Creative Community
!!!!!!OPEN SOUND JAM!!!!! Lets make some noise at the Hammock Residency. This Open Studio session invites participants to bring any kind of sound/noise maker and make some noise. We encourage the community to take part in this workshop as it will be so much fun!!! Bring a healthy snack to share and a cushion to sit on. Check out the Hammock Free School Events page for a schedule of events as well as details about each workshop.
On Thur 09 June, from 6pm – 9pm Hammock Residency 1923 Graveley Street
G. Amani – Artist, Hammock Free School, Facilitator
Heidi Nagtegaal – Artist, Hammock Residency, Founder
Freewares @ FREEGEEK Workshop will take place at FreeGeek located in East Vancouver. This will be a hands on workshop where we explore various open-source software and various free programing available to those that don’t want to pay to play on their computers. We will also be taking a short tour around FREEGEEK which is an ethical computer recycling depot and computer co-op. Check out the Hammock Free School Events page for a schedule of events as well as details about each workshop.
OnTues 07 June, from 6pm – 9pm FREEGEEK 1820 Pandora Street
G. Amani – Artist, Hammock Free School, Facilitator
Heidi Nagtegaal – Artist, Hammock Residency, Founder
Adina Bier
Hors d’oeuvres
Ask Me About Salt
In the Counter Kitchen (TCK), Brooke Singer and Stefani Bardin are turning things upside-down from the inside-out. Science and marketing have made product labels nearly impossible to decode and, in response, we are developing tools, measurement systems and recipes to reverse engineer (think: deconstruct and remake…) your favorite food and personal care products. In TCK, become a translator, detective, chemist and cook. Stop by to take a whiff, stay a while to help out in the kitchen or suggest a product for future explorations.
We are interested in investigating a broad range of commercial products that we are putting into/on our bodies and into the environment in abundance. Our focus is on the stuff we are getting intimate with — maybe even on a daily basis. But the familiarity we feel is often entirely unfounded. Just try reading the ingredients on any product in your medicine cabinet or cupboard to see what we are talking about.
http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_food.html
7000 Oaks
Fat Sculptures
The Capris Battery
Mona Hatoum
Contemporary Sculpture, How Sweet It Is
Paul Shore and Nicole Root, “New York Brownie Room (After Walter De Maria),” 2010. Brownie. Courtesy of the artists.
Has Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room ever made you crave brownies? Have you ever noticed how much Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall looks like a meandering Payday candy bar? Probably not. But trust me, your take on contemporary sculpture is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Three years ago, New York-based artist Paul Shore and art historian Nicole Root began collaborating on a series of contemporary candy sculptures that was sparked by a conversation about Richard Serra’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “As I remember it,” said Root, “Paul and I were having a summer afternoon beer and I mentioned that I would like to make a Serra sculpture out of meat. There was something about the texture of his large ellipses that appealed to me. Paul said it would work better with a piece of taffy. Imagining a small-scale Serra you can stick in your mouth was just too funny—the opposite of his serious, large-scale, large-budget works.” Trips to Duane Reade, Economy Candy, and Dylan’s Candy Store quickly ensued and what started as a joke between the artists became a full-blown project of more than 70 miniature parodies.
“Necco Circle (After Richard Long),” 2010. Necco Wafers. Courtesy of the artists.
“L-Wafers (After Robert Morris),” 2010. Sugar Wafers and gum. Courtesy of the artists.
Shore and Root narrowed their focus to important Minimalist and Earthwork artists and sculptures that have been widely reproduced and exhibited. Shore laughs thinking back to how he hardly had room for a quart of milk after the project took off; the candy sculptures were stored in his fridge for “a long time.” Eventually, they crumbled and all that remains today are the exhibition photographs, a selection of which will be shown for the first time in Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck, opening at Brattelboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont next month.
