It’s a ghost highway in the middle of LA! Not the result of road closures, the apocalypse, a zombie scare, or a massive increase in the price of petroleum, this series of car-less highways are the brainchild of photographer Tom Baker. Curious as to what a traffic-less Los Angeles would look like, Baker went ahead and created this vision through the wonders of photoshop. The result is a series of images that are eerily calming.
Seoul, South Korea is filled with blinding light-up displays and headache-inducing neon screens. But residents of the city who want to see these displays put to good use need only take a trip to the World Cup Stadium’s Peace Park, which is where this beautiful Living Light sculpture blooms. The permanent outdoor pavilion and glass canopy projects up-to-the minnute information about local air quality, and locals can send it a text message to receive a report from anywhere.
Zombie chair! Out for your wood scraps! Oozing sawdust and pure carnage! Designer Hongtao Zhou, who we found playing with ice, decided to get Holiday on a broken, abandoned chair he found on the streets in Madison, Wisconsin. The result: chair of the undead, risen from the swamp and demanding the chance to sit in your living room looking creepy. Zhou created the drippy effect with wood scraps and sawdust (and probably some monster blood and glue). Expect this chair on your front porch Halloween night, demanding all the sweet linseed oil you can muster. Happy creepy chair night, everyone, happy monster night.
So, by this point, I think it’s pretty clear that we, the humans, have messed up on a pretty grand scale. You don’t need me to read you the stats again. We need several more planets. We make and consume a lot of crap. There are islands of crap in the ocean. There’s crap in the rivers, crap in our bodies, crap in the air. All of this crap is difficult to digest, you know, on a daily level. Nobly, many artists are facing this pile of crap and trying to make compost from it. Problem is, some eco-art is actually pretty crappy.
While transforming reclaimed office chairs and stereo equipment into fully functional sound systems – the ideas behind Mikal Hameed’s work could address the disconnect that many feel towards the current Green Movement. As he considers himself only to be “green out of necessity,” Hameed recognizes that the work he produces is reflective of the struggle and indifference experienced by much of society. He is passionate about bringing people together through the shared experience of music, and it is this passion that has led him to becoming our very own eco-friendly shaman of sound. Last week I had the chance to visit Mikal’s studio, and get to know more about where he find his materials, inspiration and his feelings about being called eco.
Capturing the usually short-lived moments of a blooming bud, environmental artist Richard Solomon’s Seed Orbs encapsulate Goat’s Beard seed heads in glass balls. As an artist, Solomon has worked with plant materials for 20 years — attempting to highlight their beauty while expressing the mystery of nature. Solomon makes the Seed Orbs by first collecting Goat’s Beard buds around the mountains …
A lush lawn can be a wonderful thing to stretch out on. Unfortunately, the high-maintenance needs, which include frequent seeding and fertilizing, of grass can make it more of a pain than a joy, leaving would-be loungers disappointed. Fortunately, grassy seating can put back some of the fun. The idea of creating seating out of grass is no new concept, as you may find with the lawnge chairs or living lawn chaise. In this formulation, the Floating Green, by Ling Fan, is a stretch of lawn that appears to have rebelled against horizontality by springing from the ground, doing an elegant twist and then settling into a vertically folded position to offer passers-by a place to sit.
If you’re in the Bay Area and want to catch a glimpse of some on-point environmental artwork, head out to Swarm Gallery this weekend (hey, the Bay Bridge is back open, right?). On display at the gallery, until tomorrow (Sunday, September 13th), are works from Josh Keyes, whose surreal paintings you might have seen gracing the parking structure next to the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, and Vaughn Bell, a Seattle-based artist who is hilarious, by which I mean you can stick your head in a box full of plants.
Making art with animals. Making art with animals? Not animals tacked on walls. Not animals stuffed with cotton. Animals as co-creators, as collaborators. Really? Interspecies says: Yes. It’s a series of exhibitions, performances, lectures and workshops examining the human/non-human relationship, and it is happening October 2-4 at A Foundation in London. There will be naps with pigs, playtime with monkeys, communications with fish, and the general exploding of the species barrier.
