At first glance the sculptures constructed by artist Li Hongbo appear to be chiseled out of stone, but once manipulated and pulled, they reveal the use of a different medium. Once the viewer uncovers that the sculpture can not only move, but stretch, spread, twist, bend, and contract, the pieces exhibit a much greater impact.
Hongbo first developed an interest in paper when he worked in the book publishing business. He recognized the vitalness of paper in the design of a book, analyzing the characteristics and durability of the different types. He adopted the “paper gourd” method, which is commonly recognized from paper lanterns.
Once Hongbo discovered connecting paper, endless possibilities unfurled. He adopted a layering process, which takes months to complete, and carefully considers the depth, width, mass, and center of each piece to ensure a balanced construction. Cutting, chiseling, and sanding each piece as if it were made of stone, Hongbo’s paper 3D sculptures are more than meet’s the eye.
Once again tonight, the good folks at the Weinstein Company invited me to a pre-screening of their latest release “No Escape”. The story centers around Owen Wilson, simply trying to get his family out of what he believes is a random bout of civil unrest in South East Asia. I’ll let you take a look at the trailer (if you haven’t seen it yet) before I delve into the spoiler free review.
So presuming you just took the two minutes to watch the trailer, you would assume you get the idea of the film. However, the first point I have to make is that the movie is a bit deeper than what the trailer would have you believe, which is refreshing. Long gone are the days where trailers would get you interested in a film, and instead you can see an entire movie in two minutes. ‘No Escape’ manages to entice audiences with the story without giving away all of the surprises it has in store. (If you think throwing a little girl off a building is the best the film has to offer, you’re quite wrong.) The movie is uncommonly tense, with an unrelenting pace that drives home the stakes and the stresses of this very real feeling, very terrifying situation. From the opening scene of the film, the severity of events to come is boldly apparent, and the depiction of characters is quite true to life. There is also a welcomed lack of typical film clichés, (If people are hiding, no one sneezes and accidentally alerts their pursuers) and there are a handful of moments that seem to go in a typical direction, and take a drastic turn.
All the characters in the movie behave as one might expect them to in the real world, especially Sterling Jerins and Claire Geare, (the two daughters), and their mother played by Lake Bell is a perfect balance of what someone would do, and what someone should do in the film’s context. Some may wonder if funny-man Owen Wilson would be properly suited for a movie like this, but rest assured his acting chops shine with a perfect balance of intensity, intelligence, and a bit of humor in the right spots (primarily the film’s first act). Owen Wilson isn’t some type of John McClane style, American action hero, he’s simply a man who has to do what is necessary to keep his family safe, and escape the situation they’ve been placed in. One of the best parts of the film however, is Pierce Brosnan. His brash, rude, wise cracking character Hammond seems to be an oddity at first, but later on in the film makes his importance known, and he delivers my favorite line of the film… “I’m going to head to a strip joint. I should put on my sweat pants…. so they know I mean business.”
The events portrayed in “No Escape” never jump the bounds of reality, yet can be horrifying in spots (after you watch the film look at the photo below again, when you know who’s holding that gun.) Everything seems to be extremely well thought out. Even at the level of sound design, when a bullet whizzes past, and strikes a wall, it SOUNDS terrifying. The CGI in the film is minimal, and even when it is used, is barely noticeable. There are some ultra violent scenes, with people getting hacked to death with machetes, or run over by cars, or shot in the face, however, the point of those scenes isn’t for the gore, it’s to show the shockingly low level some humans can get to when they are forced to. The film does slip in a few places however, starting with the over use of “shaky cam”. Spots in the first act seemed to try a bit too hard to establish danger with shaking the camera to the point where I thought I was going to get a headache. There were also certain slow motion shots that seemed a little too long lasting, or just pointless all together. Also we see some type of an odd divorce sub-plot that doesn’t really go anywhere for some reason, and a few scenes ended with a quite predictable rescue of a character, while others were the total opposite, by seeing the family saved by things that seemed to come out of nowhere for no reason.
