Richard Blackwell: GROTTO VOLUME 3

Flinders Lane Gallery is currently presenting the work of Richard Blackwell.  

Blackwell, an emerging talent from Canberra, continues his fascination with real and virtual boundaries for Grotto volume 3, following his solo shows in Canberra (Grotto volume 1) and Chicago (Grotto volume 2). Blackwell employs veneers, digital projections and aluminium printing techniques to play with ideas of spatial distortion, inspired by architectural forms and landscapes. Illusionary tropes transform accepted constraints between interior and exterior to create new readings of accessible and impenetrable space.

“Grotto” is a word that conjures up dark spaces that are mysterious and dripping with stalactite like forms. The Latin grupta means crypt and suggests an underworld. The creation of artificial grottoes in Italian and French gardens was fashionable in the mid 16th C. The outside of these grottoes often appeared like an enormous rock or rustic porch and inside might be temples, fountains, stalactites or imitation gems. According to Patsy Payne, Richard’s grotto is a fabrication, his caves and asteroids refer to material in the world whilst steadfastly remaining in the virtual world and really only able to enter our space on the surface of materials that are thin and flat: MDF, veneers, digital projections or paper. What size are these structures? Are they minute or giant; in the digital realm scale is arbitrary. Richard’ structures and shapes are visually compelling, geological yet strongly abstract, physically present yet illusory.

Faultline

 Flood

Supermolet

Designboom

Designboom: http://www.designboom.com/eng/

Designboom, "world's first web-based art" claimed by some people, is an architecture and design magazine, and currently has 4.2 million readers monthly from 190 countries. The Designboom website is produced in Milan, Italy, under the leadership of Birgit Lohmann, editor in chief. It provides snapshot reports from international design shows, architectural and art exhibitions, and interviews with and profiles of leading figures in the contemporary creative scene and in design history. Designboom publishes key contemporary issues and critiques of all aspects of art, architecture and design, especially those topics which enrich the dialogue between creative professionals, industry and society.(crowdsourcing.org)

The Designboom website includes a substantial section on Mies van der Rohe. This is organized into the following main parts: Biography of Mies van der Rohe, Mies van der Rohe Exhibitions, The Barcelona Pavilion, The Farnsworth House, The Twin Towers, and The Seagram Building. Each of these buildings is described in an illustrated article.

 

 

I like its clean background which sets off content in each site page and wonderful organisation of each section, and also fair demostration of the images/photos. Especially, this website adopts a brightly yellow colour used as backgrounds of label and  search input.

 

Tree of Codes

Serendipitously, I heard an inventive book, Tree of Codes. It has a different die-cut on every page, and explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first - as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his “favourite” book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Safran Foer’s own acclaimed voice.
Tree of Codes being a haunting new story by best-selling American writer-Jonathan Safran Foer is the story of ‘an enormous last day of life’. As one character’s life is chased to extinction, Safran Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. The book has a broad appeal: to both literary audiences, intrigued by Safran Foer's new way of writing and to design and art audiences who will revel in the book's remarkable and unique visual experience. At fewer than 3,000 words, it's a quick read – half your time will be taken up with turning the pages ever-so-gingerly and inserting a blank sheet behind each so as not to be distracted by the layers beneath – but it's surprisingly absorbing. I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even allowing for the fact that I love Schulz's story-cycle. Reading Tree of Codes without reference to the original, you may conclude that Foer has conjured beautiful new images from every page. Comparing the two texts paragraph by paragraph, you notice quite often that what seems like an audacious coinage is already there in the original; Foer has merely excised hunks of Schulz's luxuriant verbiage and exhibited a slimmed-down version of the master's vision. (Guardian.co.uk)

Book Details

• ISBN-10: 9780956569219
• ISBN-13: 978-0956569219
• Paperback: 285 pages
• Publisher: Visual Editions; First Edition edition (November 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• Product Dimensions: 22.1 x 14.2  x 2.7 cm
• Shipping Weight: 0.334kg

 

National Geographic Magazine

January 1915 cover of The National Geographic Magazine

National Geographic Magazine is the official journal of National Geographic Society. It published its first issue in 1888, just nine months after the Society itself was founded. It contains articles about geography, popular science, history, culture, current events, and photography. It is immediately identifiable by the characteristic yellow frame that surrounds its front cover. The National Geographic normally issues monthly issues.

With a worldwide circulation in thirty-three language editions of nearly nine million, more than fifty million people receive the magazine every month. In May 2007, 2008, and 2010 National Geographic magazine won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ General Excellence Award in the over two million circulation category. In 2010, National Geographic Magazine also received the top ASME awards for photojournalism and essay. (Wikipedia)

The cover design of the magazine was brutally frank and plain, until cover illustrations began appearing in 1959. There have been six different cover designs, the most well-known being the yellow cover with the contents in black print, surrounded by white filagree on the borders, which has been in use since 1910. The magazine began in a 6 x 9 1/2 inch format, becoming 7 x 10 in 1900.

The latest issue: May 2011

The latest issue (May 2011, preview from the site) :
Yosemite's Superclimbers, they are hanging on by a fingertip-without a rope