100 child-sized ice sculptures sit in Beijing’s Temple of Earth to represent the 1 billion lives that will be lost in Asia due to water shortages caused by climate change. The art installation marks the launch of the TckTckTck Campaign, a campaign that works to raise awareness of the importance of a fair and ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit, taking place from December 7 to 18, 2009, where world leaders will gather to establish a plan to protect the world’s population from climate change.
This Saturday, join environmental art gallery Collectively GRASP for its closing reception. After more than a year of exhibiting eco-art, gallery Owner/Director Aileen Meehan will be closing the art space to recover from the demands of running the gallery while working full-time. Like many businesses, GRASP has been affected by the economic downturn, however, Meehan is choosing to end GRASP’s life with a celebration rather than a funeral. The closing reception will be TONIGHT (August 15th) from 6-9pm at the gallery: 850 Greenwich St, off Columbus, SF, 94133.
When Stonehedge was created, its builders used stones — making the space all about stone and light. Cycles and spirits. Seasons and sacrifice. Today, the “beings” that dominate our physical and energetic landscape are (arguably) cars. So it is no surprise that artist Jim Reinders has re-invented Stonehenge with scrap vehicles. The sculpture of sorts, which is fittingly called Carhenge, attracts thousands of worshippers — ahem, tourists — every year to its home in Alliance, Nebraska.
Melting ice: it’s the metaphor of our age. Here on Inhabitat, we’ve seen melting penguins, melting furniture, and melting little men. In case you missed theses visuals of climate change, in case those images of ice holes from An Inconvenient Truth are fading from memory, in case you’re bored on August 1st around 11 am, Chin Chih Yang has a not-so-gentle reminder for you. He’s bringing 21,000 lbs of ice to Union Square in New York City. As it melts, it will be raising flashing red hell with emergency lights triggered by the melting, protesting its own demise.
Camouflaged in recycled artificial Christmas trees and powered by solar panels, the Porta Hedge is a lean, green dystopian machine. Conceived by Justin Shull, the mobile unit is a playful and portable shelter decked out with swings and chalkboards, but most importantly peepholes for observing life outside — unnoticed. So spy on your neighbors, observe their use of pesticides, toxic cleaners, and ugly hemp fashions. Report domestic terrorists, or at least make fun of hippies — all from the comfort of your own shrub-like surveillance unit, the fabulous Porta Hedge.
My favorite part of Disneyland was always the Main Street Electrical Parade. It seems gluttonous now: a procession of mechanized floats, covered in rainbow light bulbs, all buzzing and twinkling to the tune of music. Fortunately, O*GE Architects and Interactive Gallery have sated my light-show fix with a solar-powered, LED-licious Night Garden. The installation was part of the recent Light in Jerusalem Festival and dazzled visitors to the Gan Habonim (Jerusalem Citadel) with giant neon-colored, luminescent flowers whose petals opened and closed throughout the night.
It’s a picture of a tree. Yes. Okay. But this tree has a phone number. If you call this tree it will tell you stories of the neighborhood. It will talk about the Bronx Grand Concourse, about itself, even about the local ecology. It will tell stories about the neighborhood. It might even sound proud, after all it has been around a while. Starting June 21st and continuing through the summer, the trees along the Grand Concourse will play host to a virtual Tree Museum. Visitors can call a phone number and get the details on any particular tree by punching in its extension. The audio guides are recollections and fond stories from folks who have grown up with the trees. Each tree has its own story.
It’s all about context. Meal with friends: normal. Meal with food gathered in a one mile radius: art. Traffic jam on highway: normal (and boring). Traffic jam in the Spanish mountains: art (and very curious). In 2005, artist Maider López put the call out for willing participants to create an intentional car cluster muck in the Aralar Mountains. In response, more than 400 folks drove up to the countryside in 160 vehicles to get stuck. The result: an unexpected invasion to illustrate the automobile’s impact on the landscape.
