The ancient Etruscans thrived for some 500 years in central Italy before the Roman Republic was established in 509 BCE. The Roman-Etruscan wars resulted in the overthrowing of the last Etruscan king of Rome and the assimilation of Etruscan culture into the new Roman Empire. The statues make it clear that the Romans and Etruscans were not only co-mingling, but worshipping together at this sacred site. The Italian Culture Ministry describes it as a “unique multicultural and multilingual haven of peace” during a time when the civilizations were mostly at war.

A team of Italian archaeologists unearthed the bronze statues of human figures in September and October from the mud and waters of an ancient pool in San Casciano dei Bagni’s hot springs. Over 2,000 years old and almost perfectly preserved by the unique site conditions, the statues represent the largest deposit of bronze statues of the Etruscan and Roman age ever discovered in Italy.

They date back to between the second century BCE and the first century CE, yet their features are still sharp, and the inscriptions (in both Etruscan and Latin) are still legible. Among the statues are representations of the gods Apollo, his son Asclepius, and Asclepius’ daughter Hygeia, from whose name we get the English word “hygiene.” Back in 2020, when the dig first began, archaeologists discovered a large marble pool of an ancient sanctuary decorated with fountains and altars to these same deities.

Other findings include about 5,000 coins, small votive offerings representing body parts in need of healing, and bronze depictions of internal organs that are shockingly accurate. The findings indicate that Etruscan and Roman families prayed together at the sacred sanctuary of the thermal baths.

“The pool was a sacred place, only the religious custodians could bathe there,” says Ludovico Salerno, a member of the local archaeological association that participated in the work. “Sick people came to the sanctuary in the hopes of being cured and would offer gifts to the gods. It was a place of suffering, and it was a place of hope.”

Researchers have determined that Romans dismantled the sanctuary piece by piece around the year 500 CE, about two centuries after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The statues were then laid at the bottom of the pool and covered with columns and slabs of marble in what archaeologists describe as a reverent and respectful burial.

Together, the findings provide an unusual amount of context for what life was like in that particular place at that particular time, potentially allowing scholars to rewrite the history of the transition from the Etruscan to Roman civilizations. “We can describe all the life, day by day here, through four or five centuries, so this is incredible,” says archaeologist Emanuele Mariotti.

Excavations will resume next spring, and the statues will be displayed in a new museum planned for the site.

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What will characterize our own time on Earth? Sadly, it seems like the most enduring thing we’ll leave behind is trillions of plastic particles that will still be present in every corner of the globe 1,000 years from now. London architecture firm Vatraa makes this point in vivid fashion with “The Plastic Monument,” a roughly 21-foot-tall Stonehenge replica standing in a plaza in southern Milan. Winner of National Geographic’s 2019 “Planet or Plastic” design competition, the sculpture is made out of 16,000 recycled plastic bottles.

“Taking the form of a trilithon, one of the oldest forms of structure inherited from our ancestors, the monument draws the attention to the consequences of our actions in the long run, to the fact that what we are doing today might stay on Earth forever,” say the architects. “The installation poses a stark contrast between a single-use, disposable material and the eternity of the trilithon. Made of pressed PET bottle bales — the raw material for the plastic recycling plants – it educates the public into the recycling process by illustrating its first steps, just before the material is shredded, washed, and melted into new bottles.”

Thousands of crushed bottles are held together in three stone slab-like rectangular shapes made of wire mesh, making it clear that the “monument” is made of single-use plastic trash. It sits on two solid steel blocks as a foundation and stands just slightly smaller than the real Stonehenge. That enables it to stand up to strong winds — and be disassembled for display in other cities in the future.

“When we think of what our ancestors left to us, we think of real assets made of brick or stone, like the pyramids, the Colosseum, or Stonehenge,” says Bogdan Rusu, founding partner at Vatraa. “But part of our legacy to the next generation might also be plastic waste…Hundreds of years down the line our great-great-great grandchildren might find disposable plastic items that we just got rid of today because it was so convenient to us.”

If you find that to be a depressing thought, then the monument has done its job. Whether our actual contemporary architectural creations someday become their own “ancient monuments” may not matter. Even if humanity survives the coming climate catastrophe, future generations will likely think of us in terms of the pollution we contributed to the planet rather than our more admirable achievements.

The Plastic Monument will remain on display in Milan until next October, when Vatraa hopes it will embark upon a world tour to spread awareness about the consequences of our collective actions.

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Christophe Guinet mainly works with natural materials to create his botanical sculptures. His latest project “highlights a series of sculptures representing tree trunks that come straight out of a fantastic and magical universe,” as he explains on his website. “This series of works consist of five tree trunks which connote through their shapes emotions that we can find in nature.”

The collection includes five large sculptures: a heart, an infinity loop, a spring coil reminiscent of barbed wire, a simple knot, and a more complex knot he calls “Wooden Lace.” Guinet stages the pieces in the forest and photographs them in their “natural environment,” adding to the illusion that someone has stumbled upon strange natural formations. The artist hopes the sculptures spur a sense of childlike wonder, awe, and appreciation for everything trees can do.

