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!
Marjetica Potrc has made some important art: she’s built dry toilets for Latin American slums and promoted a water jug for Africa that can also absorb the force of land mines. She’s taken the idea that art can change the world and made it come true. Sure, her art-world actions don’t do that much actual good. Instead, they do what art does best: they talk about how the world might be better.
“I believe in art. People need art to negotiate their world,” Potrc says. And the depth of that belief may be this artist’s true contribution.
Potrc (pronounced “PO-turtch,” with Marjetica sounding close to “Mari-EH-tee-tza”) was born in 1953 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she still lives. She got her start in architecture, but began making building-themed art about 15 years ago.
A typical Potrc begins with a structure or situation she finds in a distant place—say, Venezuela or Rajasthan, India—then tweaks to make more livable. “We should respect people in favelas, and learn from them, and their living conditions.” Other work comes closer to sculpture, as she mashes up constructions: in a big installation at MIT called Hybrid House, Potrc set down a wild building that hybridized features of buildings from Caracas, the West Bank, and West Palm Beach. By colliding three such different visions, Potrc achieves a surrealist edge that also embraces the real.
Berlin-based Norwegian artist Øystein Aassan uses a combination of materials including paper, plywood, ink, adhesive letters, photography, and pop cultural imagery to create sculptural installations and wall pieces that explore issues around memory and duplication. Influenced by the presentation of works in Peggy Guggenheim’s early-20th-century gallery, Art of This Century, Aasan arranges images and reproduced texts on architectural grids, or what the artist calls “display units”, drawing attention to the construction of the pieces.
Mary Lum Born 1951, in St. Cloud, MN, lives and works in North Adams, MA
Received her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY and her BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Carrol and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA
Mary Lum creates collages and wall works that outline and unfold space, gleaned from the margins of the urban environment. She collects fragmented images and the poetic undercurrents of the city through her camera lens, later dislocating these architectural details—stairwells and railings for instance—and repositioning them in geometric planes of color that open up space. In doing so, she draws attention to the overlooked but subliminally powerful architecture of modern life.
With frequent residencies in Paris, London, and New York, Lum casts herself in the role of the latter-day flâneuse (a French term meaning stroller coined by Charles Baudelaire). She ties her interest in flânerie back to Baudelaire, but also to Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project and the concept of psychogeography as practiced by 1950s and 60s writers and artists of the Situationists International. Pyschogeography suggests the experience of one’s environment through intuition rather than cognitive organization. This kind of perceptive exploration of cities feeds Lum’s interdisciplinary practice.
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!
Born in Cholet in 1926 François Morellet worked in his father’s business between 1948 and 1975. He taught himself to paint but also took lessons from a painter. His early landscapes, portraits and still lifes were executed in pastose brushwork in a subdued palette but they soon gave way to painting distinguished by stylized pictorial elements. By 1950 François Morellet was styling himself an “abstract painter”. That year Morellet had his first one-man show at the Galerie Creuze in Paris.
In the mid-1950s François Morellet was preoccupied with configuring the picture field as an infinite structure reaching beyond the confines of the picture itself. In so doing, François Morellet eliminated the all-over technique of a Jackson Pollock from his range since Morellet based each work on principles and systems established in advance. François Morellet was in fact more interested in method than in the finished painting.
Morellet joined “GRAV” (‘Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel’: 1960-1968), a group of Kinetic artists who explored the possibilities of the visual arts in a scientific and experimental way. Determined to find a new medium of expression, François Morellet used neon from 1963 as his material of choice. What interested Morellet in neon tubing was its specific material properties: its luminosity, the way it could be made to shut on and off automatically and the fact that it was manufactured.
From 1968 François Morellet became interested in architecture and space. He was given commissions for working in public spaces, including the Centre culturel in Compiègne, the La Défense section of Paris and the Kröller-Müller Museum Park in Otterlo.
In 1992 François Morellet summed up his work himself in “Relâche n° 1″ by combining in it all the materials he had ever used: painted canvas, neon tubing, adhesive tape and strips of metal. Following aleatoric principles, François Morellet allowed chance to transform his materials into an aesthetic disorder. His provocative stance and humor place Morellet closer to Dada than to Geometric Abstraction and Minimal art.
François Morellet lives in Cholet and Paris.
Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in London in 1932 and attended Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham . British painter and printmaker, his work is most often associated with abstraction. In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in the following year won the Turner Prize. He has exhibited internationally for over four decades and his work is included in major public and private collections all over the world. In 2003 he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honour. A major exhibition of his work was mounted at Tate Britain, London, in 2006. Also in 2006, The Independent declared him one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain, as his work helps many people express their emotions to others. Hodgkin’s work plays with the notion of “representational pictures of emotional situations,” and viewers delight exploring in the intense interactions of paint and surface. A brilliant colorist whose work lies between representation and abstraction, Hodgkin defies definitions.
Kenneth Josephson was born on July 1, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan. He completed his elementary education in Detroit. In 1953 after being sent in Germany by the United States Army he was trained in photo lithography and aerial reconnaissance photography. In 1957 he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, located in New York. There he studied under Minor White.
Kenneth Josephson created works in the 1960s and 1970s that placed him at the forefront of Conceptual photography. These early photographs focused on the act of picture making and offered playful commentary on photographic truth and illusion. Especially memorable from this era are his pictures within pictures. Since then, Josephson has extended his output to include elegant images of India’s street life, a series of affectionately witty nudes, and photographs of books folded into whimsical and sensuous forms.
Italy-based artist Daniele Papuli creates site-specific installations made of paper. The sculptural floor piece known as Cartoframma consists of over 10,000 strips of paper that curve and spiral out to create a magnificent rippling effect.
Despite being made entirely out of paper, the piece gives the illusion of a fibrous texture or liquid consistency. Papuli’s decision to work primarily with paper began in 1993 after trip to Berlin where he attended a workshop on the methods of manufacturing paper. Since then, the sculptor has gone on to utilize the delicate material, experimenting with its form and strength. Paper is, all at once, a difficult medium to work with, because of its fragility, and an inspiring one due to its flexibility and the ease with which one can manipulate it.
Gerhard Richter is known for a prolific and stylistically varied exploration of the medium of painting, often incorporating and exploring the visual effects of photography. Born 9 February 1932, Richter is a German visual artist that has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus following the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.
Richter is regarded as the top-selling living artist. In October 2012, Richter’s Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by a living artist at £21m ($34m).
“I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. “Because style is violent, and I am not violent.”
In the early 1960s, Richter began to create large-scale photorealist copies of black-and-white photographs rendered in a range of grays, and innovated a blurred effect (sometimes deemed “photographic impressionism”) in which portions of his compositions appear smeared or softened—paradoxically reproducing photographic effects and revealing his painterly hand. With heavily textured abstract gray monochromes, Richter introduced abstraction into his practice, and he has continued to move freely between figuration and abstraction, producing geometric “Color Charts”, bold, gestural abstractions, and “Photo Paintings” of anything from nudes, flowers, and cars to landscapes, architecture, and scenes from Nazi history. Richter absorbed a range of influences, from Caspar David Friedrich and Roy Lichtenstein to Art Informel and Fluxus.
“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.