In their first collaboration nine years ago, Shore and Root spent a day playing a game of art charade, using their bodies to enact Tony Smith sculptures. Smith’s work appears again in Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck, but this time in Hershey Bar. Other playful creations include an all-white Yayoi Kusama chair in Good & Plenty, two Joseph Beuys felt suits in pink and blue cotton candy, and a Richard Long slate circle made up of 100 pieces of broken Necco Wafers. Shore’s wooden kitchen table, where all of the works were built and shot, just happens to resemble a concrete gallery floor in photographs.
“Die (After Tony Smith),” 2010. Hershey bars. Courtesy of the artists.
As the Brattelboro exhibition title suggests, Shore and Root’s working process involved licking, sucking, stacking, and sticking. Sound like a dream come true? Not quite. Shore is sugar intolerant (sweets give him headaches), leaving Root responsible for most of the chewing which she didn’t always enjoy. “The funny thing about working with candy,” she says “is that once you have to chew or otherwise consume a lot of it in order to make a sculpture, you realize how disgusting it can be. It was not pleasant.”
“Chair (After Yayoi Kusama),” 2010. Good & Plenty, Graham crackers and gum. Courtesy of the artists.
“Pink in a Corner (After Dan Flavin),” 2010. Wax Stix. Courtesy of the artists.
The repetitious nature of candy worked especially well for replicating Minimalist works, since the originals were often made from stock forms and objects. Starbursts suited Donald Judd’s stacked boxes, Pez lent themselves to a Carl Andre floor sculpture, and a neon pink Wax Stix perched in a corner against white matte board is somehow lovelier than a real Dan Flavin fluorescent tube.
To preserve the integrity of their medium, Shore and Root used other sweets as adherents and support devices. For instance, their Kusama chair is built around Graham cracker armature; and the Fruit Roll-Ups used to mimic Christo & Jean-Claude’s Central Park Gates were stretched across Pocky Stick poles held upright by Rolos. In some cases, they had to use other forms of sugar to achieve the right texture and appearance. Constructing Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Cone and Floor Cake was a no-brainer—they purchased packaged cake, green-colored ice cream, and miniature cones. Kiki Smith’s Tale was a tad more complicated. The figure was sculpted from marzipan and the trail of excrement was made of what else but Tootsie Roll.
“Tale (After Kiki Smith),” 2010. Marzipan and Tootsie Roll. Courtesy of the artists.
“Double Figure (Pals) (After Mike Kelley),” 2010. Marshmallow Pals. Courtesy of the artists.
Smith is one of many Art21 artists you will find in Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck. Jeff Koons’s Blue Diamond appears as a Ring Pop of course and, adding another layer of childhood nostalgia to the exhibition, Mike Kelley’s stuffed-animals are represented by Marshmallow Pals. “We made sure to use the down-market marshmallow candies you can find at Duane Reade around Easter. It was important to match the somewhat sad aspect of those Marshmallow Pals with Kelley’s choice of used and abused specimens of homemade or down-market toys,” said Root. (She was working on a dissertation of Kelley’s writings around this time.) She adds, “They were also very fun to squish together.” Delicate and temperamental, candy presented the artists with some unforeseen challenges. But Shore, who works with beeswax and found objects in his own practice, quickly mastered the material. “At a certain point, it becomes just another medium,” he said. “You develop techniques and learn how to handle it.”
Shore and Root didn’t get around to using all of the candies they wanted to work with, such as your everyday M&Ms, but still covered a lot of confectionery, as well as historical ground. In one of the three videos that accompany the exhibition, Shore attempts to catch Hershey’s Kisses with his hand, a spoof on Richard Serra’s early work Hand Catching Lead. And in a gut-busting version of the Robert Smithson documentary Spiral Jetty, Root imitates Smithson’s dreary monologue as the camera follows the path of a Rock Candy, Heath Bar, Jell-o and powdered sugar spiral. Root says, “I think the art historically-minded audience will find the show funny…For those viewers less acquainted with recent art history, I hope our work will make these contemporary sculptors seem much more approachable.”
When I asked Shore if the project will continue or pick up again, he replied in all seriousness, “No, it’s consuming.”
Lick Sucked Stacked Stuck is on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, November 6 – February 6, 2011.