We’ve seen other works of art in which living trees are painstakingly guided into certain shapes over years or even decades, like the stick buildings of Patrick Dougherty and “Baubotanic” living architecture by students at the University of Stuttgart. Sometimes nature itself does the shaping, like when trees grow around objects, twisting themselves into surprising and unexpected forms. Monsieur Plant makes things happen a little faster than that with his own artistic methods, which involve plaster and real pine bark.

Guinet says forest walks inspired him to work with natural materials, raising questions about how nature adapts to its environment and its own innate creativity. His previous works often incorporated wood, bark, and moss, like an entire wearable Batman suit made of pink bark, a tree bark skateboard, arm-shaped moss sculptures wrapping around a real tree, and Nike sneakers made out of flowers.

“Contemplative and passionate aesthete of the plant world, he uses his findings related to places and seasons, to create works of art with care and a concentration close to the meditative state,” reads Guinet’s artist statement. “The artistic process is thus an integral part of the final work of art. As ephemeral and fragile as a bouquet of flowers, Christophe’s compositions show us the beauty of nature through everyday and cult objects. His care to minimize the harmful impact on the environment is in contrast to the escalation of consumerism and the race to keep producing objects which are ever newer, more technical, more ‘hype’.”

“His fields of reflection revolve around love, life, death, as well as the ambiguity of the cycle of life in a society where death has become extremely taboo. It is interesting to see a work fade, die, follow the cycle of the seasons. It reminds us of our own cycle: a flower blooms and fades to resume the same cycle the following year. We too follow certain cycles & states: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, then death. It is inevitable and every stage of life should be celebrated and magnified.”

The post Monsieur Plant Molds Tree Trunks into Shockingly Unnatural Sculptures first appeared on Dornob.

“Like air taking shape uniquely within our bodies, our lives, and the world around us, this installation changes shape based on real-time, region-specific data as an abstract representation of how air quality impacts us all differently,” the creators explain.

“This interactive installation encourages its audience to reflect on their personal relationship to air quality both locally and globally. It also evokes a lasting, emotional response for those living with the greatest consequences of air pollution through the shared experience of a simple act — breathing.”

The kinetic structures change shape in response to data from local sensors and global data from an open-source API. Audiences who gather to watch the installations will be instructed to follow the breathing pattern of the structure, breathing in with every expansion and out with every contraction to see what it feels like to breathe the air in a particular location.

They’ll even be able to select a region of interest to control the installation’s movements. A QR code will lead the audience to an educational website offering more information and actions to take in their daily lives to reduce global air pollution.

Atta Society aims to deploy the first edition of the “When Air Takes Shape” installation in summer 2023 at various locations within British Columbia. In the future, they plan to take the installation around the world. Their recent Kickstarter campaign raised 214 percent of their goal with the support of 95 backers. They’ve already created their preliminary designs and prototypes, and the funds raised will be used to construct the final sculptures and deploy them in public.

“Within the current climate emergency, human livelihoods are at stake,” the creators say. “Those in less developed regions are especially vulnerable to environmental crises. As far as our world is from being a collection of isolated utopias, many privileged individuals do not understand the urgency, or possess the knowledge, to act upon climate change.”

“However, our consumption demands can increase the risks of individuals dying from air pollution in other parts of the world. As an alarming example, U.S. consumption is responsible for about 100,000 deaths occurring elsewhere in the world. Of those deaths, about 50 percent occur in China, with another 20 percent occurring elsewhere in Asia. Yet, consumerism persists, paralleled with the exploitation of individuals and the environment.”

The “When Air Takes Shape” project makes air pollution feel more personal, wherever you may live in the world. To follow this project and watch for future exhibitions, follow the Atta Society on Instagram @attasociety and on Facebook.

The post Shapeshifting Sculptures Show the Harsh Reality of Air Pollution first appeared on Dornob.

Burning Man came back in a big way after a two-year COVID-induced hiatus. Not only did this year’s event in remote Black Rock City, Nevada draw an incredible 80,000 attendees and end with an epic eight-hour traffic jam, it also featured a record 88 official art installations. This year’s theme was “Waking Dreams,” aimed at “explor[ing] the transformative power of dreams, both literal and figurative, and celebrat[ing] the dreamers who channel this potent energy in eye-opening, often surrealistic, sometimes life-changing ways,” according to the festival’s organizers.

Here are 6 of our favorite works of art from Burning Man 2022:

Empyrean Temple

Every year, one monumental art installation is set ablaze along with the Burning Man effigy. This year, it was “Empyrean Temple” by Laurence Renzo Verbeck and Sylvia Adrienne Lisse, an architectural structure that’s revealed to be a compass rose beacon in the shape of an eight-pointed star when viewed from above. The installation represents “the region just beyond our physical realm that is the highest center of wisdom, and the source of energy-consciousness,” according to the artists. Visitors passed through portal gates and into the “multiverse” of the temple, where numerous navigational choices offer different experiences.

