If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Over the years, we have created mood boards, conceptual packages and idea books for clients in architecture, interior design, fashion and the entertainment business.
We eventually realized that the most interesting and gratifying aspect of our work was the world we were creating outside of all of the research. It was the things that would inspire us along the way that had made a lasting impact in our lives.
Our Blog is collection of images that have made us pause, reflect and appreciate art that reinforces our belief that each and every day there is a endless flow of beauty being manifested in the universe by people who are capable of providing a glimpse into a world of infinite possibilities, beauty and excellence. Enjoy!
The illusion derives from tiny glass beads that Mary Corse, now 66, mixes into her paint before brushing it on the canvas. The same microspheres, as she calls them, are what make the white lines on a two-lane blacktop reflective in the dark. “But my paintings are not reflective!” Corse was quick to say during a recent visit to New York from her home in the Malibu hills of Los Angeles. “They create a prism that brings the surface into view. I like that because it brings the viewer into the light as well. The idea, she said, is to get inside the paintings — “to create a space that actually isn’t there.”
Throughout her career, the nature of perception has been Corse’s subject, but it only underscores her basic premise. “There’s nothing static in reality,” she said. “So I didn’t want my paintings to be static either. But we live in an abstract universe and it’s pure abstraction I’m after.”
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.
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.
After a personal tragedy, Harry Taylor discovered a passion for the 150-year-old craft of tintype photography. Harry Taylor is an artist based in Wilmington, North Carolina and has a rich and diverse knowledge base of shooting all types of photography.
Matt Morris is an award-winning filmmaker specializing in documentaries and branded content. In 2008, he produced and directed PICKIN’ & TRIMMIN’, an Emmy® nominated documentary short that was an official selection of over 2 dozen international film festivals, including Clermont-Ferrand and Aspen Shortsfest. The film has won 7 awards, including Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock and Florida film festivals.
His next short, WATERMELON MAN premiered Florida Film Festival 2010 and has screened at the Nashville Film Festival and Palm Springs Shortsfest. His current film MR. HAPPY MAN has screened at DOC NYC, Aspen Shortsfest, IFFBoston, Nashville Film Festival, and more. It won the audience award for Best Short Film at AFI Silverdocs and Grand Jury award for Best Documentary Short at the Sidewalk Film Festival. Previously, Matt co-edited and contributed to the book SUPERHEROES AND PHILOSOPHY for Open Court Press. He attended Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Greg Wilson is a cinematographer living in NYC. He got his start working as a photo-journalist for rock & roll mags like Rolling Stone, Spin and Fader. In 2005 he began working in motion pictures. He shoots with everything from 16mm film to 65mm HD. Greg’s passion is narrative story telling but he enjoys documentary, commercials etc. He spent the last 5 summers on a project with the National Geographic Society, one of the largest in their history. He is currently in pre-production on another large project for the Society. He loves the outdoors and has a passion for working in tough environments needing on-the-spot solutions for demanding technical situations. In September 2011, Greg was honored by the International Cinematographer’s Guild as a nominee at the Emerging Cinematographer Awards. His list of clients include HBO, NGS, Starz, Nokia, Nike, PBS, Expedia, Cartoon Network, AOL, Rough Trade, Mute Records and more.
Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of a Hollywood action movie crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before. Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming. For more information about cheetah conservation, visit causeanuproar.com/
Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include Second Sight (1983), At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010). A feature film about her work, What Remains, debuted to critical acclaim in 2006. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.
“Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann’s steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance, and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise – subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.”
– Reynolds Price, TIME
Photographer Jenny van Sommers was born in Australia to a professor of psychology and a sociologist. After failing out of art school in Sydney, she decamped to Britain in 1995 and began a professional winning streak that has netted her numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at Cannes, and ad clients including Apple, Audi, Hermès and Nike. Van Sommers’s images have appeared in AnOther, 10, and English, French and Italian Vogue. Since 2011, she has been concentrating on personal projects exploring abstraction and large-format film work. A new series, Paper Moon, uses lo-fi special effects such as dry ice and turntables to recreate each planet in the solar system. Jenny van Sommers lives and works in SE1 in London with frequent visits to the US and France.
