For an interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama created a totally white room as a palette for visiting children to embellish as they pleased with colored dot stickers; ultimately thousands of stickers were used, to make bulls-eyes, whorls, dribbles and overlapping hits of color. The results of this crazy-simple exercise in spontaneous design is the increasingly stunning transformation of the white room…a big lesson to our often white-stuck decorating heads. Check out the transformation from start to finish…
(Video link here.) Our friend Maureen Rolla sent us this email; it is so expressive, it became a post:
“I am writing to tell you about a person and documentary that you should know about – it is called “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” – about an amazing architect, thinker, dreamer who ran a program called the Rural Studio at Auburn University in which architecture students designed and built homes, churches, and other structures for the residents of the very poor Hale County, Alabama. It is perhaps the best statement about the transformative power of architecture on regular human beings lives that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to big name, star power architecture that pretty much only benefits the star architect…) The students use some ordinary materials (hay bales, tires) in innovative ways to create some simple yet soaring projects. The film is available on Netflix (disk only, unfortunately). Unfortunately Mockbee died in 2001, only in his early 60s.”
We found a trailer for Citizen Architect (above) that makes us hungry to see the film. Check out this moving interview with Mockbee read more…
We always admire people who fearlessly take things apart on the way to REconfiguring them in a new way. So we love the antique table Faye from You are the River hacked, to give it a rustic/modern look; she salvaged rough-hewn top and added moderne legs. “I picked up a super funky table on Craigslist for $50, removed all the rusty screws, sanded it down, removed the legs and voila, I have yet another dining table!” It’s the legs that make it (They remind us of the one Sally designed out of black steel some time ago. read more…
After we posted Gary Chang’s 344 square foot Hong Kong apartment, we thought we’d pretty much seen the pinnacle of morphing possibilities for TINY. Until this morning, when we found ourselves riveted by this video of photographer Christian Schallert‘s 258 square foot Barcelona apartment (apx 11′ x 23′): a former pigeon loft re-envisioned by designer Barbara Appolloni. (Check out the “before” shots in the beginning!) We’ve seen this clever configuration of cubes likened to Legos, but find the image misleading. This completely built-in, every-need-and-square-inch-considered space is like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes that suddenly open to reveal hidden chambers; everything is hidden behind walls until Schallert wants to access it. It is an “action apartment”, given great charm by the stunning view and penthouse feel. read more…
Mondoblogo recently published this cell phone shot of a “my cousin’s” house AFTER a tornado set down on Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with these words:
“He is a 1st year law student on full scholarship at U of A. (Roll Tide) He and his wife Ceci are lucky to be alive. They were trapped in their bathroom until the Fire Department cut them out…. They literally have NOTHING left, only the clothes on their backs…
I post this only because you never know when something like this might happen to you or someone you love. So stop your griping, bitching and complaining about the little annoyances in life and get out there and enjoy it while you can, for as long as you can.”
Liz Massey of Creative Liberty blog featured an interview called with Sally in her April e-newsletter. Check it out here to learn how ‘the improvised life’ came about, and Sally’s rant-ette on the creative process, how cooking relates to improvising, and the benefits of adopting an improvisational frame of mind… Here’s an excerpt:
What advice would you have for someone who’d like to become more improvisational in their life, but is afraid to try? Fear, of course, can put the kibosh on anything if you let it. People tell me they are afraid they will fail, make mistakes, look like a fool, not be perfect, break the taboo of who they are “supposed” to be …
I view improvising as a practice: when you have an idea you’d like to try, even if you think you’ll be terrible at it, or that it will be a failure, ask yourself why not? and try it. If possible, suspend the inhibiting idea of doing things perfectly. If you are afraid of people judging you, work in private at first, but do it, take the step to see what happens if you try out your idea. Just doing that much is liberating. With practice, it gets easier and easier, and then there’s no way you cannot continue, because it is thrilling and incredibly illuminating.
Is there anything else on this topic you’d like to add? When you have an idea, I recommend asking yourself: “what would happen if …?” and “why not?”, and saying YES instead of NO frequently. Perfection is overrated. read more…
In this video, artist Francis Alys pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City over a nine hour period, here edited down to 5 minutes. The cumbersome block gradually diminishes to the size of a tennis ball, until it finally melts into a puddle of water on the pavement. Writes artist Andrea Hickey :
“… stretching the object’s inexorable dissolution through the space of the city, the artist makes the point that progress is not inevitable – in short, that sometimes making something leads to nothing.”