All in all thought, this is an amazing, real world, tension filled film that, despite a few leaps on geopolitical logic, is one you should see when it comes out on August 26th, (Sorry Vick, I got the release date mixed up). It’s nice to an exilerating story that isn’t a remake, or a reboot, or a sequel come to the big screen, and although the film is extremely graphic, it’s base in realism stands firm. The cast shines, and the balances of challenges, issues, themes, characters, and motivations all make perfect sense (which is hard to find in many modern films). I highly recommend ‘No Escape’ as your movie film for this weekend. It damn near makes me want to attend some type of survivalist training camp, just so I would know what to do if things ever went that south.
Art Noir is reminiscent of the classic era of films of the 1940’s-50’s; nostalgic films founded on good vs. evil, crime and revenge and where the hero saves the day. By today’s standards, art noir is all about style more than crime.
Artist Marko Manev has created a series of eye-catching Superhero Noir Posters. Featuring Batman, Thor, Captain America, Wolverine and more.
Born in Skopje, Macedonia Marko Manev is a conceptual mixed-media artist, graphic designer & illustrator. Active in the fine art and the pop-culture tribute art scene, he currently works as freelance designer and illustrator, creating limited edition prints and movie posters.
His clientele includes Marvel, Lucas Films, 20th Century Fox and Star Wars to name a few. His passion noir film posters from a bygone era have inspired his brilliant series. His noir era art has a bold look and an iconography all its own, taking us back to kinder, simpler times when the hero saved the day.
“Since the world is obsessed with everything that’s golden, I decided to make a fun 3D series that takes the popular “gold” naming for a spin and tries to depict these products literally or how they would look like, if they were truly made out of gold.
These were printed in 70 x 100 cm sizes, framed and exhibited at a club gallery Plac 33/45 in Ljubljana. The invitation was also made as a render of a product, you can guess which one if you scroll through the end :)” Črtomir Just
An epic new trailer for the movie “The Martian” looks even more intense than the last one, and it raises some intriguing questions about the value of human life in space exploration.
Set to the howling Jimi Hendrix song “All Along the Watchtower,” the new trailer for “The Martian,” directed by Ridley Scott, features some thrilling (and stressful) clips of astronauts braving Martian storms, rocket launches and other near-death experiences. The film focuses on astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), who is mistakenly presumed dead by his fellow Mars explorers and is left behind on the Red Planet.
When NASA officials discover that Watney is alive, they must decide whether to rescue him and, in doing so, risk the lives of the other six crew members. At one point in the trailer, the director of NASA (played by Jeff Daniels) grapples with the decision, stating, “It’s bigger than one person,” to which another character replies, “No. It’s not.” The film raises the question: If a person willingly embraces the risks of space exploration, should he or she be rescued at all costs?
Artist Stefan Pabst skillfully creates the illusion of three-dimensionality. His phenomenal pieces, which appear to be 3D objects and people, are actually anamorphic illustrations. The designer started out by painting portraits in 2007, but yearned to do something different from his usual work. “Every day for 10 hours I was painting faces. It was a challenge to begin with but I got bored,” Pabst told BuzzFeed. “I wanted to go beyond the boundaries of the sheet of paper and leave 2D behind.” Soon, this dream became a reality as the painter continued to explore his remarkable talent.
On his YouTube channel, viewers can see Pabst in action as his proves that his paintings are authentic. He’s produced a moon that rises above his paper, a horse who appears to be peeking out of his canvas, and an eerily realistic spider. While these are highly impressive, the artist wants to continue to improve by creating 3D portraits. “I want to inspire people through my art and show them that they can do anything,” says Pabst. “I want to show the magic of painting.”
Fashion is always changing and 3D printing has really begun to catch on as a way for designers to create outfits, accessories, and even complete dresses using a technology previously delegated to prototyping hardware and industrial parts.
The design studio Nervous System has created a novel process that allows a 3-D printed dress to move and sway like real fabric. The bespoke software behind it, called Kinematics, combines origami techniques with novel approaches to 3-D printing, pushing the technology’s limits.
