Photo By Gail
Skulls and Tanks: they go together! Graffiti artist K-NOR created this exciting and proactive mural, which may or may not be called Dandelions (check out the mouth of the tank gun) for the Wasteland-themed show at First Street Green Art Park. This piece is on the south side of the park facing Houston Street! See if before it’s history!
Photos By Gail
This deep-fried toy tank is one of seven identical models that make up the artwork entitled Visual Art, Add Oil! March Forward! (1999 – 2005) by Chinese artist Zheng Guogu.
Photographed as Part of the Exhibit Art and China After 1989 at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
A few weeks ago, we went over to The Fashion Institute of Technology to check out the 2017 MFA in Illustration Visual Thesis Exhibition, which was entitled 13 Stories. It is while visiting the exhibit that I discovered a cool Pink Thing created by FIT student and MFA candidate Necdet Yilmaz, who is a native of Turkey. Necdet’s visual thesis, Happy Tank, is a story about a little machine built for war that doesn’t want to fight. Happy Tank must be sent to war, but refuses to fire at a large building where a child is seen crying. For disobeying the order, Happy Tank is decommissioned and melted down. The story concludes with Happy Tank being recycled and used to construct a playground years after the war is over.
Screen Shots from Happy Tank Animated Film (Above and Below)
Necdet explains that this project “is related to my written thesis, War Themed Childrn’s Books and Propaganda. In wars, children are often affected and exploited as a propaganda tool. However, my project is in opposition to what I researched in my thesis. Personally, I am inspired to create these piece because of my background. My home country, Turkey, is located near the Middle East where there is constant war. This instability affects people in the region, like myself, economically, socially and psychologically.
“This body of work is executed in three different mediums: animation, print in the form of a children’s book and toy design. Using pdf software and animation for the first time while I was creating this work was an exciting challenge for me. I learned a lot about myself while discovering the intricacies of unfamiliar technologies. In particular, especially, when I created the animation I learned how designing three-dimensional characters, objects and environments, using different camera angles, lighting and sound in combination enhanced my creative skill.”
Given our political climate today, Happy Tank could be considered more relevant now than ever. You can see more projects by Necdet at his website, located at This Link.
Photographed in the Museum at FIT, Located on Seventh Avenue at 27th Street, as Part of the 13 Stories Exhibit, which is now Closed.
All Photos By Gail
This past weekend, Geoffrey and I finally made it to Surround Audience, the Triennial at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit fills nearly every floor of the museum and, as such, is a bit overwhelming with all of its fabulous, arty things to take in over just one visit. Rather than recap the entire show, I decided to write about a few of my favorite individual pieces, one of which is this aquarium-like sculpture creation called Distant Feel, by NYC-based French artist Antoine Carala.
Distant Feel (2015) features a new symbol for empathy — E3, or two Es facing each other — and a communication campaign for a message with no product except feeling. Recognizing how an inundation of the various causes that are blared on the news and on social-media feeds can inure us to the pain of others, or the urgency of issues and movements around the world, the artist set out to rebrand Empathy and devise and distribute a more effective expression of this feeling. The project was inspired by the genesis of the peace sign and conceived as a potential generational update.
There are no fish in this tank, but the organic sculpture closely resembles a coral reef, supporting an assortment of live plants in pastel shades of pink and violet. It’s really lovely and calming to look at. I don’t remember if this piece is on the second or third floor of the exhibit, but I am pretty sure it is adjacent to the gallery with NSA Teletubbies — which is a must-see..
Find out more about the Triennial, on through May 24th, 2015, at This Link
Read the back story on this unique tank vehicle at this link.