It reminded of me the invisible town of Silica, in the West Virginia Appalachians, that I used to visit years ago. There was an abandoned camp on the grassy banks of a river: a schoolbus with a huge stone hearth built onto it, that I imagined a hermit to have lived in. The evidence of his life – newspapers, a few pots and pans – gradually got swept away by wind and rain and as the bus sank deeper into the ground each year, as though dissolving. That very spot was once the thriving town of Silica, which I’d seen pictures of: a glass factory, a store, houses, at the turn of the century. There was not a bit of it left, all fallen down, melted into the earth….
Still, although making something sometimes SEEMS to lead to nothing, that “nothing” is always SOMETHING: a memory, a lesson or idea for later use, or some passing effect that’s not often not apparent…one thing subtly reverberating with another…
We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971 read more…
Knowing that Lydia Wills was about to move to a bigger apartment, we enlisted Ellen Silverman to photograph her 600-square-foot studio near Gramercy Park. We’ve known Lydia for years and have watched her apartment evolve into a home with lots of good ideas, far too many to cover in one post. So we thought we’d do the broad strokes now and then focus on specifics during the next few weeks. The real story of Lydia’s apartment is that it slowly evolved, as Lydia did, growing out of one thing and into another, as she discovered furniture, fabrics and lighting that resonated with her life.
Lydia has been sewing since she was young and loves natural textiles, which she used to define the space (often incorporating unusual and vintage fabrics). Over years, she discovered and fell in love with the work of Scandinavian and European Modernist designers. She bought some enduring, beautifully designed pieces of furniture and lighting (mostly on Ebay, for a fraction of their cost), like the leather chair by Yngve Ekstrom, the fantastic table by Bengt Gullberg and the chandelier by Eric Hoglund.
Since there is nothing more gratifying than seeing before-and-after photos, we’ll start with a picture of what this apartment looked like BEFORE, when someone else had it: read more…
Constance Old recently sent us a compelling email: “After our comments exchange on your post about “American Pickers” I had a feeling I might see this table again that location agent Andrea Raisfeld plucked from my car and reworked.”
And sure enough, the little table appeared completely transformed on Andrea and her husband Bill Abranowicz‘s blog A + B See:
“Andrea is a proud dumpster diver. Much of the furnishings in our homes were procured from places other than a store. While we buy plenty, we love the thrill of the find at a tag sale, side of the road pick-up, or thrift store. It’s part of our reduce, re-use, recycle philosophy.
On a recent scout to one of her client’s homes, the homeowner, artist Constance Olds, pointed to a car filled with all kinds of stuff destined for the thrift store. Andrea peered into the back seat, and spotted a small wooden table. Constance originally purchased it at a thrift store to use as her daughter’s drawing table, and had always intended to repaint it herself, but years later still hadn’t gotten around to it, and now the daughter was adult sized. Within hours of getting it home, we had it painted.
I love my dumpster diving momma!”
Now that is Creative Re-Use! Here’s how they did it: read more…
Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years.
To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be fun to run a picture of Sally’s hacked kitchen as it was photographed for just one such magazine (note the artfully arranged array of photogenic foods) alongside an i-Phone photo Sally took one day when all-hell-was-breaking-lose in that same kitchen… and she couldn’t keep up with all the things she had to do, not to mention close the cabinet door, or break up an Amazon box to take to the recycling bin or even pick up a paper off the floor.
A lot of that stuff on the counter are objects waiting to be photographed and half-done projects for ‘the improvised life’, amidst bills and lists and…
The truth of that kitchen is that it waxes and wanes… gets messy then neat…out-of-control then serene and collected, and back again. Real life and making and doing is a wild business: work….in….progress….
In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currinsaid something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going:
“…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “
A really big part of improvising/making/creating is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. We suspect that is one of the reasons why improvising is difficult for some people:
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’sGreen Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&Mwrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
A while back, the N.Y. Times reported on a stylish mom whose muslin-covered John Derian sofa became a canvas for her daughter and her seventh grade class to decorate with markers. The article didn’t say whether she’d intended the white muslin sofa to be painted on or whether the blank canvas she’d meant only to be chic and minimal inspired a fit of improvisation. No matter, I suppose. It IS a great idea, and was taken a step further by her son, who embellished two muslin-covered arm chairs with Fabric Paint clearly an incredibly fun thing for a kid to do.
clearly an incredibly fun thing for a kid to do.