Instead of pinning fabric to a dress form, a Kinematics garment starts as a 3-D model in a CAD program. Kinematics breaks the model down into tessellated, triangular segments of varying sizes. Designers can control the size, placement, and quantity of the triangles in a Javascript-based design tool and preview how the changes will impact the polygonal pinafore. Once the designer is satisfied, algorithms add hinges to the triangles uniting the garment into a single piece and compress the design into the smallest possible shape to optimize the printing process, often reducing the volume by 85 percent.
It’s not just the dress — Sandy’s entire outfit has been 3D printed. As for the dress though, it is called the A.X.I.O.S. Dress, which stands for “Advanced Xtreem Integrated Operating Scales.” It is made of an armor-like pattern created by designer Cameron Williams back in April 2014. Using SOLIDWORKS, Williams has modified this pattern slightly, to make it more appropriate for a dress design. It is 3D printed using about $78 worth of ABS, Wolfbend TPU, and TPE materials, and was designed and printed to be a perfect fit for Sandy’s body.
“The dress is more comfortable than I imagined, it even makes music when I move,” said Sandy.
Bike chains are versatile, and not just because you can use them to propel a bicycle or as a wallet chain.
Roller bike chains—flexible, slinky, steel mechanisms—can also be used for fine art. South Korean Artist, Seo Young Deok, has fashioned an exhibit of bike chain figure sculptures, a few of which are shown below.
The figures—mostly torsos and faces—look muscular and meticulously proporioned, some in an ancient Greek fashion, others in almost a “Lara Croft: Tomb Rader” way. The bodies are broken or shredded at the limbs and necks, or as a gash up the torso. From perusing the images, one may get an impression both of robot war and classical art simultaneously.
According to Oddity Central, Deok looks for inspiration in “crowded markets, and metro or bus stations, but also in Buddhist sculptures and paintings, which he has always admired.”
First prize winner of the international contest for contemporary Aubusson tapestry.
Confluentia project, at the junction between furniture and tapestry, joins in a weaving carpeted furniture and pill rug of Aubusson.
Two wood bedside tables embellished with a tapestry are connected by it, creating a new link, a part of space in the space.
The object appears as a landscape, in the manner of the Aubusson tapestry of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it is seen as a flat stretch between two woody reliefs.
A domestic landscape creating by the union of two familiar typologies in housing world: side furniture and rug. The tapestry presents an abstract drawing suggesting a peaceful space, like a lake, while being lively by the gush of two headwaters inviting to contemplation.
We can see the pattern of a topographical map, by definition, the drawing of a place. A hybrid territory, a micro-landscape between design furniture and tapestry.
The user goes inside the landscape, lives the scene and becomes an actor in the tapestry. Thus, the action is not only set-up by the look of the tapestry but also ” with, around, on”.
The interlacing of threads and colors is mixed up to build Confluentia, point of confluence between perception in-visu and experience in-situ.
The show entitled Midnight Reverie is Audrey Kawasaki’s second showing at a New York space and it flirts with more dreamy undertones with her seductive feminine figures. Similar to her previous turn at LeVine, there will be a limited edition available. Entitled You Come First, the print will be sold in person on a first come first served basis with the sale beginning on September 8th at 1pm in the gallery.
In 1949, LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso in Vallauris, France. He showed Pablo some photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates jumping in the dark. Picasso was immediately inspired, these photos were the result.
International tours, EDC appearances, Festival sets, Vegas gigs, and never ending music studio hours can do a good job of keeping two friends apart. But for the first time in over a year, DJ Storm and DJ Jeff Phantom have teamed up again for another multi-genre mish-mash of mashups. ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ sticks closer to the the electronic music side of the fence, and where it does feature hip hop, it does so with remixes. However, the ebb and flow of the 65 minute long mix features a range from House, to Twerk, to Trap that is sure to keep any listener entertained. Check out a demo below, and click the photo above to download.