As the topic of urban restoration garners more attention, we have seen an increase in the investigation and experimentation relating to NYC’s ecological past. NYC Wildflower Week demonstrated a rise in popularity of plants native to New York City. Coupling urban restoration and indigenous plants, Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith, both landscape designers, were commissioned by the Public Art Fund to design and construct ‘A Clearing in the Streets,’ a 15-foot wide, plywood structure containing the beginnings of a meadow. The temporary installation, meant to invite passers-by to appreciate and watch the “re-insertion” of nature back into the city, offers a glimpse into NYC’s native landscape.
Sometimes it is hard to truly grasp how much waste we create as a society. That’s why NYC-based graphic design agency, MSLK is creating an installation that is an in-your-face visual of the amount of water bottles consumed in the United States. The installation uses 1,500 water bottles, the number of bottles consumed every 1 second — that’s 90,000 bottles per minute! Entitled “Watershed,” the piece is meant to inspire its viewers to consider the collective environmental repercussions of drinking bottled water over tap. The installation is showing at the Figment Art Festival, open from June 12-14 on Governor’s Island in New York City. Click through to see a video of the installation’s assembly!
When it comes to eco-art, it doesn’t get much better than Edina Tokodi’s awesome green graffiti made from living moss. Inhabitat has been following artist Edina Tokodi and her tongue-in-cheek moss art installations for awhile now — from streetside bambis to greenings of Philadelphia Transportation. Now we’re excited to see the latest of her work appearing in galleries and blank walls all over.
Billboards get all sorts of (justified) flak for polluting our mind-scapes. They are everywhere, flaunting famous people — in expensive clothes, drinking sexy beer, promising us recession-busting discounts. Unfortunately, billboards are also responsible for a more tangible type of pollution. At the end of an advertising campaign, billboard workers roll up the heavy-grade vinyl and toss it in the dumpster. When Peter Schulberg experienced this waste firsthand, he immediately took steps to remedy it by inviting artists to use the discarded vinyl as a canvas for their work, which he would then display on the exterior walls of his gallery in Los Angeles.
It’s still the subject of (extensive) debate whether the electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) produced by appliances, cell phones and high-voltage wires contribute to human illness and cancer. For an academic overview, check out the Human Radiation Effects Group, by Professor Denis Henshaw of the University of Bristol. For a visual illustration, look no further than FIELD by artist Richard Box. It’s a grid of fluorescent light bulbs planted into the ground beneath a series of power lines. When the bulbs glow, it’s not because of a series of buried wires, or a battery– they light up using the ghost power radiating from the wires overhead.
So you think it’s okay to continue with your 15-minute shower because you’ve got your super-efficient, on-demand water heater and extra-conservative shower head? Perhaps you’ve even gone as far as funneling your shower water into a personal greywater system. Well, your shower curtain has heard it all, and thanks to artist Elisabeth Buecher, it’s not taking any more of your excuses. Your soapy butt is getting kicked out after 4 minutes, when the shower curtain Elisabeth designed inflate with spikes.
Photographic artist Chris Jordan never ceases to amaze us with his clever pieces that allow people to “see” concepts that are often difficult to visualize. We submit for your viewing pleasure, his latest work, Gyre. Look familiar? The 8′ x 11′ triptych is based on the famous Japanese painting, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Hokusai. Instead of paint, the colors are composed of 2.4 million pieces of plastic – the estimated number of pounds of plastic that enter the world’s ocean’s every hour! Gyre is the first image in a mini-series that Jordan is creating about the Pacific Garbage Patch, and is named after the Pacific Gyre, a thousand miles wide ocean current which turns clockwise like a giant slow-motion whirlpool and concentrates tons of the world’s trash.
Earth Day (April 22) is rapidly approaching and while we know that living an eco-conscious lifestyle should be a a daily habit and not a once-a-year exercise, we are thrilled by the eco-minded buzz on the interweb. We are most excited to hear about local intiatives that are helping cities green their surroundings and engaging their …
Brooklyn-based street artist, SWOON is in the midst of launching her third fleet of “junk rafts” — crafted from construction site cast-offs and recycled scraps, these eclectic floats are a cross between a stage-ship and art-raft. These ships are envisioned, by SWOON, as a manifestation of “bits of land broken off and headed to sea.” Her third adventure/site-specific sustainability circus is entitled Swimming Cities of Serenissima and will be comprised of three rafts that will float through the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to Venice throughout May 2009. Along the way, the crew of the vessels will collect curiosities and trinkets and incorporate them into their floating cabinet of wonders. The final result will be put on display for the public to examine when the fleet reaches its final destination, Venice.
