highlike

Haruhiko Kawagushi

Flesh love all
I want to express love through my work. Because everything in the world is based on love[…] Based on such an idea, I started a project to vacuum pack a couple and everything around with a landscape. Not only a couple who loves each other but also everything around them is vacuum-packed, and eventually the whole landscape is vacuum-packed, creating an image where everything in the world is one existence. The shooting location is the most important place for them. The things you love will be one, and the world will be one. I think that is an ideal form of love. In order to participate in this project, you need to be ready for death and love next to you, and I need to be prepared for it too.

Josiah McElheny

Interactions of the Abstract Body
With ‘Interactions of the Abstract Body’ McElheny pushed these ideas further, creating a large and varied body of work that looks at how fashion and modernism have intersected and influenced each other, especially through the common language of the body. Crucially, McElheny animated this dynamic with the constant presence of a performer. By combining a continuous flesh-and-blood performance with static sculpture in the same gallery space, a first for White Cube, McElheny radically fractures the distinction between performance and exhibition.

Alexandre Burton

Impacts
If you’ve never seen a Tesla coil in person, it’s a remarkable experience. Purple plasma flashes in unpredictable, wide-reaching bolts. The sound cracks with more fearsomeness than a whip. The air fills with the sterile acridity of ozone. The effect is equal parts frightening and beautiful; this machinery can use enough voltage to carbonize your flesh right down to the bone, yet some self-destructive impulse tells you to look closer. Alexandre Burton plays with this very impulse in his installation, Impacts. The exhibition features several Tesla coils that hang from the ceiling. They fire, not against a cage or predictable grounding surface, but a delicate pane of glass, so the viewer can appreciate the plasma filaments like a framed piece of art or a caged lion.

South Georgia Heritage

NEON – Fantastical Architecture, Art and Design

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT
South Georgia Heritage Trust launched an open call for a site-specific commission to be located on Grytviken the former whaling station of sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia. The project was required to celebrate the whale through a reinterpretation of the former Flensing Plan (a large timber deck used to process the captured whales) and offer a message of hope for future generations by demonstrating how humankind can move from exploitation to conservation. Our proposal imagines that the deck of the Flensing plan has been cut like a piece of flesh from the ground and bent upwards to form an arc. The timber deck is replaced with concrete pavers which are coloured based on the activities which took place in the sites past and present (whale processing and whale watching). The coloured pavers are positioned to create a gradient which provides the visitor with a visual representation of the way the site has changed over time.

Samuel Mathieu

Guerre

A struggle that seems to be of particular relevance today. A metaphorical title, poetry of the line and of colour, that highlights the challenge that each of the parties represents. A kind of symbolic correspondence that flirts with our world, with our history, our human condition. War opens up perspectives of matter, a struggle both real and poetic that blends lines and directions, inscribing the trace, the hue, in the flesh of the dancing body but also in a seductive paradox between line and colour.

REBECCA WARD

APPARITION
Materiality and process are central to Rebecca Ward’s practice and evoke “architectural garments” ripped, unwoven, and re-stitched from fleshtoned canvas duck, leather hide, and silk organza. In her canvas works, the artist removes the weft (horizontal) threads of the fabric to reveal the underlying stretcher bars, highlighting the physical structure of the painting itself. Ward’s artworks reveal and obscure, and by their nature, entice viewers to closely investigate contrasts in line and material, modulations in color, and multi-dimensional layers.

KATE COOPER

Rigged
A hybrid of consumer associations, ranging from the glossy iconography of the TV commercial and the sterility of video game graphics to the luminosity of the department store poster and the smell of freshly opened cosmetics, create a subconscious lure. Her use of CGI technology in her artistic practice surpasses a simple study of digital textures (think nostalgic glitch-making) to occupy a full-fleshed, hyperreal space, usually reserved to corporate giants in advertising or entertainment.

COLIN CHRISTIAN

Hardcore Pink
Colin now works full time on his original sculptures, finding inspiration in old sci-fi movies, pinup girl/supermodels, anime, ambient electronic music and H.P. Lovecraft. In 2004 he started using silicone in his sculptures, a difficult material to use but one that helps him achieve his goal of true cartoon realism, a line drawing made flesh. He is not looking to create every imperfection and flaw, but to take the exaggerations and perfections of cartoons and make them into a realistic 3D form.

Claudia Hart

The Swing

In The Swing, a 3D game avatar becomes Rococo fleshy decadence. In this multi-screen animation, the avatar swings on a seat suspended from the sky, in super Mannerist slow time. Her wooded surroundings ebb and flow at different rate, imitating stop-motion. Years pass in a matter of moments. The avatar is the driver of all of these cycles, but a driver scarcely in control – she is instead, a Mother Nature heading straight for what she suspects might be oblivion. The Swing is a multi channel installation, in nine, five and three screen versions.

sound: Kurt Hentschlager

EMIL ALZAMORA

埃米尔·阿尔萨莫拉
ЭМИЛЬ АЛЬЗАМОРА

“The human form is a constant within my work. I often exaggerate or distort it to reveal an emotional or physical situation, or to tell a story. Limitation and potential are as human as the flesh, yet hardly as tangible. In my works I strive to make visible this interaction.”

EMIL ALZAMORA

埃米尔·阿尔萨莫拉
Эмиль Альзамора

“The human form is a constant within my work. I often exaggerate or distort it to reveal an emotional or physical situation, or to tell a story. Limitation and potential are as human as the flesh, yet hardly as tangible. In my works I strive to make visible this interaction.”

VICTOR MORALES

30 Seconds or More – One Animation a Day
14 – Low Budget Flesh Mandala
File Festival – Machinima

MEREDITH MONK

מרדיית המונק
Мередит Монк
ميريديث مونك
16mm Earrings
Meredith Monk’s groundbreaking performance work, 16 Millimeter Earrings, was a seamless integration of live performance, objects, film, vocal and instrumental music, movement, text, recorded sound, and light. It marked several, notable “firsts” for Monk: thinking of sound as an overall environment, working with her voice and visual images as primary elements, creating a full sound score, and incorporating film into a live work. The piece was a breakthrough in her quest to discover a visual/sonic/poetic performance form that could weave together multiple modes of perception. Responding to the original performances in 1966, art critic John Perrault wrote in the Village Voice, “Images, movement, film, words and sounds in Miss Monk’s new work are so skillfully interwoven and inter-related that no description can substitute for the kind of magic that she has managed to produce. The whole stage is her canvas and she uses every bit of it. 16 Millimeter Earrings has to do with surfaces, all seen as if through glass or reflected in a mirror. The surface of the human body. The surface of the erotic and the emotional. The radical juxtaposition of apparently contradictory surfaces- film, flesh, colors, and sound- becomes a witty method of deliberation and deliverance, and of complete art.”
video

STELARC

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC