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Paul Caparatta: Central African butterfly wing Portraits

New York, USA, based artist Paul Caparatta takes inspiration from an ancient Central African practice of the use of a very unique material to create striking portraits. Butterfly art – a native, popular art form from the Central African Republic, evolved during a rare, annual phenomenon in which thousands of butterflies fill the sky during the months of October and November. These butterflies, having lived their natural lifespan, fall to the ground where their delicate, colourful, textured wings are carefully collected and used to create pictorials of animals and scenes of rural life, mainly. A butterfly specialist, Caparatta does take care not to use the wings of any endangered species. It’s a fair bit of painstaking labour to create these striking profiles / portraits of ladies, all from the splendid wings of butterflies. Take a look.  Read More…

World Architecture Festival 2014: Winners

This year’s World Architecture Festival held in Singapore saw architects and architecture studios from across the globe compete for honors in the macro categories of completed buildings, future, small projects and landscape. In recognizing worldwide architectural excellence and celebrating the built environment, the festival was attended by over two thousand architects, designers, and clients. The festival’s jury comprised some of the world’s leading architects and designers, led by British architect Richard Rogers, with Rocco Yim (Hong Kong), Julie Eizenberg (USA), Enric Ruiz Geli (Spain), Peter Rich (South Africa) and many others. Here is a selection of the winners of the World Architecture Festival 2014. Take a look.  Read More…

James Mollison: Where Children Sleep. 2010

A graduate of Oxford Brookes University and the Newport School of Art and Design, Kenya born photographer James Mollison, undertook a notable project while working in Italy, at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. Weaving around the core idea of children’s rights worldwide, Mollison reflected on his own childhood and the spaces he inhabited, finally zeroing down on the thought of the bedroom and the child – a space that spoke much about culture, class, affinities, possessions or the lack of thereof. Since not all spaces where children slept were ‘rooms’, he chose to call the project ‘Where Children Sleep’. Combining portraits of children, with the spaces they sleep in, and accompanied by their individual stories, Mollison manages to evoke childhood and livelihoods across cultures and nations of the world – Mexico, Japan, Cambodia, Brazil, England, Italy, Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, Senegal, Lesotho, Nepal, China, India, USA among others. His work has been widely published worldwide, by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, the Guardian magazine, The Paris Review, GQ, New York Magazine and Le Monde. Take a look at some selections from ‘Where Children Sleep’.

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Doug Menuez: Documenting Silicon Valley 1985-2000

A remarkable, yet ‘quiet’ revolution was unfolding in the mid 80s in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA – a singular era that would radically change communications, cultures and ways of being in the connected, wired (and wireless) world. By then, I was just beginning to enjoy my computer classes in school, cracking acronyms like RAM and ROM and keying away in the BASIC language. On the other side of the planet, over a period of fifteen years, American photographer Doug Menuez stepped into the ideas rooms, work-spaces, group meetings, pep-talks, lunch and launch huddles inhabited by late twentieth century technology tribesmen and tribeswomen, who cumulatively, in their own ways, wanted to change the world. And, they did. In training his lenses on the likes of Steve Jobs at NeXT, John Sculley at Apple, John Warnock at Adobe, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel, Bill Joy at Sun Microsystems, Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Marc Andreessen at Netscape (among many others), Munuez remained an observant, insightful and privileged witness to a very significant period in human technological, design and engineering innovation, and mapped the key architects and soldiers who laid the foundations of what will be later dubbed ‘Silicon Valley‘. In recognizing the archival importance of his project, Stanford University Library acquired his images ten years ago. Take a look.

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DALeast: Urban Mural Revival

Wuhan, China born contemporary artist DALeast emerged out of the graffiti crews a decade ago from the streets of Beijing, China. As a young student of sculpture at the Fine Art Institute in his hometown Wuhan, he became increasingly disenchanted and demoralized by the ‘dead’ curricula and teaching, and opted to drop out of art college. A decade later he finds himself to be one of the key visual voices sparking a renewed interest in the possibilities of the urban mural. Shying away from labels and bracketing of his work, he is comfortable in finding creative energy and expression on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico as much as he is at home in showcasing his work at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York, USA. Best known for his ‘Creature‘ series, he travels much of the world seeking out public walls and surfaces to spray unleash his animals on. He is a true ‘auteur’, with a body of work that is distinctly identifiable not only by the characteristics of line quality but also with obsessive themes. I find his work extremely dynamic and energetic, with visible sculptural roots, and his reiteration of liberation, breaking away, human-animal calls for contemplation and reflection. Take a look.

