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.
Geometric mirrors
Geometric Mirrors is a series of mirror angles, each comprised of two mirror surfaces intersecting at a 90° angle. While a perpendicular viewpoint simply reflects the viewer and the opposite space, an interesting visual phenomenon occurs when the viewer faces the corner angle directly. The right angle causes a duplicate reflection, as both mirrors reflect not only the space but also each other. Their widths become extended into the adjoining side, thus appearing to the viewer as a mirrored cross rather than a mirrored angle.
Vision II
David Spriggs’ Vision artwork series have a distinct focus on the senses. Accentuated by an affinity between its subject matter and the fragmentary nature of the medium, there is a tension created between form and emptiness. Appearing both as an implosion and as an explosion depending on the one’s perception, the viewer has the sense that he/she is observing a form in becoming, yet at the same time breaking down. The immersive experience created by Vision provides the audience with the impression that they are in the midst of witnessing an event, something of monumental proportions akin to the Big Bang. In changing viewpoints by navigating around the work, Vision is continually altered, breaking down at the sides so that the viewer can only see the edge planes of multiple sheets, begging the question: Is there in fact a form, or just individual images?
In the Eyes of the Animal
In the Eyes of the Animal, a journey through the food chain, is an artistic interpretation of the sensory perspectives of three British species. Created using Lidar scans, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones & bespoke 360° cameras, the piece is set to a binaural soundscape using audio recordings sourced from Grizedale Forest in the north of England.
Mist Installation
An installation designed by Clap for Minsk, Belarus, that was built by volunteers from the city itself. For the concept of this installation Clap starts from the history of Minsk, a city that during the Second World War was devastated. The bombs destroyed 80% of the buildings and the city was not rebuilt until the 1950s. That is why the population of this city remembers these times as something unpleasant and many of them prefer not to talk about it. The design studio starts from a geometric volume that represents in a conceptual way the volume of a building. They imagine that the bombs fall on him destroying it, generating new openings and brand new volumes. These new openings result ingeniously in an entrance and a viewpoint on the top. The destruction gives way to the function generates grandstands, stairs and seats. From the inside, life makes its way in the form of a tree, exceeding the height of the installation itself.
FORCE
FORCE is an installation work that provides a visualization of the force of gravity via the interaction between gravity and a liquid with carefully computed qualities. Black silicone oil, engineered to achieve the required viscosity, streams constantly from the ceiling under the influence of gravity, forming a black pool on the floor and blurring the distinction between the characteristics of solids and liquids as if it were a sculpture transformed into a liquid. The tightly configured space places the viewpoint in the interface between time, space, and matter, giving us a direct awareness of the reality of our existence within a continuous series of actual moments.
Криста ван дер Ниет
The work of Krista van der Niet emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception. At this moment the sculptor becomes a photographer and you stand still together with her.
МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The Last Judgment in Cyberspace
虚拟最后审判
In his latest body of work, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, Miao Xiaochun appropriates Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco as territory for similar provocation. Developed on computer, Miao has built a virtual model of the Apocalypse, architecturally structuring the tiers of Christian afterlife. Replacing each of the 400 figures in Michelangelo’s iconic work with his own image and placing them in corresponding pose and position to the original painting, Miao ‘photographs’ the scene from various vantages, ‘documenting’ the Second Coming from viewpoints both within and outside of the scene.
Лукас Самарас
卢卡斯·萨马拉斯
لوكاس ساماراس
ルーカスサマラス
루카스 사마라스
Chair
Since the 1960s, Lucas Samaras has devoted his art to the evocation of an intensely private, obsessional, sometimes hallucinatory realm. Among the many motifs that occur in his work, the chair is especially prominent. The “Chair Transformation” series has included provocative sculptures executed in a variety of materials including wood, wire mesh, and mirrored glass. Throughout the series, Samaras transforms the ordinary object into a fantastical one, evoking a dreamlike metamorphosis. Here the artist suggests an animated flight of stacked chairs. A deceptively simple form, the sculpture appears from different viewpoints to be upright, leaning back, or springing forward.
КРИСТА ВАН ДЕР НИЕТ
The work of Krista van der Niet (1978) emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception.
Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.
hyperbolic cube
Departing from the Hyperbolic Cube (Thomas C. Hull, 2006), a regular octagon symmetrically folded, we produced origami studies of octagonal and cubic volumes in order to understand the spatial qualities of classic hyperbolic paraboloid shapes. The geometric principle is a folded octagon that traces the outline of a cube, creating an internal, vaulted space. After several iterations we achieved the intended balance: the asymmetry of the structure enhances the visual properties of the basic form, the duplicity between the strong orthogonal geometry and the curvilinear forms continuously altering from different viewpoints. It reveals itself in a constant, visual shift as one navigates towards and around it.
Морис Бенаюн
莫里斯·贝纳永
Cosmopolis
Overwriting the city
Cosmopolis endeavours to examine urban realities through people’s eyes. It is an artistic, and scientific interpretation of urbanization, making a visit a physical and intellectual experience.
The visitor enters a big, moving panorama of a constantly changing city. Twelve observation binoculars, much like those found at scenic lookout points, allow one to be surrounded 360° by twelve urban environments. Seven Occidental cities and five Asian cities: Paris , Berlin , Barcelona , Chicago , Johannesburg , Cairo , Sao Paulo , Beijing , Shanghai , Chongqing , Chengdu , Hong Kong , can thus be discovered, each from different viewpoints. Bearing no resemblance to the touristy landscapes one may expect to see, these scenes lay out major urban issues simply through a choice of viewpoint: transportation, environment, architecture, energy, health…