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Maxim Zhestkov

Simulation Hypothesis

In Simulation Hypothesis, Zhestkov equally seeks inspiration in pre-historic cultures of cave art and ancient bas-reliefs. He plays with a visuality that precedes written language, from a time in which early humans used clay to make vessels and figurines.
The artist uses the inspiration from ancient forms of art and transforms it into digital sculptures using simulations and algorithms based on principles of nature.
The show takes viewers on a conceptual journey, immersing them first in Clouds of Creation, a large-scale projection that recreates the Big Bang, and then guiding them through micro manifestations of this transformative moment of genesis.

Vincent Leroy

Echo Lens
Emerald Lake, Canada
Hybrid, Vincent Leroy’s work oscillates between the real and the virtual, the natural and the artificial, drawing its inspiration from both nature, which often sites his work, and from the digital world. Whether its kinetic sculptures, immersive installations or monumental works, movement is almost always Vincent Leroy’s raw material. The kind of movement that inspires life, amazement, and a permanently shifting viewpoint.

Liam Lee

Untitled 05
“I look at forms in nature for inspiration – from microscopic organisms like bacteria and viruses, to moss covered stones, branches of trees, the human body, seedpods, landscapes, star charts, etc., then try to bring all of these disparate elements together in the work”

Pone Architecture

Transparent Shell
Based on concepts, Transparent Shell gains inspiration from a rich variety of sequences in nature. By dissecting, extracting shell structure and restructuring, it reveals the tension of life evolution. Conch-shape helix is blended with vertical, balanced, stable and standard three-dimensional grid. Density and depth of different degrees are on one hand, in mutual erosion, harmony and coexistence and on the other hand, in antagonism, competition and conflict.

SIMON CHRISTOPH KRENN

Parasitic endeavours
Simon Christoph Krenn’s 3D animation, Parasitic Endeavours, initially started out as the creative wanting to explore distorted perspectives on human evolution. “I think my main inspiration came from nature and its creative forces themselves. I used to study zoology at university and was especially fascinated by evolutionary biology and the development of animal morphologies. I realized the video’s strange and somehow creepy potential and decided to push the animation even more into this direction.”

ROSIE DANFORD PHILLIPS

Autumn Winter 2019
Rose Danford-Phillips admits it: as the daughter of gardeners, she draws her inspiration from nature. And when she evokes her love for lace, she speaks about a “delicate sensation of petals” … With her skill at vegetation metaphors, she explains that she transformed a magnificent piece of Sophie Hallette lace into a “rampant vine” for her graduate collection at the Royal College of Art. Either by combining it with a fringed silk to reinforce the idea of an uncontrollable, wild nature or by hand-embroidering it onto plastic to create a sense of nature recreated in a laboratory. “Lace tells a story” she says and hers transports us into a poetic, feminine and modern tale.

Wyss Institute, SEAS & Boston University

Microfluidic Origami for Reconfigurable Pneumatic/Hydraulic (MORPH)
Looking to create a robot smaller than a centimeter that might someday perform precision surgery or help destroy tumors, researchers from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston University looked to nature for inspiration, and developed a novel microfabrication technique to construct it. Their tiny robot looks like a rubbery, transparent spider — and in fact, the team modeled the form after Australia’s famously colorful and captivating peacock spider.

Esseline Keeven

Esseline is a Biomimicry designer. She draws her designs with nature as a source of inspiration. Her recent designs are inspired by the beautiful shapes and patterns that you see when you look at cells at a microscopic level. The arrangement of lines in her flat design has a major influence on the final bulging of the printed 3D objects.
Photographer: Andy Hendrata

Iris Van Herpen

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
FALL 2017
AERIFORM

‘Aeriform’ examines the nature and anatomy of air and the idea of airborne materiality and lightness, creating negative and positive space with shadow and light. Van Herpen also drew inspiration from the Danish underwater artists Between Music who challenge the relationship between the body and its elemental surround, in a subaquatic environment where air is absent.

rachel garrard

Body Systems I
British-born artist Rachel Garrard creates a range of multi-disciplinary work that explores the great unknown, looking to quantum physics and other theories of the universe for inspiration and guidance. Both her video performance pieces and works on paper capture, despite their earthly limitations, the infinite nature of life on this planet and beyond. In a personal statement on her blog, the artist explains “that exploring the outer reaches of the universe can be similar to exploring the inner reaches of the human psyche and that both are governed by the same forces.

TOMAS LIBERTINY

The Unbearable Lightness
Libertiny’s fascination with the beauty and intelligence of nature fuels his work with timeless yet relatable emotions. The relationship between Man & Nature, both psychological and physical, serves as a constant source of inspiration.

alexandre deschaumes

Photographies éthérées
Cerro Espada

Alexandre Deschaumes is a self taught french photographer. These photographs take place in the French Alps, Austria, Iceland and Patagonia.
“When I am in nature, the environment makes me feel humble about all that surrounds me, opening a new abstract door of inspiration, making me very grateful about these fantastic benefits. And the most important aspect that i like about the abstract photography quest is that when I am in nature, I feel home and I feel alive.” From one of his last interviews,”What are some tips you could give to people that really like your work?”
“I would advise them to listen to their inner feeling, to take their camera and go somewhere remote, like a deep forest during a foggy day and keep watching everywhere to seek details, because beauty is everywhere.To feel the atmosphere of the surroundings, vision is always the most important. In composition, you should avoid everything that disturbs and focus on simple shapes, because elegance comes with simplicity.”
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Peter Flemming

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

Ballet Preljocaj

AND THEN, ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE
And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace is a huge, ambitious monolith of a work. First created by Angelin Preljocaj for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010, it takes inspiration from the vision of apocalypse conjured by St John in the biblical Book of Revelation.There are no horses galloping across the stage or horned beasts. But Preljocaj sets himself a barely less daunting task: choreographing the essential meaning of apocalypse, as a cataclysm so profound it lays bare the very essence and history of human nature.Preljocaj launches his work with a shattering opening sequence. Ten women drive through hard, slicing, geometric formations; lights flash, electro-percussive music reverberates; and the air becomes as thick and swarming as a tropical thunderstorm as the movement accelerates towards its convulsive climax.Out of this intensity emerges a Garden of Eden tranquillity, where men lope and flutter in delicately animalistic moves, and two women in white tunics play like lazy cherubs.

dextro

non-linear algorithms

Dextro writes ‘non-linear code’ drawing inspiration from nature. The results are non-fractal or random programs that iterate without change, with equal rules for all objects. Most of the scripts rely on trigonometry and could be seen as sets of wave generators interacting with one another. Some of these pieces take years to develop but the code is usually short but complex.
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SHIRO KURAMATA

倉俣 史朗
glass chair

Shiro Kuramata’s approach to designing objects reflects the atmosphere of innovation in postwar Japan. By 1970, Kuramata had introduced alternative materials such as acrylic and glass into his furniture, which played on traditional ideas of materiality and form.Transparency, the appearance of weightlessness, and a Minimalist vocabulary quickly became his signature aesthetic. In 1976, Kuramata designed Glass Chair. Its reductivist and planar form reflects his interest in geometry as well as the effect of light as it transforms and illuminates the glass. Kuramata, like many of his Japanese contemporaries, looked to Western culture for inspiration. In particular, the sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin influenced Kuramata’s furniture designs of the 1970s, such as Glass Chair.