Paradisium

Made of reclaimed lumber and trees burned in the CZU Lighting Complex fire in Santa Cruz, an interactive grove of geometric trees sprouts out of the sand. “Paradisium” by Dave Keane and Folly Builders of San Francisco creates a play of shadows across the desert floor and offers climbable structures and walkways among the canopies. The artists explain that “Paradisium is a grove made out of trees, long fallen, that remind us of the forest’s beauty and our interconnectedness and interdependence with nature, while also fostering a sense of community and an investment in our shared future.”

Gaia

This colossal sculpture by Marco Cochrane and Julia Whitelaw measured 40 feet by 12 feet and was made out of stainless steel rods based on a “flower of life” pattern and covered in stainless steel mesh with LED lighting effects.

“Inspired by and in honor of nurturing energy… mother energy… love and connection: and the joy we feel when we act on the imperative to take care of each other and our planet,” the artists explain. “Julia’s vision for Gaia was inspired by the joy she and her children experienced those times when, as a young mother, she took her children to the beach and watched as they ran, jumped, dug, built castles, bickered, buried each other, and made new friends, and by her own memories of being that child.”

The Museum of No Spectators

Architect John Marx and artist J Abinthia Vermut created this spectacular open-air art gallery challenging the “elitist” nature of typical galleries. The “radically inclusive and interactive museum space” creates a space for everyone to make art and become an exhibiting artist. Located on the edge of Black Rock City, the unusual shaped structure invited guests to create their own art on the spot, contributing directly without gatekeeping.

The artists add: “When participants exit, they find themselves on a stage, the Theater of the Participant, which opens you back up to the vast potential of the Playa and the World beyond. This is the stepping-stone to becoming the change you want to make in the world…”

Catharsis

Point of View

A collaboration between Serge Beaulieu and Yelena Filipchuck, this piece is inspired by embroidery patterns from Filipchuk’s birthplace, Ukraine. “It is not possible for us to think of this year without thinking of her homeland and wanting to represent the beauty and spirit of Ukraine while working through the emotions of this challenging time in our artwork,” the artists explain.

The post 6 Unforgettable Art Installations from Burning Man 2022 first appeared on Dornob.

Guy-Olivier Deveau, who lives in Quebec City, is a contestant on the second season of the Canadian reality show Race Against the Tide, where participants sprint to complete giant sand sculptures on the beach of the Bay of Fundy. The judges select the winner on each episode just moments before the tide washes all the art out to sea.

While some sculptors might be frustrated by the temporary nature of sand art, Deveau loves it.

“A lot of people wonder, ‘Oh, how does it feel knowing that your art will be destroyed soon?'” the artist said in an interview with Canada’s CBC network, adding: “…I really don’t mind it because when I’m starting it, I know what I’m in for.”

He finds sand art freeing for several reasons. “I like ephemeral art. One of the things is that they’re very quick mediums to work with,” he explains. “A two-meter sand sculpture will take me like, two or three days. If I were making the same thing out of wood or out of stone, it would take me weeks, if not months.”

Deveau also enjoys the ability to make and fix mistakes easily. With sand, he says “you can scratch it off and start again or try something new. The commitment is not so high. If you’re going to be working on a piece for four months, you know, if suddenly you don’t feel like doing it anymore or if you’re not into it, well, you’re stuck with it. But with sand, you just iterate a lot and then you’re always working on something new.”

His particular brand of sand art has a harder edge than most of the competition. Skulls, disintegrating heads, and skeletal creatures are prominent motifs in Deveau’s work.

“I like to jokingly say that my inspiration is philosophy, death metal, and video games,” Deveau says. His influences include H.R. Giger, the artist who created the creature from the Alien movies. Deveau also incorporates themes from Japanese fantasy role-playing games, adding: “Also, I like anything that has a death metal or black metal aesthetic — that is dark and sometimes a little bit disturbing.”

“I know there’s a lot of other artists that are doing that style in different mediums, but when it comes to sand, this has become my signature style, so maybe that’s what makes me unique,” he says. “Sand sculpture is often a bit more family-oriented, so my style may kind of clash with what’s expected.”

The artist’s horror-laced creations have at times been too much for the judges, but his vision eventually grew on them. “All the stumbling blocks that I came across just became fuel for the energy to do it better,” he confesses.

The second season of Race Against the Tide aired on July 10th, 2022. The winner will be named in the last episode, set to run on Sunday, September 11th.

Fans can check out Deveau’s amazing sand art, as well as his ice, snow, and wood sculptures on his Facebook and Instagram pages.

The post Guy-Olivier Deveau’s Sand Castle Art is a Temporary Terror first appeared on Dornob.

Measuring a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, the project is truly astonishing in scale. But what might be even more astonishing is the fact that it’s actually done, especially to those in the art world who thought it would remain an unfinished money-suck for the remainder of Heizer’s life. The 77-year-old artist first broke ground on “City” in 1970, building the first part, “Complex One,” over the following decade with a crew of workers. At first, he paid for it himself, raising the rest of the funds from art institutions and collectors over the ensuing decades. Heizer and a group of supporters also founded the nonprofit Triple Aught Foundation in 1998, which contributed $30 million.

