All Photos By Gail
This black, heavily embellished dress from House of Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing for the Fall/Winter 2012–13 collection, feels less like a garment and more like a moment preserved in time. An unapologetic show-stopper, it reads as both armor and ornament —structured, deliberate, and unapologetically intricate. Continue reading Eye On Design: Balmain’s Beaded Time Capsule
All Photos By Gail
Monsters are usually pictured as scary creatures that represent the unknown. They stoke our deepest fears. Lee Bul’s version, Monster: Black (1998 – 2011) , harnesses sequence, crystals, dried flowers, and glass beads to create a defiant figure of social liberation.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lee Bul, Monster: Black
Photo By Gail
This striking sky-blue Venetian glass ewer captures the imagination with its fantastical dragon-shaped handle — a signature flourish of the 19th-century Venetian glass revival. During this period, master glassmakers looked back to the opulence of Renaissance designs, reinterpreting them with new techniques and dazzling colors. Recently, novel conservation methods have been applied to this ewer, reviving its original luster and reminding us why Venice’s glassmaking tradition has been celebrated for centuries.
Photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
Photo By Gail
In this photograph referred to as Glass Tears (1930–33), the face of a model known as Lydia acts as a backdrop for a group of small, gleaming glass balls. Man Ray made multiple variants of the image, in which the balls, like tears, appear to move and multiply across her static face from one version to another. He originally conceived of this shot as an advertisement for smudge-proof mascara.
Photographed as part of the Exhibit, Man Ray: When Objects Dream, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Photo By Gail
Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the early 1990s for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. For more than four decades, she has mined magazines and archives for photographs and texts, then reconfigured these materials to question their objectivity and grant them new meanings.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lorna Simpson, True Value