Is it possible that this is the song of the plastic bag? Plastic’s infamous reputation with the eco-crowd has fueled a creative renaissance that stirs significant introspection into how we have used plastic and how we can use it. Jellyfish. Sculpture. Woven mats. Haute Couture. In early March, art group Luzinterruptus immortalized the plastic bag with an impromtu garden of light. The installation, called “A Cloud of Bags Visit the Prado” occupied the area near The Prado Museum in Madrid for a period of about 4 hours. It included 80 such recycled baggies, which inflated with the aid of the wind.
Artist Henrique Oliveiraa was a student in São Paulo, Brazil when the plywood fence outside his window began to peel and fade into different layers and colors. The wood, called tapumes in Portuguese is ubiquitous in the Brazilian city, serving as enclosures and barriers for various sites. When the fence was dismantled, Oliveira harvested the remains and used them as materials for his senior show. The result propelled him into his current work: undulating, swirling, bulging peels of wood layered onto hallways and walls in daunting forms. His most recent show will be called, fittingly, Tapumes.
Artist Patianne Stevenson has finally nailed the recipe for the ultimate all-natural, planet and people-friendly cake. It’s gorgeous, vegan, and virtually free of calories, because, um, it is made of recycled cardboard. She calls her collection The Cardboard Kitchen, and it is filled with chocolate icing, tarts, cupcakes, layer cakes, frosting and little lace doilies.
Neozoon, is the singular form of a species of animal introduced to an area by humans. It is also the name of a artist who is re-populating urban areas with animals made from old fur coats. We’ve seen this striking kind of graffiti before from Inhabitat favorite Edina Tokodi, but the use of recycled fur adds another layer of irony. There is a suggestion that in this time of ecological change, the ghosts of fur-coats past have returned to reclaim their original habitats.
Gathering branches surrounding a tree, artists Agnieszka Gradzik and Wiktor Szostalo use the organic material to create wicker-people that embrace the tree. That’s right, these figures are literally, tree huggers. Rather than something out of a sixties, however, the sculptures tend to resemble people from a timeless international population. At the recent 2008 UN Conference on Climate Change in Poland, visitors could stand in line with several wicker-people in an exhibit entitled “Lonely Tree, Lonely People” — all waiting for its chance to show some limb-y love to the symbolically lone tree. Though its creators are based in St. Louis, Missouri, the Tree Hugger Project has a population that spans the globe.
So how do we gauge the effects of climate change? Not just empirically but aesthetically, viscerally, visually? This is a question the city of San Jose has put to different groups of artists in commissioning a design for a Climate Clock. The clock will be a site-specific public art piece that will serve as an educational tool about global climate change– while also recording its local effects. The proposals were narrowed from 50 down to three. The finalist groups will have residencies at both the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University and the Montalvo Arts Center in order to develop the designs further. The city of San Jose will then select a winner in mid-2009. In the meantime, we can examine the intricate and fascinating proposals for works of art that will monitor our people space for the next 100 years.
We are seeing some significant achievements in environmental change — and we hope that with public art works like this large-scale environmental art installation by French art duo HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiki Hansen) that greater eco-consciousness will characterize 2009. Last February, HeHe installed a Nuage Vert, or “Green Cloud”, across the skies of Helsinki. The installation used laser tracking to project a green illumination onto the chimney emissions of the Salmisaari power plant. The illumination adjusts its shape and size to the contours of the vapor, reflecting the electrical consumption of residents in Ruoholahti and neighboring Lauttasaari.
It appears that global warming has finally created its own version of the Wounded Veteran. Sitting in a puddle of himself in Buenos Aires’ Plaza Francia, a young man from Red Cross Argentina issued pleas to passers-by: not for spare change, but for action against climate change.
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