Long enamored with the idea of monumental art, Heizer got the idea for “City” after visiting Egypt with his father. The influence is evident in the structure of Complex One, which resembles that of the stepped pyramid Zoser. The raised earth structures of “Complex Two” are also reminiscent of Egyptian pyramids, as crisp and unblemished as they once must have been. Another monument, called “45°, 90°, 180°,” is made up of rows of huge triangles and rectangles standing on a concrete plaza. They are all in fact modular pieces of what would be a single wedge, if they were ever assembled.

Photographs of the finished project reveal these ancient influences, but also associations that hit a little closer to home. Its shapes and proportions recall those of 20th-century modernist architecture, and taken as a whole, they could almost be seen as future ruins of contemporary society viewed by our distant descendants. It’s a reminder that as a species, we and our creations are simultaneously enduring and fragile. It wouldn’t take long for the desert winds to completely cover our cities in dust after we’ve gone.

Most of “City” consists of natural materials like dirt, rock, and clay sustainably sourced from the Great Basin landscape, in which the piece is set. In 2015, former President Barack Obama designated 700,000 acres of the desert containing and surrounding the project as a national monument, protecting it for future generations.

Not many people will actually get to experience “City” in person. Tickets are limited to six per day, at least for now. Those lucky enough to get their hands on one will have to fly into Alamo, Nevada, where they’ll be picked up and driven to the installation. Once dropped off, they won’t be led on a guided tour or follow any marked paths. The project is meant to be experienced as if you wandered in on foot and roamed around in awe and wonder, having no idea what you’ve found. “I am not here to tell people what it all means,” Heizer told The New York Times. “You can figure it out for yourself.”

The post After 50 Years, Artist Michael Heizer’s Mysterious “City” in the Nevada Desert is Complete first appeared on Dornob.

Known as Vanitas, the genre focused on the futility of seeking wealth, power, and earthly pleasures, as it ends the same way for everyone: death. Carrington found the idea intriguing when she visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago.

“I’ve always been attracted to the tradition of ‘memento mori,’ art that reminds us of the passing of time,” Carrington said in a recent interview. “In looking at those pictures of half-consumed food and fading flowers, I realized that one of the only things that could have survived to today was the silverware, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to try to make something out of that?’”

Her brainstorming led her to collect cast-off tableware to create arrestingly beautiful metal floral arrangements. Soup spoons became peonies, and silver teaspoons changed into rose petals. She incorporated berry spoons and fork tines to imitate tulips, protea, and hydrangea blossoms. One piece features a suspended silver pitcher pouring out a flood of feathers and flora.

Carrington taught herself how to weld just for this project, as well as how to solder and braze. Each piece takes her roughly three months to complete. “They’re quite difficult to make,” she said, referring to the process of collecting, sorting, composing, and finally welding every item into place. “Each flower requires a different kind of spoon and each metal requires a different heating technique.”

In the same vein, she has also constructed a 17th-century-style ship from the strands of discarded pearls. In a nod to Vanitas sensibilities, its splendor is tempered with the heaviness of the precious orbs.

Carrington has a long history of assembling everyday objects in completely new configurations. She’s turned gold jewelry into spider webs, metamorphosed soda cans into classical busts of famous kings and philosophers, transformed old blue jeans into a map of the United States, and even transfigured buttons into a giant postage stamp with the profile of Queen Elizabeth II.

“Mundane objects such as knives and forks, barbed wire, pins, and paintbrushes come with their own readymade histories and associations which can be unraveled and analyzed if rearranged, distorted, or realigned to give them new meaning as sculpture,” Carrington adds.

Her artistic career began with studies at the Bourneville College of Art, after which she earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1985 from Trent Polytechnic. She finished her formal training at The Royal College of Art graduating with a Masters in Sculpture in 1987. Since then, her art has attracted global attention, even being used to help raise awareness about human trafficking at the 2010 United Nations conference in Luxor, Egypt. Her list of personal commissions from celebrity clientele is impressive, including Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, Elton John, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tyra Banks.

Her works can be explored on her website and her Instagram page.

The post Ann Carrington’s Upcycled Sculptures Pay Tribute to the 17th-Century Art of Vanitas first appeared on Dornob.

“Since I was a child I have always loved hammocks,” Sala explains. “My grandmother was of Mexican decent and had all kinds of them in the garden of the beach house. When I was 20 years old I was living in Lisbon and I bought my first hammock and I used to hang it in the ‘miradouros’ of the city. Later the hammocks accompanied me on all my wild travels to the Greek islands. During the lockdown I was lucky enough to find myself in a house in the countryside and I hung one from two trees to get back to these wonderful memories and feelings, to that sweet rocking that cures all my worries. Long live the hammocks, they always make me smile… maybe because they are themselves giant smiles?”

A smile is a sweet way of looking at the arc shape of an occupied hammock, integrated here into a black metal frame as the bright red mouth while basic line work suggests the shapes of the eyes, nose, and face.

“Bruno’s Swing” is another incredible piece by Sala that similarly makes the interactive component the “heart” of the structure, while the frame offers both support and an aesthetic element. A child’s swing takes the shape of a bright red heart in the chest of the motherly figure wrought in black iron. Sala was inspired to create this sculpture after spending many hours in playgrounds enjoying the happiness and wonder of her child swinging.

