Handily done

A few other pictures from Figment on Governors Island: give the artwork a hand! I didn't catch the name of the piece at the top, or its artist, but the piece at bottom is from The Palm Authority Project by Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos.

Headless, armless

Ah, how nice it is to live in New York, where the streets are a sculpture gallery.

Well-packed shelves

This 2011 piece by Manolo Valdés, Bookcase, is spectacular. This snapshot is a poor reflection of the towering sculpture, which appears at first glance to be a bookshelf stuffed with a compulsive collector's hoard; when you look closer, you see that it's slabs of gorgeous wood, full of beautiful textures and inevitably calling to mind the source of all those pages you've turned.

Bye, bear

The Urs Fischer teddy bear installation ("Untitled (Lamp/Bear)") on Park Avenue started coming down yesterday. Between that and the dismantling of Jaume Plensa's "Echo" in Madison Square Park, I'm a little bummed -- and can only hope some great new large-scale sculpture will debut soon!

Order and disorder

It was hard to pry myself away from this Megan Suttles installation at the Governors Island Art Fair. Little pieces of a translucent material (shards of glass? bits of hardened plastic?) were strung on fishing line that extended between two walls of an apartment in one of the island's old residences. The sculpture felt kinetic, explosive -- but the material was quiet, reflective, almost not there, and the way it captured light tranlsated something that might otherwise have been overwhelming and chaotic into a moment of contained poetry.

From Suttles' artist's statement on her Web site:

Every now and then I find myself in these situations where it is very difficult to control the way I see, touch, smell, talk, breathe, everything. My vision becomes blurry, the world spins. It happens randomly, triggered by seemingly mundane occurrences: sound, wind, large crowds, solitude. Over the years I have learned to conceal these episodes by constructing a container. Through various breathing techniques and concentration, I am able to contain the chaos to the point where it becomes invisible.  My work has become focused on revealing this chaos; making the invisible visible again. ... Through this work I have been exploring the eternal struggle between restraint and disorder: the way we tend to conceal our inner confusion with the outward appearance of refinement and perfection.

Scenes from Socrates

Image: portion of Leif Low-beer piece against the skyline; Flickr user Joel Speasmaker has a better image of how the sculpture plays with perspective.

Ambled on down to Socrates Sculpture Park yesterday evening and poked around the Vista exhibit (which is on until August 7):

Vista will explore the ways that methods of viewing and observation determine the assessment and evaluation of an object or scene. The works in the exhibition will employ visual alignment, perspective, and the framing of a site-line or point of view to dictate perception.

Which Side Are You On?, Howie Sneider, 2011

Closeup of one side of Jillian Conrad's Relative Distants, 2011

Between Lines, Priscila de Carvalho, 2011

One Way, Ivan Argote, 2011

Echo in the park

Jaume Plensa's Echo, which was installed in Madison Square Park in early May and will be on display through mid-August, is breathtaking. About the piece:

[The sculpture] depicts a nine-year-old girl from Plensa’s Barcelona neighborhood, lost in a state of thoughts and dreams. Standing forty-four feet tall at the center of the park’s expansive Oval Lawn, Echo’s towering stature and white marble-dusted surface harmoniously reflect the historic limestone buildings that surround the park. Both monumental in size and inviting in subject, the peaceful visage of Echo creates a tranquil and introspective atmosphere amid the cacophony of central Manhattan.

Plensa’s sculpture also refers to an episode in Greek mythology in which the loquacious nymph Echo is forced as punishment to repeat only the thoughts of others. Plensa’s Echo plays on the narrative of this Greek myth by depicting a young girl’s face in a state of reverie, translating this sculptural portrait into a physical monument of the internalized voices of the thousands of daily visitors to Madison Square Park.

Ice ice Buddha

This cell phone picture is admittedly terrible, but do not let that stop you: go, now, to the Rubin Museum and see the ice sculpture of the Buddha before it melts (the Rubin will be open all night, but who knows how long the piece will last?).

This piece, by Atta Kim, is Monologue of Ice, and if you so choose, you can leave with a little vial of the water that has run off the sculpture (we did!). Kim is a South Korean photographer whose work has frequently touches on Buddhist themes; he documents the sculptures (he's also done, for example, Mao in ice) as they fade away. It's really unbelievably cool, both literally and figuratively.

Salt of the earth

Totally in awe of the labyrinthine installations -- in salt -- of Motoi Yamamoto. (The above is from "Hundred Stories About Love," which was housed at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.)  

Yamamoto writes a bit on his site about his inspiration, his materials, and his method:

The mainspring of my work is derived from the death of my sister from brain cancer ... Since then, I have had the dilemma, in grief and surprise, of thinking about what I had and lost. I started making art works that reflected such feelings and continue it as if I were writing a diary. Many of my works take the form of labyrinths with complicated patterns, ruined and abandoned staircases or too narrow life-size tunnels, and all these works are made with salt. Salt seems to possess a close relation with human life beyond time and space. Moreover, especially in Japan, it is indispensable in the death culture. After my sister's death, what I began to do in order to accept this reality was examine how death was dealt with in the present social realm. ... Drawing a labyrinth with salt is like following a trace of my memory. Memories seem to change and vanish as time goes by.

Hat tip to Neatorama, where I came across Yamamoto's work!

The first cut is the deepest

Field Favorite, 2007.

Loving Simone Lourenco's exuberant, sculptural works in paper. Lourenco's drawings and collages are being shown at Art101 Gallery's Flat File program in Brooklyn.