Retail Therapy

NY-based design agency GHaVisualAgency creates a lush multi-screen video wallpaper 'Nokia in Wonderland' (also click on the 'Multiscreen Version' for the true experience) for the Nokia flagship store. The screens in these stores display some surprisingly abstract work and has developed an interesting approach to environmental media in a branded commercial space, featuring work by other newmedia design heavies HiRes, Tomato, Universal Everything, and others. But GHava are my friends and they did some cool Supernature-ish video so I'm pimping them here. Word.
Like other flagship retail locations (Prada, Comme des Garcons, Samsung et al) the keyword is experience design and the idea is less about selling Product and more about Brand-as-Lifestyle. Problematics aside, from a critical perspective this concept points in an interesting way to the convergence of diffuse fields such as architecture, media, marketing, and product design, and baldly demands of us, the consumer, a kind of tribal allegiance to certain market forces which our participation in a techno-savvy culture demands...like in the novel Snow Crash, in which any abstract organization of business activity operates as an independent nation state: the Mafia, Chinatown, religious cults, McDonald's...Nokia?

Reactive Video Garden

A clever commercial installation developed in Processing by the collaborative team of i2off.org + r3nder.net.

Chris Natrop's Fabulous Hanging Gardens

above (L to R): Fern Space; Sparkle Bomb.

I just came across the work of Chris Natrop via dataisnature, and don't know how it could have stayed off my radar. Natrop creates intricate hand-cut paper sculptures and wall pieces that make careful use of the space, light, shadow, and application of surface materials such as wall paint, nail polish, and watercolor. The installations bring to mind both the rich decorative objects of Tord Boontje or Petah Coyne and the swirling, myth-infused psychogeographies of Matthew Ritchie.

above (L to R): Landscape Blossom Pop; Pink Dimension

Some of the smaller works have an almost devotional or altar-like composition; Natrop's process is both meditative and poetic without being cloying or precious, and responds to (in the artist's words) the visible but 'hidden essence' of his home of Los Angeles, an overpowering sensual environment of extreme urbanism infiltrated by a relentless efflorescence.
Visit the artist's website here, and read an interview with him here.

Jorge Pardo @ Friedrich Petzel

Jorge Pardo, the whimsical & prolific artist/designer, has a solo exhibition of objects & paintings now through April 21st at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea.
Pardo is popular for his multidisciplinary installations which blur the distinction between 'design' and 'fine art', although I feel that's more because he chooses to show his work in galleries and because his 'design' work--furniture, lighting, interiors--seems vaguely more conceptual and part of a process of working in which the artifact or fabrication is more an outcome rather than a goal. As such, the works in this exhibition create the ambiance of a not-completely-finished boutique hotel lobby.
The main feature of the show are a couple dozen milled-PVC chandelier pendant lamps hanging at various lengths from the ceiling. While variants of this design can be seen in multiple trendy boutiques right now, closer investigation reveals a form less akin to traditional ornament and something a bit edgier and aquatically primal--think Ernst Haeckel vs. Tord Boontje.
The paintings are actually silkscreen & applique on unprimed linen, and draped with fabric garlands, bringing to mind the large-scale collages of Beatriz Milhazes. The gay floral patterns are diffused somewhat by the dourness of the surface material.
Rounding out the show are a group of wine-storage credenzas with custom hinge fixtures and a series of bizarre clocks made from contoured layers of corrugated cardboard and wood. Pardo's work here as elsewhere playfully makes a statement about the sheer aesthetic experience of architecture, objects and spaces. While the objects are wonderful and exuberant in their own right, however, this presentation seems strangely unalive.

Fast Forward: 'New' New York

The built environment of New York City is undergoing a radical transformation. With a rush of new development, the city is going to experience a rapid evolution over the next decade. As New York Magazine reported, a city larger than San Francisco is now being “built on top of the city that we know.”
This show features a 'future map' of architectural projects on a large aerial shot of the city, and has a special focus on the (west side) High Line project the Bronx River Greenway.

Cal Lane: Metal Lace Artist

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(click image to view larger)

I first came across Cal Lane's amazing 'rust dust' patterns at Scope Art Fair and most recently at the Museum of Arts & Design awe-inspiring 'Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting' show. Ms. Lane is an artist who hand-welds intricate and delicate patterns and filigrees into steel beams and surfaces. Her work exists at a fascinating intersection between craft, fine art and industrial production; and on another level as a historical confrontation with the feminine 'decorative arts' and the macho heroic-sculpture monuments of Modernism.

Quoted from Ray Cronin, Curator at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, from the catalogue of Lane's sculpture exhibition 'Fabricate':
"By cutting into the beams, reproducing the patterns of lace, Lane seems to be pointing out the limits of Modernity's asceticism. In this reading the lace patterns work as ornament, a decorative function that undermines the structural integrity of the beams...Is ornament eating away at the modernist purity of the towers? ...I suggest that the decorative is indeed a corrosive."