Tower Furniture for the House with the Little Chinese Girl, Mario Tchou Residence, Milan (All Photos By Gail)
Ettore Sottsass (1917 – 2007) designed the interiors of Mario Tchou’s Milan apartment and named the project for Tchou’s daughter, who captured his heart as she attempted to scale the Tower. The latticework, dowels and cubic proportions suggest the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Wiener Werkstatte, and the Bauhaus.
All Photos By Gail (Click on Any Image to Enlarge)
Clive Murphys’s Post Neo Proto Demo exhibit is one that Geoffrey and I literally stumbled onto while in the same West 26th Street building for an entirely different exhibit. But I was immediately drawn into the Magnan Metz Gallery’s street level space because I cannot resist an exhibit that mixes Contemporary art with Modern Furniture Design. So, yeah.
Post Neo Proto Demo, Murphy’s third solo show at the gallery, “comments on how ones living space is a representation of a created personal philosophy” – that is certainly true in my apartment! – exploring the relationship between the radical and the domestic.
Taking the legacy of Modernism and the avant-garde as its point of departure, Murphy deconstructs and reassembles, delicately blending the familiar with uncanny, the purposeful with the dysfunctional.
The exhibition includes altered domestic tableaus comprised of sculpture made with modified domestic materials. The result allows the viewer to participate in Murphy’s inversion of the classic furniture showroom by blending the purposeful with dysfunctional.
In addition, new works drawn and spray painted on pages from iconic furnishing catalogs mirror the arranged living space tableaus with a tongue-in-cheek disruption of idealized domesticity.
I wish that some of these items were for sale at IKEA, because I would totally love to see them in my apartment. At any rate, I left with few inspired new design ideas of my own.
Clive Murphy’s Post Neo Proto Demo Will be on Exhibit Through April 12th, 2014 at Mangan Metz Gallery, Located at 521 West 26th Street, in the Chelsea Gallery District.
Even though I grew up in Southern California, there are a lot of tourist attractions I never had a chance to see when I lived there. These days, when I go back to visit my family and friends I try to check out some of the places that especially showcase what a naturally beautiful area California is (which of course I never appreciated until I moved to the concrete jungle of NYC).
On my most recent visit at Christmas, I had a fun time with my friend Sue at the Japanese Garden, located in Balboa Park in the city of Van Nuys. If you’re a fan of the fun Tattoo Artist reality competition series Best Ink, then you might recall the Japanese Garden from this season’s episode where the Best Ink contestants visited it to get inspiration and sketch during the “Design an Asian Tattoo” challenge.
While the Japanese Garden is an ideal place to spend some quiet time enjoying nature, it has a constructive purpose as well as being beautiful to look at. The Garden is actually built on the site of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which was designed to produce reclaimed water that will meet the requirements of the California Department of Health Services and the County Health Department. The filtration process takes a total of about 11.5 hours, producing reclaimed water can be made available for specific reuse, with any excess being discharged to the Los Angeles River.
These photos were all taken in December, just a few days before Christmas (during the spell of 75 degree, sunny days that Californians refer to as “Winter”), so you can imagine how much more lush and floral this place looks when things start to grow again in the spring.
In the uncropped version of the above photo, you can clearly see the reclamation plant in the background.
The Garden is also an ideal spot to practice your amateur nature photography skills!
This photo was taken from inside the on site Tea House.
Wild Bamboo!
The Japanese Garden is Located at 6100 Woodley Ave, Van Nuys, California, 91406. Hours are Monday through Thursday from 11:00 AM until 4:00 PM, and Sunday from 10:00AM until 4:00PM (the last gate entry each day is at 3:15PM). The Garden is closed to the public on Friday and Saturday, on all LA County Holidays and if it rains within 24 hours of opening time and during open hours. It is suggested that you call (818)756-8166 on the day you wish to visit to make sure the Garden is open. Admission to the Garden is only $3.00 per person, $2.00 for Seniors 62+ and Children under 10. Exact change is appreciated.
This Koi Fish Mural is painted across the walls inside the Visitors Center.
Her heart is nearly breaking
The earth is nearly quaking
The Tokyo taxi’s braking
It’s screaming to a halt
And there’s nothing to hold on to when gravity betrays you
And every kiss enslaves you
She knows how hard her heart grows
under the nuclear shadows
She can’t just escape the feeling
repeating in her head
When after all the urges
some kind of truth emerges
We felt the deadly surges discovering Japan
Discovering Japan
The GIs only use her
They only ram right through her
Giving an eastern promise
That they could never keep
Seeing a million miles,
between their joke and smiles
She heard their hard denials
As the tears dropped sideways down her face, face
I woke up talking in the tongue of a different race, race
And as the flight touches down my watch says 8:02
But that’s midnight to you, midnight to you, midnight to you
I dreamed headlong collisions
in jet lag panavisions
I shouted Sayonara
It didn’t mean goodbye
But lovers turn to posers
Show up in film exposures
Just like in travel brochures,
Discovering Japan, discovering Japan