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Futurefarmers is a group of artists and designers working together since 1995. Our design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, aritist in residency program and research interests. We are teachers, researchers, designers, gardeners, scientists, engineers, illustrators, people who know how to sew, cooks and bus drivers with a common interest in creating work that challenges current social, political and economic systems.
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which will rotate identities every four months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each country we focus on.
Glasgow Beer and Pub Project
A six-week socially engaged art and field-research project into Glasgow’s beer industry and pub culture. The research led to the creation of participatory artworks for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art at The Market Gallery and other public venues.
Included in the programming was the Pub School, an educational event series exploring the aesthetics of beer and brewing in Glasgow, and the Market Gallery Pub, a one night pub that presents Scotland-based homebrewed beers as artworks.
Art & Beer (At the Museum)
2009
For an event called Shine A Light: A Night at the Museum at the Portland Art Museum. I worked with Lompoc, Laurelwood, and Lucky Lab Breweries of Portland. They each received tours of the museum, chose an artwork, brewed new beers inspired by that artwork. The three beers were available for free sampling only on the night of the event.
Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale
Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.
Update: Friday 22 October 2010
The landscape of sunflower seeds can be looked upon from the Turbine Hall bridge, or viewed at close-range in the east end of the Turbine Hall on Level 1. It is no longer possible to walk on the surface of the work, but visitors can walk close to the edges of the sunflower seed landscape on the west and north sides.
Although porcelain is very robust, we have been advised that the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow members of the public to walk across the sculpture.
Sunflower Seeds is a total work made up of millions of individual pieces which together from a single unique surface. In order to maintain and preserve the landscape as a whole, Tate asks visitors not to touch or remove the sunflower seeds.
Juliet Bingham, Curator, Tate Modern
“Ai Weiwei’s Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today’s society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?”
Update: 28 April 2011
We understand from news reports that the artist Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese authorities on Sunday 3 April as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. The artist remains uncontactable and his whereabouts are unknown. We are dismayed by developments that again threaten Ai Weiwei’s right to speak freely as an artist and hope that he will be released immediately.
In response to Ai Weiwei’s arrest and detainment, leading museums around the world have joined and launched an online petition to express concern for Ai’s freedom and call for his release, including Guggenheim Museum; the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD); Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; and the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris. We sincerely hope that our collective action using social networking sites – Ai Weiwei’s favored medium of social sculpture – will promote Ai’s liberty and the principle of free creative expression.
Photography: Clayton Perry Photoworks, 2011 Vancouver, Canada.
2011
Vancouver Biennale, Richmond BC Canada (work in progress)
Blue Trees is an afforestation art action, an avenue of trees coloured blue, a total immersion, the trees becoming identified by colour.
The Blue Trees is an ephemeral work, reverting back to its original state over time. An afforestation art action set within an urban context – it is the response of cities such as Richmond, Canada to issues relating to deforestation that in the end will determine the sustainability of this resource, both locally and globally.
Photos: David Brown, Richmond British Columbia, Canada
2006
The Blue Trees
Melbourne, Australia
Collected guns melted into steel to fabricate shovels, tree planning Jardín Botánico de Culiacán
Green Light-Botanical Lamp
Natalie Jeremijenko: Tree Logic
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist-experimenter. Her projects and those with an artists’ collective called the Bureau of Inverse Technology have consisted of creating devices and situations for the purpose of gathering overlooked facts. These data sets and the means by which they were formed range from the Despondency Index (for which the Bureau installed a motion detector camera on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, recorded suicides, and graphed the relation of suicides to stock market and other data) to Tree Logic (1999) at MASS MoCA (in which six live trees are inverted and suspended from a truss, displaying the contrived growth responses of the trees over time). In this age of the commodification of information, Jeremijenko has made data her medium.
In Tree Logic, the art of the piece is not found in its condition at any single point in time, but in the change of the trees over time. Trees are dynamic natural systems, and Tree Logic reveals this dynamism. The familiar, almost iconic shape of the tree in nature is the result of gravitropic and phototropic responses: the tree grows away from the earth and towards the sun. When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun – so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is.
