Others have remarked about the serene beauty of a complex mechanism precisely engineered to perform a single task, that would be simple for a person, just for the purpose of delighting its operator and/or audience. Witness Air Sculpture, by Japanese automatist Kazu Harada, case in point.
Remarkable art from Korean Young-Deok Seo, who works in many different types of chain, but always, it seems, with the human form as subject. The roller-chain piece shown here is but one of many beautiful examples, none of which have apparent titles, in the artist’s online portfolio.
On the PVC-Innovations site, Adam Withrow walks you through how to heat and bend PVC end pieces into abstract sculptures. I can see other practical applications to this process as well, though it should be stressed that proper safety precautions be taken as PVC can get pretty noxious. I’d love to see someone attempt a piece like this and then dye it afterwards.
I try to avoid superlatives in my headlines, and have been for awhile now. But it’s been a long time since I had such a hard time resisting that urge. Here’s a few that came to mind while I was composing this one about the work of Dallas artist Gabriel Dawe: stunning, magnificent, celestial, gorgeous, beautiful, amazing, transcendent. “Awesome,” if it could still be used literally, might also have been in that list.
Bill Secunda’s sculpture “Mantis Dreaming” was inspired by The Verve’s song “Catching The Butterfly.” Of it, he writes: “I imagined a praying mantis might have that dream, his opposite, the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, and always out of reach. He is so infatuated with it, when the butterfly lands on him he stands frozen. His instincts clash with his fascination, all he can do is hope it doesn’t fly away.”
As impressive as this bottle-cap self-portrait from artist Mary Ellen Croteau may be, I probably would not have chosen to mention her piece “CLOSE,” here, if it weren’t for the interesting way that she has used sets of nested plastic bottle caps and bottle-cap liners to achieve a much deeper color palette than would’ve been possible using bottle caps without the nesting trick. Clever!
Ambitious work-in-progress from Brooklyn artist Jonathan Brand. So far, it would appear, he’s only finished the motor and one wheel. But even by themselves, those are impressively detailed models. Can’t wait to see it when it’s done!
