Marc Newson’s latest creation for Ikepod sees the Australian designer interpret the most iconic timepiece of all: The Hourglass. Director Philip Andelman traveled to Basel, Switzerland, to document the designer’s modern take of the classic hourglass inside the Glaskeller factory. Each hand made hourglass comprises highly durable borosilicate glass and millions of stainless steel nanoballs, and is available in a 10 or 60 minute timer.
January 27, 2013
Marc Newson
Marc Newson is the most acclaimed and influential designer of his generation. He has worked across a wide range of disciplines, creating everything from furniture and household objects, to bicycles and cars, private and commercial aircraft, yachts, various architectural commissions, and signature sculptural pieces for clients across the globe.
Born in Sydney, Newson spent much of his childhood travelling in Europe and Asia. He started experimenting with furniture design as a student and, after graduation, was awarded a grant from the Australian Crafts Council with which he staged his first exhibition – featuring the Lockheed Lounge – a piece that has now, twenty years later, set three consecutive world records at auction.
Newson has lived and worked in Tokyo, Paris, and London where he is now based, and he continues to travel widely. His clients include a broad range of the best known and most prestigious brands in the world – from manufacturing and technology to transportation, fashion and the luxury goods sector. Many of his designs have been a runaway success for his clients and have achieved the status of modern design icons. In addition to his core business, he has also founded and run a number of successful companies, including a fine watch brand and an aerospace design consultancy, and has also held senior management positions at client companies; including currently being the Creative Director of Qantas Airways.
Marc Newson was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and has received numerous awards and distinctions: he was appointed The Royal Designer for Industry in the UK, received an honorary doctorate from Sydney University, holds Adjunct Professorships at Sydney College of the Arts and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and most recently was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) by Her Majesty the Queen.
His work is present in many major museum collections, including the MoMA in New York, London’s Design Museum and V&A, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Vitra Design Museum. Having set numerous records at auction, Newson’s work now accounts for almost 25% of the total contemporary design market.
Newson has been the focus of on-going and intense interest in the media, generating significant editorial value for his clients, and has been the subject of a number of books and documentary films.
December 31, 2012
Jim Isermann
Jim Isermann is a practicing artist, based in Palm Springs, California. Since receiving his MFA from the California Institute of Arts in 1980 Isermann’s artistic output has chronicled the conflation of post-war industrial design and fine art through popular culture. Functional installations that reclaimed a utopian view of the future while revealing the pathos of that failed promise have maintained an unflagging belief in the beauty of utilitarian design. Through out the 1990′s Isermann explored traditional handicraft technique to produce works (i.e.: stained glass, weaving, etc) that are unashamedly beautiful, a beauty that is integral to the limitations and specific characteristics of fabrication. In 1998, following a 15-year survey exhibition organized by David Pagel for UW Milwaukee’s institute of visual art, Isermann began to use a computer to design manufactured elements. Realized installations and commissions have employed mass-produced thermal die-cut vinyl decals, plotter-cut mylar decals, ContraVision© ink jet printed vinyl and projects incorporating multiple vacuum-formed ABS plastic panels. In 2003, a 35-foot 5-pendent chandelier, custom carpeting and furniture selection were permanently installed in the atrium of Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus.
Currently Isermann divides his practice between producing labor-intensive studio work for gallery and museum exhibitions and designing and overseeing commissioned projects that involve industrial manufacturing processes. Most recently Isermann has mounted solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects, New York in 2007, Corvi-Mora, London in 2008 and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles in 2009. Commissioned projects were completed in 2006 for the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in 2007 for Yale University Art Museum, in 2008 for Princeton University and in 2009 for Stanford University and UCR.
December 12, 2012
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei (born 18 May 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.
Ai Weiwei is China’s most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. Against a backdrop of strict censorship and an unresponsive legal system, Ai expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media. In response, Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention.
As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called “tofu-skin schools” in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport on 3 April, he was held for over two months without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of “economic crimes” (tax evasion).
In October 2011 ArtReview magazine named Ai number one in their annual Power 100 list. The decision was criticised by the Chinese authorities. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin responded, “China has many artists who have sufficient ability. We feel that a selection that is based purely on a political bias and perspective has violated the objectives of the magazine”.
AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China. Her detailed portrait provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures. This is one to watch and it’s on netflix!