Her child had recently grown too heavy to swing in her arms, and she missed that feeling. “With the swing I felt I was doing the same thing but with the help of an architectural structure,” she says. “Before this I had been that structure and in the future I will always be that structure, of care and affection. That is why when I drew it, it came out in the form of a self-portrait.”

“Fly High” is more decorative in nature, but no less impressive. This kinetic ceiling sculpture of a woman’s figure places her head, arms, legs, and heart on different hanging wires so they move independently, making it look like she’s floating or dancing any time a breeze rolls in.

Sala also uses wires and movement in her kinetic human sculptures series. Each one is like a meditative stress-relief toy — just twang a part with your finger and watch its moving elements gently sway or spin. Many have maternal themes, like a mother bird flying with her baby bird, a woman’s figure cradling an egg, and a family of figures relaxing together, all intertwined.

The post Smiling Hammocks and Artistic Swings: Fun Kinetic Sculptures by Geometrie da Compagnia first appeared on Dornob.

Dylan says the artwork “represents perception and reality at the same time… all the iron is decontextualized to represent peace, serenity, and stillness.” He says the work also contains “enormous energy… it represents the illusions of a journey rather than the contemplation of one.”

Dylan’s Rail Car is a continuation of a series of pieces the musician has crafted using welded metal. The first shown publicly was a set of iron gates entitled Mood Swings, displayed at London’s Halcyon Gallery in 2013. Others include Portal, an iron archway made for a casino in Maryland, and a gate controversially purchased by the U.S. State Department in 2019 for $84,375.

Railway motifs have special meaning for Dylan, with many references to railroads appearing throughout the singer’s discography. Songs include “Slow Train”, “Railroad Boy”, “Train A-Travelin’”, “Mean Old Railroad”, and more alongside Dylan’s legendary 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks”. In “Freight Train Blues”, Dylan writes, “Well, the only thing that makes me laugh again / is a southbound whistle on a southbound train.”

In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan wrote “I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure. The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass.”

Other train-themed artworks by Dylan include a series of sketches called The Drawn Blank Series, created between 1989 and 1992. For the 10th anniversary of the release of his 2008 album “Train Tracks”, Dylan added more drawings to the series, adopting a bolder visual style. The full collection can be seen at Castle Fine Art.

Located about 15 kilometers north of Aix-en-Provence, Chateau La Coste is a 600-acre estate featuring 34 site-specific works of art, small buildings, and pavilions by artists and architects like Frank Gehry, Yoko Ono, Jenny Holzer, Ai Weiwei, and Tadao Ando. The Art and Architecture walk takes guests on a relaxing two-hour tour of these pieces, ending at the winery designed by Jean Nouvel. Ando’s building houses a small gallery, bookshop, café, and restaurant. Among the most notable sculptures in the garden are Louise Bourgeois’s giant Crouching Spider (2007) and Alexander Calder’s Small Crinkly (1976).

If the south of France isn’t exactly on your list of upcoming travel destinations, you can enjoy the artworks on display at Chateau La Coste through the estate’s website. But if you plan to be in the area anytime soon, don’t miss this stop. The tour is truly an unparalleled experience of spectacular contemporary art by some of the world’s most influential creators.

The post Bob Dylan’s Love Affair with Trains Continues with a Monumental Sculpture in France first appeared on Dornob.

Consisting of a total of 200 artists from 58 countries, the Biennale was curated by Cecelia Alemani and is itself entitled “The Milk of Dreams.” The title draws its inspiration from the title of a book by surrealist artist Leona Carrington, which Alemani describes as being an exploration of “a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of imagination.”

Upon exploring the exhibition’s many poignant offerings, it’s easy to see why the imaginative curator landed on the theme. An eclectic mix of eye-openers and statement-making pieces, the often surreal and exploratory pieces of the Biennale speak to its global sensibility and penchant for pushing the envelope (and in some cases, dropping jaws with in-your-face, dreamlike artwork).

Below are some of the most standout pieces on display this year, running the gamut from fantastically nightmarish metamorphic mashups to stark depictions of reality that speak to the horrors of war and the power of resilience:

“We Walked The Earth” by Uffe Isolotto

Occupying the entire Danish Pavilion, Isolotto’s piece is emblematic of this year’s Biennale and its surrealist namesake. Depicting a human/horse hybrid lying prone in the center of a stark, messy interior, the piece evokes the dramas of a transhuman world afflicted by the same cycles of life and death, hope and despair, that connect us all.

“Elephant” by Katharina Fritsch

Larger than life and less fantastical than many of its counterparts, German artist Katharina Fritsch opted for size, grandeur, realism, and attention to detail on this piece. But that doesn’t make it any less impactful. Fritsch is also a co-recipient of the Biennale’s Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement this year.

“Gyre” by Yunchul Kim

Stunning, silver, and described as “a sprawling body of entanglements” by its creator, this standout in the Korean pavilion is pseudo-realistic — a tangled up knot of fantastic proportions that doesn’t rely on animate objects and their relationship to the world, yet somehow evokes a feeling of movement with its twisty form.

