Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes
Artspace, the Twin Cities-based organization, has pioneered what sounds like the ultimate niche idea: It’s a nonprofit real estate developer for artists. Its flagship project, the Northern Warehouse in the Lowertown district of St. Paul, Minnesota, has been housing artists for more than 20 years in the heart of a neighborhood that’s undergone vast transformation.
This is a promising subject, but the article is very disappointing. Check out the ending. Is it possible to load more caveats into something posing a conclusion? I guess it might be.
One mighthope that its permanent presence might keep some of the neighborhood’s character intact, regardless of whatever else happens. If that’s the case, the Northern Warehouse model suggests that it’s possible to break the SoHo effect but still leverage the urban pioneering instinct of artists. Artspace doesn’t prove that artists can power the economy of whole cities. Its success— born out of an intricate model that emphasizes the long-term stability of an arts community — hardly translates to a blanket endorsement of the equation that artists = urban prosperity. But it seems to be doing something pretty effective in the Twin Cities.
Uh huh. Or on the other hand: MAYBE NOT!
Geocoded Art is a collection of world’s greatest landscape, cityscape and seascape paintings. Explore the location of these paintings using Google or Bing Maps. Search by painting name, artist or region.
When you think of ghost towns, your mind doesn’t typically gravitate to New York, Paris, and Beijing. Yet that’s what these thriving metropolises have become in the hands of Lucie & Simon, a Paris-based art duo behind
When you think of ghost towns, your mind doesn’t typically gravitate to New York, Paris, and Beijing. Yet that’s what these thriving metropolises have become in the hands of Lucie & Simon, a Paris-based art duo behind the apocalyptic photo series, “Silent World.”
Lucie & Simon, who were born without last names to judge from their website, have used a digital scalpel and a special filter to excise the human flesh from city landscapes. They leave just enough evidence of our species’ presence – a lone woman in a blood-red coat in Madison Square Garden, for example, or a hoisted flag in Tiananmen Square – to make the mysterious, mass disappearance as eerie as possible.
UPDATE: More on this here.
The map-based art of Matthew J. Rangel: In “a transect – Due East” Rangel uses the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, rising from California’s San Joaquin Valley, to explore “the ways in which human constructs of land influence our experience of place.”
Between 2006 and 2008, Rangel walked a combined 200 miles, documenting the landscapes he encountered by fusing his vision of nature, sublime in the tradition of Romantic landscape painting, with the bureaucratic and commercial boundaries that delineate and define today’s idea of wilderness.
Layering his drawings and field notes on top of photographs and government-commissioned maps, the series forces viewers to consider the complex implications of human limits and expectations being imposed on the majesty and uncontrollable force of nature, as seen in jagged mountain peaks and tumbled boulders.
Accurate Maps vs. Useful Maps — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers
Drawn freehand directly on a computer and printed on an inkjet printer, Ross Racine’s works do not contain photographs or scanned material. Racine’s digital drawings examine the relation between design and actual lived experience, subverting the apparent rationality of urban design and exposing conflicts that lurk beneath the surface.
For his series titled “No Way Home”, Spanish artist and photographer Rafa Zubiría created beautiful surreal images of buildings floating in mid-air. More here.
Toronto based photographer David Trautrimas creates hybrid architectural buildings using everyday objects such as coffee pots, scales and old lawnmowers. Trautrimas searches for source materials which allude to a greater architectural doctrine usually unnoticed in these machines. Then, by dramatic distortion of scale and context, elements of these objects are meticulously re-assembled into strikingly original structures that are paradoxically familiar by virtue of their origins.