You can follow him on twitter here
December 3, 2012
Theo Jansen
Another great video from Theo Jansen. Directed and Produced by Salazar for Red Bull Media House. Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist. In 1990, he began what he is known for today: building large mechanical animals out of PVC that are able to live on their own, known as Strandbeest. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company (BMW) television commercial Jansen says: “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” He strives to equip his creations with their own artificial intelligence so they can avoid obstacles by changing course when one is detected, such as the sea itself. see more here Previous post
November 8, 2012
Richard Woods
Richard Wood is a Painter, designer, sculptor, architect— In 2002, Woods transformed a New York gallery space with an exaggerated use of historical patterns, architecture, and iconography in his installation Super Tudor. He combined patterns and prints from various periods to overtake floors and walls of the gallery’s interior, using a Tudor-inspired façade to transform the building’s exterior. This project, like many of Woods’s endeavors, shaped an existing environment into a new reality, using cartoon-like decorative surfaces, mainly with hand-printed woodblock techniques. Woods has said that his vibrant color palette is inspired by his childhood memories of his parents’ home in 1970s England, where he was surrounded by “plasticky” colors and garish, narrative wallpapers. Though best known for his architectural installations, Woods is also a distinguished painter and sculptor.
Infused with a cartoon sensibility, Woods work, whether transforming a whole building into a collage of clashing decorative surfaces or creating an approximation of a rock, revels in the idea of beauty literally being skin deep.
Wood’s interventions operate on the boundary between art, architecture and design, exploring the relationship between the functional and the ornamental. It’s all part of Woods’ desire to confront our aesthetic values and the results raise questions about the way we live, with, and in spite of, tightly controlled town planning.
August 15, 2012
Nicky Vearsey
ARTISTS STATEMENT
Nicky Vearsey We live in a world obsessed with image. What we look like, what our clothes look like, houses, cars… I like to counter this obsession with superficial appearance by using X-rays to strip back the layers and show what it is like under the surface. Often
the integral beauty adds intrigue to the familiar. We all make assumptions based on the external visual aspects of what surrounds us and we are attracted to people and forms that are aesthetically pleasing. I like to challenge this automatic way that we
react to just physical appearance by highlighting the, often surprising, inner beauty. This society of ours, consumed as it by image, is also becoming increasingly controlled by security and surveillance. Take a flight, or go into a high profile
courtroom and your belongings will be X-rayed. The post arriving in corporations and government departments has often been X-rayed. Security cameras track our every move. Mobile phone receptions place us at any given time. Information is key to the fight against whatever we are meant to be fighting against. To create art with equipment and technology designed to help big brother delve deeper, to use some
of that fancy complicated gadgetry that helps remove the freedom and individuality in our lives, to use that apparatus to create beauty brings a smile to my face. To mix my metaphors, we all know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, that beauty is more than skin deep. By revealing the inside, the quintessential element of my art speculates upon what the manufactured and natural world really consists of.
X-ray photographer and film-maker Nick Veasey works with x-ray and scientific equipment to create unusual and beautiful x-ray photos to commission. We love your work Nicky, give us a bell !
August 9, 2012
Ed Moses
Ed Moses (born 1926 in Long Beach) has been a prominent figure in the Los Angeles art scene for almost 60 years. He first exhibited in 1949, and was part of the original group of artists from the Ferus Gallery in 1957. Moses’ career was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996, and his art was featured in the Pompidou Center’s survey exhibition ”Los Angeles: Birth of an Artistic Capital, 1955-1985” in Paris.
Always working with process and experimenting with materials as a painter, Moses has been critically lauded for his bold composition and innovation. He remains a prolific fixture of the Los Angeles art scene, and is respected for his inventiveness as an artist and his attentiveness to new developments in contemporary art.
The artwork of Ed Moses has appeared in exhibitions around the world, and his pieces are included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
At age 82, he still works in his studio every day, transforming as many as six canvasses with a complete willingness to let chance dance. “I explore” he explains. “Painting is my medium of discovery; I am a process painter.” His openness to chance is bolstered by the fact that a large segment of his studio is outdoors, where he paints.
He admires Renaissance painters. “Ever since I was a young painter, that idea of letting the form emerge from process has been continually important,” he says.
He says that, when he paints, a metamorphosis can happen—a discovery. “I explore the possibilities of the phenomenal world through paint. The process of painting stands as a metaphor for life, my own existence,” he says, coining the word “phenomenonologist” for himself.
It was a pleasure to meet you Ed, looking forward to hearing from you so we can schedule our ” Peek in to your studio” drop us a line !
