, intentional and primary activities themselves.

For this her first solo exhibition at SEVENTEEN Collis has produced a series of interventions that refer to the accidental and neglected, within the context of gallery space. The exhibition will be easy to overlook, as a cursory glance might lead the viewer to believe the gallery was empty. However, further investigation of the space will reward the viewer, leading them towards Collis notions of hidden labour, within a complex network of contradictions and revelations. Dont get your hopes up questions the structures and methods of its own production, together with the viewers most basic assumptions about artistic production and display. (Seventeen Gallery)

www.carnovsky.com

Color est e pluribus unus

We wanted to represent the antique theme of the metamorphosis intended as an unceasing transformation of shapes from a “primigenial chaos”. For this purpose we have created a sort of catalogue of natural motifs starting with the engravings from natural history’s great European texts, between the XVI and the XVIII Century, from Aldrovandi to Ruysch, from Linneus to Bonnaterre. A catalogue – it naturally includes also human – that does not have a taxonomic or scientific aim in the modern sense, but that wants to explore both the real and the fantastic, the true and the verisimilar in the way medieval bestiaries did.

In each image three layers live together, three worlds that could belong to a specific animal kingdom or to an anatomical part, but at the same time connect to a different psychological or emotional status that passes from the clear to the hidden, from the light to the darkness, from the awakeness to the dream in something that could be a sort of exploration of the surface’s deepness.

RGB is a collection of wallpapers that mutate and interact with different chromatic stimulus. (www.carnovsky.com)

photos by Luca Volpe // Image Courtesy of Carnovsky

Its that time of year again. For us northern westerners the rain (or snow) has stopped and we have begun to awake from dormancy, blossom in the sun and engage public spaces outside of our cavernous shelters. Short-shorts, tandem-bike rides and park beers aside, Gestalten’s new release, Urban Interventions Personal Projects in Public Spaces, lends us more inspiration to get outside.

“Evolving from graffiti and street art, urban interventions are the next generation of artwork to hit public space. Using any and all of the components that make up urban landscapes, these mostly spatial works bring art to the masses. They turn the street into a studio, laboratory, club, and gallery and challenge us to rediscover our environment and interact with it in new ways. This is the first book to document these very current, personal art projects in a comprehensive way. It shows the growing connections and interplay of this scene with art, architecture, performance, and installation as it turns public spaces into surprising and provoking individual experiences.” (www.gestalten.com)

This year marks the 8th annual SHOWTEL exhibition of site-specific art in all media including installation, sculpture, video, sound and performance art. Each year, more than twenty artists are selected to transform hotel rooms into conceptual art environments on view for only one or two nights.

SHOWTEL is the most infamous art exhibition in Palm Beach County. Two thousand people attended the one-night show in 2009. The show continues to be the only recurring exhibition showcasing emerging contemporary artists from the area. Over 200 artists have participated in the exhibition to date. Click here tickets.