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Designs of the Year 2014: Product Design Nominees

Designs of the Year‘ is the London, UK located Design Museum‘s exhibition of the most innovative, intriguing and original international design across the seven categories of Product, Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic and Transport design. Although global in spirit, I do sense a Euro-Western Europe slant in the list of nominees across the categories. Starting today (26th of March, 2014), voting opens as part of the social jury process in selecting the winners of round one, across the seven categories for the final exhibition. These are the nominees for Product Design for the year 2014. Take a look.

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Jenni Sparks and David Robinson: Hand mapping cities

Creative cartographic expressions are a distinct challenge, especially if they have to possibly double up as real word navigational aids as well. There is this tension between creative, expressive liberty and the concrete ‘rootedness’ in directionality, topographic fidelity and cartographic accuracy. The complexity of a project of this nature increases manifold when it is to be hand drawn entirely without rapid erase, undo, redo tools. Precision of line coupled with a quirky ‘sense of humor’, which in turn is married to the larger vision of a macro city to micro map translation, undoubtedly showcase the remarkable skills and abilities of British illustrators Jenni Sparks and David Ryan Robinson. Take a look.

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Postcards as propaganda: Women’s suffrage movement, 1902-1915.

The battle of the sexes has been waged much longer than we would imagine, here and now. In the early 20th century, the women’s suffrage movement strengthened its foothold across both sides of the Atlantic, and in the face of this visible, growing strength, the (threatened) men in opposition deployed blistering propaganda targeting the opposite sex. The weapon of choice, of course, was the extremely popular postcard. To quote researcher John Fraser (The Oxford Art Journal, October 1980): “that the pictorial postcard was ‘possibly the great vehicle for messages of the new urban proletariat between 1900 and 1914’ (it was cheap to buy and to post, simple to use, and quick to arrive in an age of frequent postal deliveries).” From the blatantly misogynistic to the provokingly laughable, a range of these early pre-electronic mass media propaganda survive to this day. The right to vote was, and still is, a terrain of contestation and negotiation. Take a look.

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Polish cine posters: Artist liberation and aesthetic innovation

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Lending considerable prestige to the ‘stick-to-the-wall-and-tear-it-down’ medium of the poster, was the first International Exposition of the Poster held in Krakow, Poland in the fag end of the 19th century, 1898 to be precise. Jan Wdowiszewski, the then director of the ‘Technical Industrial Museum’ authored two essays devoted to the art of the poster, and in conceiving the Poster Exposition, tapped into the artistic vitality of Krakow of that era, and in turn laid the foundations of what will be later internationally known as Polish Poster Art. The artists associated with the initial poster years in Poland were from the Academy Of Fine Arts and were members of the Society of Polish Artists“Sztuka” – there was acceptability associated with creating posters of various kinds, and over the next century, this specific ‘zeitgeist’ saw some of the most remarkable visual expressions through posters, making them an identifiable and essential part of Polish culture. With Polish independence, post First World War, Tadeusz Gronowski, an architecture student at the University of Warsaw rose to the fore as one of the key ‘architects’ of Polish poster art, responding to the needs of an industrialized nation and the urgently required advertising communications. Gronowski’s work was marked by modernist, cubist impulses and an irreverence for visual tradition, a liberating move from the poster styles of the earlier periods. His work was carried further by later architects turned graphic artists from the University of Warsaw.  Read More…

World Architecture Festival 2013: Winners

The World Architecture Festival took place in Singapore this year and saw around 200 shortlisted projects compete for awards in 30 different categories, from offices and places of religion, to family homes, schools, shopping centers, and future architecture projects. WAF is arguably the most prestigious of architectural honors in the world, and it draws the best of talent from across nations. The shortlisted projects and the wide range of architectural interventions presented in the festival is indicative of the fertility of the built environment, of creative processes and responsibilities accruing to furthering of thinking and doing architecture, in breathing life into spaces and structures for human families, communities, and societies worldwide. Take a look at the top honors.

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