Photo By Gail
Fred Wilson’s Guarded View (1991) aggressively confronts viewers with four black, headless mannequins dressed as museum guards. Each figure wears a uniform, dating to the early 1990s, from one of four New York cultural institutions: the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Photo By Gail
The Birth Machine Baby sculpture pictured above was photographed by me in the Last Rites Gallery in Manhattan, which has a number of original HR Giger pieces on display. Giger, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 74, is perhaps best known in popular culture as the designer of the Alien creatures in the film franchise of the same name, or, if you are a bit older, the designer of the cover of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s 1973 epic prog rock masterpiece, Brain Salad Surgery. But his career was about so much more than that.
Continue reading HR Giger’s Birth Machine Baby
All Photos By Gail
This Moss Lamp (1999) exemplifies designer Gaetano Pesce’s use of industrial production techniques and materials to produce unique objects. Here, he pours silicone in thread-like trails to achieve a textured and translucent sphere that casts a soft glow through irregular gaps and varied thicknesses. The end result is dictated by the behavior of the material.
All Photos By Gail
For the famed furniture designers, brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, startling materials are a hallmark of their design practice. Often evoking the rich street-market culture of their native Brazil, they utilize everyday elements in unexpected ways, such as this looped red cord for the opulent pile upholstery of this Vermelha (Red) chair (2007). Continue reading Eye On Design: Vermelha Chair By The Campana Brothers
All Photos by Gail
On the way to Jonathan Levine Gallery for this past Saturday’s opening reception, I walked by Elizabeth Dee Gallery and was drawn inside by this stunning creation, which is called Coffee Table Museum, and was created by artist Joel Otterson in 1989. The mixed media installation / sculptures includes a natural wood plank coffee table adorned with perhaps a dozen coffee pots and coffee makers plus cups and what you might call coffee service accessories.