The Third & The Seventh is a fascinating short film by Alex Roman. In this movie he tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view. The main subjects in this film are already-built spaces. Sometimes they are portrayed in an abstract way and sometimes in surreal manner. We suggest that you switch the video to full screen view to fully enjoy this short film Gem.

Photos and Video by Alex Roman | Music by Alex Roman based on the original scores by Michael Laurence Edward Nyman and Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns

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• Mizu Hanabi | fireworks of water drops
• Gabriel Michel | Milky way
• Aras Karimi | light as a playful actor

We came across French photographer Gabriel Michel’s portfolio and very much liked his Milky Way series. The dialogue between the fluid (Milk) and the fragmented parts of the submerged human body does remind one of the play between the fabric of a garment and the wearer of this garment. A fascinating photo series.

Photos by Gabriel Michel | Portfolio website

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• Alex Roman | The Third & The Seventh
• Mizu Hanabi | fireworks of water drops
• Aras Karimi | light as a playful actor

Mizu Hanabi is the title of a stunning video by Japanese artist Tetsuka Niiyama. for this work he was inspired by and idea of “What would it be like if a water drop explodes like fireworks?”. The result: Water drops in a microgravity space bursts sequentially,imitating the Japanese seasonal tradition, fireworks.

Video directed and animated by Tetsuka Niiyama | Sound Design by Yoshio Matsumoto | Production by Taiyo Kikaku. co. ltd.

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• On Kawara Reading One Million Years
• Daniel Rozin | The wooden mirror
• Alex Roman | The Third & The Seventh

Aras Karimi, a Los Angeles based artist, looks at photography as a relationship between light and film: light as a playful actor and film as a serious recorder. He sees it as his job as a photographer to write the best scenario for this one-time instant play. Light itself, is the main subject of his works. He is interested in light as the story teller. In fact the scenes in his works are the medium to picture light, its mood on different surfaces and its personality in different spaces.

Photos Aras Karimi | Untitled works about light

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• Alex Roman | The Third & The Seventh
• Gabriel Michel | Milky way
• Mizu Hanabi | fireworks of water drops

The below video shows highlights from the ‘Stillness at the Speed of Light’ exhibition which was on show in May 2010 at The Vinyl Factory in Soho, London. The Exhibition showcased the extraordinary alchemy between light artist Chris Levine and pop/fashion icon Grace Jones. Chris Levine is the latest in a line of artists who worked with Grace Jones. He managed to make a step forward in the line of all the extraordinary iconic images of her which where created by other artists, like for example Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, by creating a stunning 3D portrait series using the lenticular printing technology.

Photos Chris Levine | Grace Jones | video: Delmar Mavignier

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• Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | Exhibition
• Hannelore Knuts, UltraMegaLore Fashion Icon Testimony
• Juergen Teller: Zimmermann a surreal fashion fairy tale

Currently the Foam Fotografiemuseum ( Photography museum) is presenting an exhibition of the stunning work by the photographic duo of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition is titled: Pretty Much Everything. It shows approximately 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.

Inez van Lamsweerde en Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Dubiousness is at the base of practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin rope between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.

Pretty Much Everything is on view from the 25th of June untill September 2010 in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.

Photos Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | M/M (Paris) | source: Foam Fotografiemuseum

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Currently the museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany is showing an interesting exhibition from work of American artist Wade Guyton. The monochrome planes, stripes and bars, which Guyton has recently begun using very often, are computer-generated. The colour black and the letter X have become signature motifs in his work. These newer paintings by Wade herald the modernist motif par excellence: the monochrome. The classical monochromes by Alexander Rodchenko or Robert Ryman had already served to reduce painting to its essence: color, canvas, and frame. It can be assumed that Guyton’s monochrome bars, even when they appear in larger complexes, have a similar objective to that of Rodchenko and Ryman, namely self-reflective painting. However where other artists have used brushes, light, sounds or even metaphors to paint, Wade started (ab) using an inkjet printer. As medium he started out with paper but moved to canvas. He prints the elementary geometric forms he uses over and over again by feeding the canvas into the printer again and again. This sometimes causes the print head to lose grip. These errors in the printing process produce elisions and streaks.

Guyton follows a strict plan; it is for instance important that the dimensions of each canvas be adapted to the technical details and the space in question. And although the width of all the artist’s works produced on the printer is the same, the length is oriented to the architecture of the exhibition room.

The exhibition in the museum Ludwig is curated by Dr. Julia Friedrich and will run until  22-08-2010

Photos Wade Guyton Maurice Cox | museum Ludwig

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Interactive artist Daniel Rozin creates fascinating mirrors with unreflective surfaces. The below video shows one of his creations, “the wooden mirror”. This mirror uses 830 square pieces of wood which are hooked up to an equal number of small motors which move the wooden blocks according to a built in camera. The camera picks up the movement in front of the mirror and transfers the signal to the wood tiles which results in an eerie representation of reality depicted in small wooden pixels.

Photos: Daniel Rozin | Video: The Open University | Youtube

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• Mizu Hanabi | fireworks of water drops
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 Silent voice | 300×240×45cm | used white clothes

Japanese artist Naoko Yoshimoto began her career studying psychology at the University of Kyoto but moved gradually after it more into art. Her main medium are clothing and textiles. She creates very interesting and strong conceptual sculptures and installations made from garments like for example dresses, tops and trousers.

In the early days as she began collecting these clothes she saw them a bit as symbols of the people living in the places where she met the clothes. She imagined the histories behind them. Touching these used garments, gave her the idea she gained a feeling for the memories of these people and their everyday lives which the garments used to touch, a feeling that could not be communicated by words. But after while this gave her an uneasy feeling as she realized that she could imagine the people and the everyday life of the place she visited, but that she could not directly touch them. There was a feeling of distance and uncertainties. These thoughts had great influence of her current work and made sure she shifted even more towards a conceptual approach in her work.

In some of her current works like for example ” silent voice”, “shadow portrait” or “history behind clothes” she removes the colour of garments by bleaching or uses white coloured garments and compresses and condenses these “white shaded” clothes and transforms them into building blocks for her conceptual sculptures. These works depict conventional as well as more abstract objects and give an interesting social commentary which is created by the medium and its carrier.

 White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

 White coffin detail | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

 Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

 White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

 White coffin | 150×130×180cm | used white shirts

 River of oblivion detail | bleached clothes

 River of oblivion | bleached clothes

Photos Naoko Yoshimoto | conceptual clothing sculptures

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• Willy Verginer | sculptures and vibrant colour blocking
• Christopher Coppers reinterprets (fashion-)magazines
• Kinetic Sculpture, metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding

Sculptor Willy Verginer was born in 1957 in Bressanone and currently works and lives in Ortisei, Italy. He creates interesting sculptures and installations using the traditional craft of woodcarving. At first glance all the figures seem to reflect everyday life. This idea gets strengthened by the fact that most of them also wear contemporary casual clothing. They also have a link with the archaic and classic Greek sculptures. However, a closer and more focused look at the work shows that it goes beyond just that. The compositions of the installations, the positioning, the inclusion of surreal elements and the use of vibrant colour blocking across three dimensional surfaces which cuts the sculptures into fragments, lifts these works above just pure perceptual and figurative art. These elements and details give the viewer an access into the deeper conceptual layers of the fascinating work produced by Willy Verginer.

Photos: Willy Verginer | sculptures and installations

Read also these articles:

• Naoko Yoshimoto | conceptual clothing sculptures
• Christopher Coppers reinterprets (fashion-)magazines
• Kinetic Sculpture, metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding