Sisyphus - Sand Art Tables
For almost twenty years, Bruce Shapiro has been creating CNC machine sand art installations for museums and community spaces in Switzerland, Germany, and Australia.
He calls this series Sisyphus and has now created a small scale version available to purchase for home installation as tables.
Currently he is funded for the project through Kickstarter.
You can check out the table in action in the video below:
Alexander Ekman - "A Swan Lake"
"Swan Lake is our best known ballet. But why is it so famous? Why are we so fascinated to see people performing as birds on stage, and why exactly swans? These are some of the questions choreographer Alexander Ekman has asked himself in A Swan Lake."
Rodney Mullen Debuts New Tricks, Captured in 360 Degrees
Rodney Mullen steps inside fashion photographer Steven Sebring’s revolutionary 360 studio to capture several never-before-seen moves.
Sebring calls the short film, Liminal.
Rogelio Manzo
Rogelio Manzo is interested in finding the harmony in chaos and accidents. His approach to creating these portraits is what he calls a "Construct - demolish - repair" process during which he finds "a brute yet honest identity" in his subjects.
Mylinh Nguyen
"Inspired by animalistic forms both living and extinct, artist Mylinh Nguyen welds alien creatures from brass, bronze, and silver."
Romain Langlois
"A self-taught sculptor, Romain Langlois studied medical books and anatomical charts to understand the human body, building his first sculptures using only plaster and clay. Seeking a more permanent material, Langlois turned to bronze, a metal he now incorporates into works that are inspired by nature rather than man."
"Through his sculptures the artist would like to reveal the inner energy of the elements, to convey their mysteries which beyond their intrinsic beauty follow us in the look that we have."
Christo - "The Floating Piers"
For 16 days, “The Floating Piers,” a saffron-colored walkway, will connect two small islands in a lake in Northern Italy to the mainland.
“It’s actually very painterly, like an abstract painting, but it will change all the time,” Christo, 81, a Bulgarian-born American, said of his project.
"Getting the walkway to both gently undulate and remain securely affixed to the uneven lake bottom was a feat that has occupied engineers, construction companies, French deep-sea divers and even a team of Bulgarian athletes drafted over the past two years. The walkway is assembled from 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes that form its 16-meter-wide (53 feet) spine, covered this week with a waterproof and stain-resistant fabric made by a German company for the project."
Seven Magic Mountains by Ugo Rondinone
"Renowned Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s colorful large-scale, public artwork Seven Magic Mountains is a two-year exhibition located in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, featuring seven thirty to thirty-five-foot high dayglow totems comprised of painted, locally-sourced boulders."
Rogan Brown
These pieces are "part of a new series of works that mixes hand and laser cutting to create an incredibly detailed and varied visual texture making multiple references: coral, bacteria, pathogens, diatoms, fungi etc...Each motif is however completely fictive and imagined; it is this interplay between the imagination and the "real" world that fascinates me, reality is transformed and estranged through the creative process which paradoxically makes the finished work more real and unique."
Lisa Nilsson
Artist Lisa Nilsson uses a centuries-old technique called quilling to painstakingly create intricate textile patterns with compact rolls of Japanese mulberry paper. Her latest artworks Jardine and Gospel are inspired by the patterns of an Islamic carpet and an 8th century gospel cover. 8 months of work went in to creating the 27” x 34” carpet piece.
L7M in Rome
Brazilian artist L7M illustrates various types of birds materializing from a chaotic swirl of dripped paint and flourishes of spray. The graffiti birds depict a contrast between their urban surroundings and nature while also highlighting a distinct clash of both abstract and figurative techniques.
These images are from his last trip to Rome.
Gareth Pugh S/S 16 - Fashion film by Ruth Hogben
Pugh’s provocative garments take center stage in yet another collaboration with filmmaker Ruth Hogben.
The Heart of Soho sees masked figures embody the spirit of its strip-lit streets, shimmering in coins and pole dancing in paillettes. Styled by Katie Shillingford, the short film and thudding soundtrack sum up Soho’s seedy glamour in all its glory, making Pugh’s message loud and clear:
"Soho needs to be saved. And quickly."
Faig Ahmed
"Faig Ahmed is an internationally recognized artist from Baku, Azerbaijan, who represented Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He is well known for his conceptual works that utilize traditional decorative craft and the visual language of carpets into contemporary sculptural works of art. His works reimagine ancient crafts and create new visual boundaries by deconstructing traditions and stereotypes."
Ahmed’s artworks engage the viewers through it’s unexpected marriage of traditional crafts, steeped in history, with hyper-contemporary, digitally distorted images often in the form of pixilation, three-dimensional shapes and melting paint that alters the pattern on the rugs. He employs computers to sketch his works and chooses intricate traditional methods of carpet-weaving techniques to printing his designs on carpets.
A Beautiful Darkness - Film by Ruth Hogben & Gareth Pugh
A SHOWstudio film by Ruth Hogben and Gareth Pugh
Thomas Heatherwick
Titled "Bleigiessen"
The shape was inspired by the German custom of Bleigiessen. On New Year’s Eve small chunks of lead are melted in a spoon held over a candle. The molten lead is then poured from the spoon into a bowl of cold water, where it hardens almost immediately. Each person tries to determine what he or she ‘sees’ in the hardened lead, much like trying to find shapes in the clouds on a summer day. The shape of the lead determines the future of that person for the year to come.
The shape was inspired by the German custom of Bleigiessen. On New Year’s Eve small chunks of lead are melted in a spoon held over a candle. The molten lead is then poured from the spoon into a bowl of cold water, where it hardens almost immediately. Each person tries to determine what he or she ‘sees’ in the hardened lead, much like trying to find shapes in the clouds on a summer day. The shape of the lead determines the future of that person for the year to come.
Heatherwick’s studio produced over 400 lead pieces, before settling on one five centimeter piece that would become the basis for the sculpture. That bit of lead was extrapolated into a 30 meter tall instillation using 142,000 glass spheres suspended on 27,000 high tensile steel wires.
Kohei Nawa
"Once images of a particular object collected through the computer screen identifies itself as a suitable motif, the physical object is acquired through the internet and encapsulated in a layer of spheric cells. This process homogenizes the surface texture and depth perception for each piece. Although various in size, each sphere allows one to simultaneously "see" different details within it. The result is a visual experience with a certain repetitive quality and a warped sense of depth."
Arran Gregory
"We are part of nature and are curiously drawn to it, yet at the same time we are continually becoming more and more detached. In a rapidly advancing technological age, AG's practice questions our primitive instinct and connection to the basics of nature."
Arran Gregory is widely acclaimed for his geometric sculptures and experimental depictions of the natural world. His artworks are a curious visual insight into Man’s relationship to nature and the emotions it provokes within us as humans. Often visually deconstructing subjects found within nature, AG experiments with structure, reduction, colour (or lack of) and the connections between 2D and 3D/ drawing and sculpture.
Lucy McRae experiments with negative pressure
Artist Lucy McRae shows us the experiments she's been doing with emergency blankets and vacuum cleaners in a behind-the-scenes preview video brought to you by DEZEEN.