My photographs are primarily a documentation of a physical evolution. I have changed a common object into sculpture in a state of flux. The way we choose to research and find information is also in an evolution. I hope to raise questions about these changes, the ephemeral and fragile nature in which we now obtain knowledge, and the future of books.
I arrive at some of my images by chance. Others, through experimentation. Without these two elements, my work would not flow easily from one idea to the next. A random encounter on Drew Street with the Houston Yellow Pages was the primary inspiration for this project. After that chance meeting, I began the search for more books, and more methods to change their appearance.
I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need “Windows 95?” After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house gave me a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper, and sometimes contents.
As I begin the process, I first consider the contents of each volume. I didn’t spend more than a few seconds on “Windows 95,” but the “New Century Dictionary of the English Language,” is a treasure that, because of its fascinating illustrations, and archaic examples, saved it from taking on a new form. Sculpting segued to thoughts on obsolescence and the relevance of libraries in this century.
Half a century ago, students researched at home with the family set of encyclopedias, or took a trip to the library to find needed information. Now, owning a computer, and connecting to the internet gives a student the ability to complete a research paper without ever going near a library. I have fully embraced that technology, and would not want to be without it, but, I also fear that it is rapidly leading us to rely less and less on the reference books common in the last two centuries.
With the discarded books that I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography. This project has become a journey that continues to evolve.
A final note – No important books have been injured during the making of any of these photographs.
Philippe Halsman (2 May 1906 Riga, Latvia – 25 June 1979 New York City) was a Latvian-born American portrait photographer. Born to a Jewish family of Max Halsman, a dentist, and Ita Grintuch, a grammar school principal, in Latvia. Halsman studied electrical engineering in Dresden, but moved into photography in Paris in 1931.
He began contributing to fashion magazines such as Vogue and soon gained a reputation as one of the best portrait photographers in France, renowned for his sharp, and closely cropped images that shunned the old soft focus look. When France was invaded, Halsman fled to Marseille and he eventually managed to obtain a U.S. visa, aided by family friend Albert Einstein (whom he later famously photographed in 1947).
Halsman had his first success in America when the cosmetics firm Elizabeth Arden used his image of model Constance Ford against the American flag in an advertising campaign for “Victory Red” lipstick. A year later in 1942 he found work with Life, photographing hat designs, one of which, a portrait of a model in a Lilly Daché hat, was his first of the many covers he would do for Life.
In 1941 Halsman met the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and they began to collaborate in the late 1940s. The 1948 work Dali Atomicus explores the idea of suspension, depicting three cats flying, a bucket of thrown water, and Salvador Dalí in mid air. The title of the photograph is a reference to Dalí’s work Leda Atomica which can be seen in the right of the photograph behind the two cats. Halsman reported that it took 28 attempts to be satisfied with the result. Halsman and Dali eventually released a compendium of their collaborations in the 1954 book Dali’s Mustache, which features 36 different views of the artist’s distinctive mustache. Another famous collaboration between the two was In Voluptas Mors, a surrealistic portrait of Dali beside a large skull, in fact a tableau vivant composed of seven nudes. Halsman took three hours to arrange the models according to a sketch by Dali. A version of In Voluptas Mors was used subtly in the poster for the film The Silence of The Lambs,and recreated in a poster for the film The Descent.
In 1947, he made what was to become one of his most famous photos of a mournful Albert Einstein, who during the photography session recounted his regrets about his role in the United States pursuing the atomic bomb. The photo would later be used in 1966 on a U.S. postage stamp and in 1999, on the cover of Time, when Time dubbed Einstein as “Person of the Century.”
In 1951 Halsman was commissioned by NBC to photograph various popular comedians of the time including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, and Bob Hope. While photographing the comedians doing their acts, he captured many of the comedians in mid air, which went on to inspire many later jump pictures of celebrities including the Ford family, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marilyn Monroe, María Félix and Richard Nixon.
When the photographer Philippe Halsman said, “Jump,” no one asked how high. People simply pushed off or leapt up to the extent that physical ability and personal decorum allowed. In that airborne instant Mr. Halsman clicked the shutter. He called his method jumpology.
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 !