“Brick House” by Simone Leigh

Formerly located in NYC’s High Line in 2019, U.S. artist Simone Leigh’s “Brick House” is a majestic bronze sculpture depicting an imposing figure that’s part Black woman, part house, “registering as a vessel, a dwelling, a space of comfort, and as a site of sanctuary…a Black woman’s body as a site of multiplicity,” says Madeline Weisburg. Leigh has also won a Golden Lion for her monumental and momentous sculpture.

“Untitled” by Raphaela Vogel

Vogel’s contribution was a jaw-dropper for sure — a perfect example of the German artist’s experimental repertoire, which often raises eyebrows with its metaphoric, sometimes metaphysical statements. Here, Vogel went for the shock factor, depicting a large, cartoonish model of a penis being pulled by a fleet of white giraffes, complete with explanatory plates describing various diseases and conditions like erectile dysfunction. Cartoonish? Yes. Shocking? Definitely.

“Piazza Ucrainia” by Boris Filonenko, Lizaveta German, and Maria Lanko

In referring to the Venice Biennale this year, Wallpaper recently said, “Stark reminders of a raging war were never far from sight or mind,” and this is most evident in the centerpiece of the Ukrainian pavilion. A piece created by the pavilion’s curators, this stirring sculpture contains a multitude of stacked sandbags to represent the country’s efforts to protect their art from war damage — a reminder that’s both stirring and symbolic. Other notable Ukrainian offerings include “The Fountain of Exhaustion” by artist Pavlo Makov, which only arrived at the exhibition due to the perilous efforts of curator Maria Lanko to transport the piece beginning on the same day Russia began its attack.

“Valeriia” by JR

Statements and reactions to the war in Ukraine were not limited to the country’s own pavilion. French artist JR presented a large photograph of a young Ukrainian refugee in this statement-maker that puts a human face on the tragedies of war. It’s also been featured on the cover of Time and is part of the ongoing exhibition “This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.”

“Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts” by Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl

A curvy, faceless hybrid that’s equal parts sensual and unrecognizably recognizable, “Invitation…” is another potent representation that’s visceral and colorful, perfectly in keeping with exhibition’s central surrealist theme. Located in the Austrian pavilion, the sculpture is perched above the viewer on a plinth, presented as a figure to be worshipped and admired.

The Venice Biennale 2022 runs from April 23rd through November 22nd, 2022 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.

The post This Year’s Venice Biennale is Full of Surrealism — and Stark Reminders first appeared on Dornob.

The Playground

Designed by architectural firm architensions, “The Playground” is a conglomeration of arched towers, connecting frames, mirrored walls, and ground-level benches and piazzas. The colorful towers reach up 56 feet into the air, creating much-needed shade for festival-goers. Architects Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro, from Italy and Brooklyn, respectively, intended for their art to create connections.

Says Orsini, “It’s a place to gather and a place where we hope that our differences will be at ease.”

Buoyed

In this installation, three 36-foot-tall buoys appear to float over a grassy surface, each incorporating a whimsical mix of design elements. “I needed to build something optimistic,” explains Dutch designer Kiki Van Eijk, adding that “My buoys are joyful totems that metaphorically prevent you from sinking when we come together.” The blue buoy is topped by a Dutch-style windmill, the white one has a neck like Seattle’s space needle and sports a pair of butterfly wings, and the green buoy is capped with a mosque-like dome and mini palm tree.

Circular Dimensions x Microscape

Exploring the significance of water in the desert, Coachella Valley-native artist Christopher Cichocki used 25,000 feet of PVC pipe to create a 50-foot-tall shell-shaped pavilion with three tunnel walkways. Inside the walkways, highly magnified images of barnacles, salt, water, and algae cover the walls, while a soundscape of original musical compositions fills the ears of visitors.

“My art calls attention to the natural world and industrial mutation. This I want to reflect upon the permanence of change and transience, where visual and aural elements transform between levels of perception,” Cichocki says. “Are we looking through the microscope or the telescope? I find these elemental perceptions become indistinguishable at times.”

Cocoon (B.K.F.+H300)

The designers at the Argentinian firm Estudio Normal used their installation to honor the iconic B.K.F. Chair that was initially conceived in Buenos Aires in 1938 by designers Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy. Over time, the origin story of the now ubiquitous sling-back chair has been obscured. “For us, it’s very important because it’s going back to the place where everything happened and the chair became very popular,” says Estudio Normal’s Martin Huberman. “But at the same time, it got copied and the original names behind it vanished, which were two Argentinian architects and one from Catalonia, Spain.” The studio combined 400 reproductions of the B.K.F. chair to create a nine-story white cocoon to be appreciated in 360 degrees.

Mutts

When brainstorming ideas for her art, Romanian architect Oana Stănescu pondered on the unconditional love and support of her dog, Perry. She constructed three dog outlines in primary colored steel, the tallest of which stands 18 feet high. The insides are stuffed full of indigenous greenery in a celebration of nature.

La Guardiana

A 30-foot-tall statue of a woman topped with horns and a club in her hands towered over Coachella as a guardian looking out for the world’s refugee populations. The sculpture, created by LosDos (husband-and-wife Ramon and Christian Cardenas), was based on previous artwork made in collaboration with the band Rage Against the Machine.