Check out this amazing series by the German photographer Elizaveta Porodina.
muse : Kate / MIA ARTISTICA style : Emma Pulbrook hair : Mustafa Yanaz make up : Heiko Palach set : Beatrice Schuell light : Josef Beyer art objects: Marion Wunderlich
“The sketch is arguably the most critical stage of an illustration. Conjuring thumbnails, narrowing the concept, clarifying the message, all of it boils down to the sketch: the blueprint for what will eventually be the final piece. For me, lazy sketching tends to result in client misunderstandings, technical frustrations, slower execution, and (worst of all) lukewarm finals. I respect the sketch phase. Up until a year ago, it was also the one step I absolutely dreaded.
Before last fall, I did all of my sketching in Photoshop. Thumbnails were pencil and paper and sometimes those would be scanned in as the base layer, but the real work was all digital. My problem is that I just don’t really enjoy working digitally. Something about it has never felt very satisfying to me. “
“I can’t say for sure where the interest in sketching in paint started, but I believe the thing that finally tipped me to try it out was a box of preliminaries by Robert Maguire that were being sold for obscenely low prices at San Diego Comic Con. I have always loved seeing these sorts of miniature illustrations whenever I come across them and, for whatever reason, these in particular inspired me. It occurred to me that sketching might be more fun if I could do it this way. At this point I’ve done hundreds of 5×7 inch figure studies so I knew that I was comfortable at that scale. I decided to try doing something similar on the next job where I’d have some creative flexibility and a comfortable deadline.
I decided my surface should be the same as my typical go-to (Masonite primed rough with acylic gesso). I wanted to work monochrome, but decided a colored ground would help give the pieces a bit more tonal variety and allow me a “spot color” if I needed it, so I coated each panel with cadmium red acrylic. This method was something I was already testing on my “re-cover” series and the success of those encouraged me. The tricky part was altering my workflow.”
“There were a few obvious drawbacks here. The first and most obvious was I would have to shoot way more reference than before. Instead of shooting for the chosen idea, I was working up multiple ideas. This also ran the risk (which has bit me a few times so far) of having the client want completely new sketches in a new direction which meant bringing the model back in for a second shoot (and paying for that second shoot). There was also a slight concern about letting the reference drive the sketch as oppose to the other way around.
The upshot of all this was that once I had approval, I could dive straight into the painting with no delay and it would be as close as possible to the approved sketch because my reference was already assembled. It felt like a fair exchange, all things considered.”
This over-the-top looking setup gives you a comfy ergonomic leather seating unit with touch-screen controls, and a view to kill with three computer displays positioned just right for you to lean back and enjoy.
The whole thing is motorized too, so you can adjust the angle of your environment without getting up out of your chair. It’s also got a work surface for a keyboard and mouse, and the monitors can be positioned at a flat eye-level if you want to get some work done.
For Kinki magazine, H magazine, and exhibited at The Chalet as part of Streetland & Glasgow International Festival of Art 2010.
And here they come – these shamanistic hybrids – half-human half-sculpture
made out of the simplest and most conventional materials like paper, glue, cord
and tape. Merging into some sort of mythological creatures, that only have
been constructed for the very purpose of being captured by the camera in order
to get disassembled into the numerous disconnected elements again.
Being squeezed into physical two-dimensional picture in the printing process,
they are getting re-cut and transformed to a complete unique, yet undiscov-
ered species. Every new species is constructed manually by multiplication of
the same depiction that is being glued together to a brand new composition,
“evolutionizing” the old one.
If anyone has watched the movie “The Perfect Storm”, you’d know that when multiple formidable forces connect, things can get pretty ugly. That’s exactly what we have in the case of Duckwrth, The Kickdrums, and Brooklyn Gypsy. The track Naruto has already been spun all over the world, before the video even dropped. Shot by Mancy Gant, the Naruto video is both tribal, and urban. Simple, unique, and complex. Stunningly introspective, and still manages to give people what they want from Duckwrth. Check out the visuals for Naurto below.
Special Thanks to Team Backpack, Lino Brown, Christina Ting, Rare Panther, Blind Youth and Brooklyn.
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