The Pavement Surgeon Lyon-based artist Ememem repairs holes in sidewalks and walls with colourful mosaics. Ememem’s first mosaic dates back 10 years when he found himself in a damaged alley in Lyon.
“I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it…my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.” — James Turrell
For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, “His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.”
Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960’s. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.
Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colors we see and thus, our perceived reality.
In 1974 Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice begun in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell has sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels and apertures within the volcano that heighten our sense of the heavens and earth. While Roden Crater is not yet open to the public, Turrell has installed works in twenty-two countries and in fourteen US states that are open to the public or can be viewed by appointment. Agua de Luz, a series of Skyspaces and pools constructed within a pyramid in the Yucatán, and forthcoming projects around the world, from Ras al-Khaimah to Tasmania, integrate many of the principles and features embedded within Roden Crater.
Turrell’s medium is pure light. He says, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of worldless thought.”
Installing Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Inopportune: State One” (2004) at the Guggenheim Museum. This work formed of suspended white sedans and multichannel light tubes simulates an exploding car bomb spiralling upward from the rotunda floor. It exhibits Cai’s interest in feng shui, pyrotechnic science, cosmological science, and ancient Chinese myth.
A leading figure in contemporary Chinese art, Yin Xiuzhen has worked primarily in site-specific installation and sculpture since the early 1990s. Her work addresses issues on both an environmental scale and a personal one, and often employs quotidian materials, including found textiles. Projects 92 presents her large-scale sculpture 'Collective Subconscious,’ which is composed of a bisected minivan connected by a long tube covered in a quilt made of found garments. The public is welcomed inside this transformed conveyance, where they will find a cozy refuge complete with low stools and soft pop music—a space that invites visitors to break the silence of the hushed gallery, reinventing it as a place for conversation and discussion.
Installation View of Concrete Meets Video Meets Painting
I projection mapped a video onto a cement block I made from a mold, and also mapped another video around the cement block that served as a frame for the center piece. The video projection is pointing down to the floor. The idea is I am making a painting through video, and the painting has to do with the materiality of the projection vs. the materiality of what it’s being projected on (the concrete).
Let’s Drift in Time 2016 Found objects, oil, pastel, stickers on canvas “I see you, and that’s it. I will see you somewhere, some time, some day. I don’t know, I can’t promise, but we’d see.”
A Haunting is an art installation to be visited alone at night.
A Haunting can read like a real-life nightmare that gleams from windows out into the darkness of Australia’s great and vast interior.
The 1920s-built house sits on confiscated lands of the Wailwan peoples and other nearby language groups and radiates as if like a dark bloody history that speaks of Colonial settlement and of Indigenous skirmishes with pastoralists.
But passing folk might initially view A Haunting in other ways
The lights can read as frenetic like in an emergency as if coming from an Ambulance or a Police light. Like as if some forensic crime photographers are at work inside the house – processing the aftermath of a crime. The house sits like an agitated photo darkroom.
Craie sur acrylique noire recouvrant toute la surface d’un bureau d’une usine désaffectée à Saint-Ouen accompagnée d’un jazz composé avec mon frère et trituré avec des bruits d’usine, 2,8 x 4 x 5 m.
Installation sculpture by artist Cai Guo-Qiang. These are sculptures of tigers suspended from the ceiling with countless arrows in them. Possibly referencing human’s destruction of other species as innovations in technology and expansion continue.