“We definitely want to send a message of solidarity for the refugee and migrant communities with what’s happening every day and all around the world due to many different things,” says Ramon Cardenas.

Spectra

“Spectra” by UK-based design studio NEWSUBSTANCE has been in place at the Coachella festival since 2018. By day, the visitors can climb the spiral tower’s seven stories to get a different colored view of the event from every floor. By night, LED lights illuminate the structure, leading guest up to the top for a full bird’s-eye view.

The post 7 Stunning Art Installations from Coachella 2022 first appeared on Dornob.

One of his more recent pieces, “Still in One Piece III” used porcelain facial features to capture his coronavirus lockdown musings. The outlines of two faces shielded by protective masks press against each other, the hyper-realistic noses brushing and lips locked together. While the image is vaguely unnerving, it also portrays our species’ deep for connection and intimacy.

“At the beginning of May [2020], this idea popped up in my mind from nowhere during my meditation. Ideas came up to me like this very often. Many of my pieces were created with ideas popped up during meditation,” Tsang told My Modern Met of the kissing masks piece. “I have a strong feeling that these creative ideas were not originated from me. But I believe there must be a good reason that it came to me. Maybe just because I have the ability to realize these wonderful ideas and show them to the right people. For this reason, I don’t want to interpret it myself. I think everyone who see my works has the right to interpret them in their own way, according to their own feelings.”

Other works open for interpretation include a grimacing face that appears to be having its skin pulled sweatshirt-style over its head by a pair of arms emerging from the skull. Another features fingers from inside a head prying open the face, causing the features to disappear but still look like the person might be screaming. Tsang’s “Remembrance” has one face melting on top of another, while “Love in Progress” shows a pair of hands wringing out a tortured face like a wet towel.

Although his skill with ceramics seems like it must have taken a lifetime to perfect, art and sculpture are actually a second career for Tsang. Having grown up poor, the artist originally focused on trade labor, first as an air conditioning assistant and then a potato chip fryer. He eventually became a police officer, spending 13 years keeping the streets of Hong Kong safe. During that time, he took a clay modeling class and was transformed by its pliable nature. “The clay seemed so friendly to me, it listened to every single word in my mind and did exactly [as] I was expecting,” Tsang said in an interview with Colossal. “Every touch was so soothing. I feel like I was touching human skin. I found peace and joy in it. I’ve felt in love with it ever since.”

Leaving behind his police work, Tsang jumped into a “new life” of “exploring art.” However, his experiences as a cop with the “dark side of the city and humanity” heavily influence his artist creations. “What affected me the most were the fatal cases,” he said in an interview with the Bein Art Gallery. “I saw people being stabbed and killed by gangsters, a 6-year-old girl who was murdered by her maid, an 11-year-old girl who watched her younger brother die under a big tire of a double-decker bus while she was helping her mother to take care of him, and lots of faces of people who lost their lives in fatal car accidents. Today, I would definitely say that my service plays an important role in my creation. At least, I see things differently.”

Tsang updates fans by posting his latest work to his website, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

The post Johnson Tsang’s Surreal Ceramics Show the Face of Human Struggle first appeared on Dornob.

“Kami is the Japanese word meaning ‘god,’ ‘divinity,’ or ‘spirit’; but it also means ‘paper,’” Shibata explains. “Kami reside within nature. They dwell in the sky, in the ground, [and] in the wind, as well as various objects such as old trees, big rocks, and manmade creations. Kami move freely beyond time, universe, and places, appearing during events, as well as in our houses and our bodies. These spirits also dwell in paper. In the religion of Shinto, white paper is considered as a sacred material.”

Shibata hopes to use the traditional method of Japanese paper cutting to draw attention to “the delicate relationship we as humans have with the environment.” Her interest in paper cutting started when she began to play with the needles, strings, and leftover fabrics in her mother’s quilt and patchwork atelier shop as a child. She moved to New York after high school and experimented with paper art and stained glass before enrolling in the Printmaking and Sculpture mixed media department at the National Academy School in New York. In 2015, she moved to Paris.

Shibata sees her paper art as a way to travel to strange worlds, and her travels to new countries have broadened her ideas about what those worlds can look like while reinforcing her appreciation for her Japanese identity. The landscapes she creates are often surreal, mysterious, and even ghostly, occasionally offering a glimpse of a shadowy figure within the forests and dense cityscapes. She’s fascinated by the way the layered cut-outs interact with each other, creating highlights and shadows that she sometimes enhances with strategic lighting.

Even her smallest works can consist of many sheets of paper and hundreds of hours of careful slicing. These pieces might be enclosed within a goblet, apothecary jar or vase, and illuminated with a single tiny bulb for an enchanting effect. But Shibata’s “paper worlds” are downright jaw-dropping when they’re at their largest, crafted as interactive experiences within art galleries. Currently, Shibata is working on an installation she calls “Inochino-uta, Poetry of Life,” a large-scale project consisting of over 100 pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling. It’s set to be exhibited later this year.

