October 26, 2010
Harvey Lynch
October 26, 2010
Terunobu Fujimori
Japanese architect and architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori is his voracious appetite. A longtime professor at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, Fujimori came to designing late—he got his first commission at age 44, 19 years ago—but he has since conceived some of Japan’s most startlingly original buildings, on average one per year.A modern eccentric with an architectural sensibility drawn from ancient Japanese traditions, Terunobu Fujimori designs projects that are exercises in playful experimentation and sophisticated craft.
Fujimori basically fell into designing buildings after his native village commissioned him to design a small history museum for a local family with ancient ties to the area. As he pondered what form the building should take, he felt the weight of all of architectural history bearing down on him. “Since I was a famous architectural historian,” he says, “I thought my architecture should be totally unique, dissimilar to any architecture that came before. I figured that if I did something traditionally European or Japanese, everyone would say ‘Oh, it’s because he’s a historian.’ I didn’t want that criticism.” But at the same time, he wanted to stay away from anything too contemporary. “Some of my closest friends, like Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito, were architects who were starting to get famous, and I didn’t want them to laugh at me and say, ‘Oh, you mimic my work.’”Read more at Dwell
October 16, 2010
Ian Pyper
Ian Pyper is a frank and unaffected man. He is passionate about his drawings, yet claims to dislike the ‘pretensions of the art world’. Perhaps this is why he hesitates to discuss his work, and resists the suggestion that there are psychological reasons behind his images.
Coming from a working class family from Liverpool, England he was encouraged to be a draftsman instead of an artist, so he could earn money from his obvious talent. This, while working with only two fingers and a thumb on each hand!
In 1981 he began devoting himself full time to his drawing. His work evokes a strange spiritual and rhythmic pattern. Using somewhat tribal and recurrent symbols there is a mystical energy in his amazing drawings.
Now living in the South of England, PYPER continues to produce drawings for an ever-growing audience.
October 16, 2010
Susan Dory
Susan Dory’s paintings
Artist’s statement
I’m interested in creating complexity through the repetition of a single element. I build my paintings with many layers, painting, pouring, masking, and pay particular attention to the negative space created by the painted forms. By using the capsule shape in my compositions I explore the possibilities of these shapes docking, organizing and lodging together, interlocking as groups, floating freely in and tunneling through space. The capsule shape itself is fascinating in the way it can be deconstructed. By removing the two end curves, what remains are two parallel lines like an equal sign or implied infinity. The removal of the parallel lines of the capsule shape leaves only the two curved ends, like parenthesis, representing departure in a body of text or insertion of a symbolic unit. Deconstruction of the capsules within my compositions interjects ideas of movement, crossing, passage, overlapping, time/motion, and dynamism.
Color can dominate, helping to inform decisions and creative routes during the process. The juxtaposition of colors unites the various modulated passages within my work. I take joy in the language, patterning and process of painting.
October 14, 2010
Jeri Eisenberg
Jeri Eisenberg statement:
I feel no need to seek out grand vistas or exotic locales, majestic mountain ranges or rushing rivers. It’s the common wooded landscape of my day to day life that captures my attention. Many of the images in my current work are from areas close to my home; others are from farther flung places, but places that I just happen to be for one prosaic reason or another. They are places that are generally more ordinary than spectacular.
By photographing the treed landscape with a purposefully oversized pinhole or a radically defocused lens, however, I capture it as it is not often seen. The images are firmly grounded in the natural world, a particular place, a particular season, a particular time. But by obscuring detail, only the strongest brush strokes emerge: the images become sketches with light, literally and figuratively. They tend to float between there and not there, to dissolve into abstraction and reconfigure themselves back into recognizable form.
I began this series when my father, then 83, started loosing both his sight and his memory. Strangely, the work has been comforting. Beauty, though fleeting and fragmentary, seems to console me.
Education: B.A., Kirkland College, 1974 ,J.D., Boston University, 1977 ,M.F.A., Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University, 2005
October 14, 2010
Irene Kung
Irene Kung was born in Switzerland, 1958, started her career as a painter and with success, but it has only been in the last several years that she has fully concentrated on photography. Her images are dark and isolate the objects or subjects she photographs. She has photographed architecture in several cities in Europe and in New York, but she manages to capture a detailed look that the human eye will not perceive. Next to photographing architecture she has also made pictures of animals, trees and mountains.
October 3, 2010
Blake Witherow
Blake Witherow was recently short-listed for the James Dyson award for creating the Regenerative Helmet, a multi-impact helmet that can be used again and again after an impact. Currently, bicycle helmets are meant to be replaced if they are dropped or impacted in a crash. “The original concept was to produce a helmet that was less environmentally damaging when it was discarded. However, as more information from scientific and engineering journals surfaced, the project evolved into developing a safer helmet,” says Blake.
Blake, 23, graduated from the RMIT Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) last year, and now works for Formero, a company that provides rapid prototyping, tooling and manufacturing services to take products from prototype to production. Blake’s helmet has two rear halves that are squeezed together and held together by a strap, which moulds it closer and more comfortably to a cyclist’s head. Cyclists can still wear beanies and skull caps without affecting the helmets fit.