“I cut paper to express my thankfulness to the ‘Kami’ spirits for having been born in this life,” Shibata says. “Each cut, each page is a prayer. My process helps me to be quiet and clear my mind in meditation or prayer. I purify my soul through the act of cutting paper. By interacting with the ‘Kami’ spirit material, I can connect to this spirit world with our own.”

The post Layers of White Paper Spring to Life in Sculptures by Ayumi Shibata first appeared on Dornob.

At the Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA), an underwater art museum off the coast of Cancún, Mexico, the eerie submerged displays don’t shy away from these contradictions. Snorkeling and scuba diving are supposed to be tranquil pastimes, but these scenes (made of nontoxic marine-grade cement) are meant to provoke. A little boy sits on an upturned bucket surrounded by the sort of trash that can be found throughout the Earth’s oceans. A group of figures bury their heads in the sand. A man dressed like a banker stands in the center of a circle of children, all pointing weapons at him. Objects resembling bombs are strewn throughout the area.

Like many other underwater sculptures around the world, these displays are the work of sculptor, scuba diver, and photographer Jason deCaires Taylor, perhaps the most famous and prolific underwater artist of all time. His art can be found in the seas off Grenada in Spain, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, in the Maldives, and near other key tourist destinations.

At first glance, it may seem a bit grandiose to fill these places with representations of human activity, regardless of the subject matter. But these pieces are actually crafted to help preserve vulnerable natural reefs that are affected by the presence of divers, creating alternative places to sightsee underwater. They also function as artificial reefs, creating new homes for coral, sponges, and other marine life.

MUSA is Taylor’s brainchild, and he serves as its Artistic Director. Joined by other artists like Karen Salinas Martinez, Roberto Díaz Abraham, Rodrigo Quiñones Reyes, Salvador Quiroz Ennis, and Elier Amado Gil, he’s filled the museum with 500 sculptures occupying an area of more than 420 square meters with a total weight of over 200 tons. “The Silent Evolution” is the largest work, comprised of a group of human figures representing cultures from all over the world. As more marine life entangles itself with the cement statues, they transform, seeming to come alive.

Each sculpture is installed carefully and timed to make sure it’s in place before larval coral spawning occurs. Often placed in areas of barren sandbanks to boost diversity, the installations also give scientists the rare opportunity to study new ecosystems as soon as they’re established. They also provide economic benefits to the areas they’re installed in, mainly in the form of tourist dollars that go back into conservation efforts.

Taylor’s works have inspired other artists to create similar installations around the world, like the Centeen Memorial Dive Park along the St. Lawrence River in Ontario, Canada by David Sheridan. Italian fisherman and activist Paolo Fanciulli similarly dropped Carrara marble sculptures into the Mediterranean Sea to prevent damage to marine life by trawling boats.

The post Ghostly Underwater Sculptures Draw Tourists Away from Busy Diving Sites first appeared on Dornob.

“Since Aspen Snowmass first opened in 1946-47, Aspen, Colorado’s average temperature has warmed by three degrees Fahrenheit,” explains Aspen Skiing Company, who commissioned the project. “In total, Aspen Snowmass has lost 30 days of winter since 1980 alone. This season, as part of our 75th anniversary, we’ve installed The Melted Gondola art installation at the top of Aspen Mountain to get people thinking about the next 75 years – and to draw attention to the urgent need to aggressively address climate change.”

Launched in partnership with the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (POW), the campaign takes inspiration from a piece by James Dive and The Glue Society called “Hot with the Chance of a Late Storm”, a similarly melting ice cream truck installed on the beach in Sydney, Australia. Protect Our Winters is a community of athletes, scientists, creatives, and business leaders working to advance non-partisan climate policies. “We need a movement to create large-scale policy change on climate,” says Auden Schendler, Aspen Skiing Company’s SVP of Sustainability. “POW is that movement, mobilizing the outdoor industry as a political force.”

POW and Aspen Skiing Company hope the sculpture will provoke an emotional reaction in onlookers as they arrive on the mountain. Many visitors look forward to their mountain excursion all year, and shorter snow seasons can be highly disappointing. With Aspen warming by about 0.4 degrees per decade, a future in which skiing is no longer possible may be within sight. The groups hope anyone moved by the installation will write to their senators, pressure their favorite businesses to use their voices and influence in Washington, or work to affect small changes like clean energy standards in their own towns.

The installation is rendered even more poignant by the dramatic juxtaposition of two recent events in Colorado: a rare winter wildfire that killed at least four people and destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in the Boulder area, and the 10 inches of snow that extinguished it. On the day the fire started, the area was experiencing unusually high winds after months of drought. The fires blazed across an urban area once thought to be much safer than forested areas in terms of fire risk, burning down a Target and a hotel.

“The record warm temperatures we’ve had in Colorado definitely played a role in this,” says Jennifer Balch, fire scientist and the director of the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in an interview with Colorado Public Radio. “Our temperatures across the Front Range between June and December were the warmest on record going back to the early 1960s. Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that we’re burning during this event, they’ve been baked, essentially, all fall and all winter. And then, on top of that, we didn’t get a lick of moisture.”

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