By framing certain phenomena, such as tree growth or suicides, as a data set, Jeremijenko’s work illustrates the ability of scientific presentation to transform information. These phenomena are accessible without the artist’s intervention, but her presentation of them allows the viewer to examine and question them in new ways. (In this sense, her inverted trees may be compared to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, actually an inverted urinal, of 1917.) Our perceptions of trees change when we view them as a collection of growth responses rather than as immutable symbols of the natural world. The public for a work of art, and for Tree Logic in particular, is encouraged to interpret (and debate) motives and outcomes, though the opposite is often true of “real” science, which does not invite public discourse. Through her elaborate framing systems (in this case a metal armature, stainless steel planters, and telephone poles), Jeremijenko revels in exposing the idiosyncratic manipulation intrinsic to combining facts to form data.
Exhibition made possible by the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute.
Makoto Azuma Moss Carpets
Organic Moss Carpets
The New York based landscape and urban design office of Balmori Associates
Public Farm One (P.F.1), Ninth Annual Young Architect’s Program.
Since 1999, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and its sister institution, the PS1 Contemporary Art Center has hosted the Young Architects Program (YAP) to design a temporary installation in the courtyards of PS1 in Queens, NY for their summer “Warm Up” parties. Every intervention has expanded upon the theme of the “Urban Beach.”
In 2008, 40 years after the Summer of ’68, we felt it was time for a new leisure revolution, one that creates a new symbol of liberation, knowledge, power and fun for today’s cities. Leaving behind the Urban Beach, our project became the Urban Farm — as a symbol of our generations’ preoccupations and hopes for a better and different future. As cities have finally proven their superiority over their suburban counterparts — in everything from quality of life to environmental impact — they should again become our much needed laboratories of experimentation.
Channeling the last utopian architectural projects about the City that examined its potential, represented its promises of liberation, and captured its pleasures — from Superstudio’s Continuous Monument to Koolhaas’s Exodus — Public Farm 1 (P.F.1) is an architectural and urban manifesto to engage play and reinvent our cities, and our world, once again.
1. Structure
Stemming from the desire to both embrace the grid as organizing pattern for the urban farm and working with a structural material that would be recyclable and biodegradable, cardboard tubes were chosen as the primary building material. The tubes serve as planters, preassembled in a “daisy” pattern of six tubes arranged in a hexagon around a seventh central tube. The central tube alternates either as a “picking hole” to access the crops or a structural column, extending to the ground.
2. Planting
51 varieties of herbs, fruit and vegetables were selected to thrive in the urban environment and planted to bloom in succession throughout the summer. The plants are also organized by the “daisy pattern,” each daisy planted with a single species.
3. Program
Each column is programmed to create a variety of experiences and interactions beneath the farm. These include a solar-powered juicer for fresh veggie cocktails, a periscope to provide close-up views of the fields, a towel column and a water-spouting column next to the pool, two columns joined together with a bench and enclosed by a curtain to provide privacy, a nighttime column of twinkling stars and cricket sounds and a solar-powered phone-charging column. In the smaller courtyard a series of experiential columns use video and sound to bring animal life to P.F.1
4. Power
P.F.1 is completely off-grid. The solar power system consists of an array of eighteen photovoltaic modules to power all of P.F.1’s power loads — videos screens, speakers, lights, cell phone chargers and all of the irrigation pumps.
5. Irrigation
A drip irrigation system was designed to deliver a controlled amount of water to each planter-tube, fed by a cistern which collected more than 6,000 gallons of rainwater over the course of the summer.
6. Chickens
Unbeknownst to MoMA, the “tool shed” we were building was actually a chicken coop! On the day of the opening we brought 6 mature chickens and a dozen peeping chicks. The chickens had the run of the grounds during the week and produced eggs all summer long.
Photo by Raymond Adams
Is living furniture the next frontier in ultra-eco-friendly design? Oxygenating the air, providing a punch of green and acting as a natural accent in both interior and exterior spaces, these 13 unusual furniture designs incorporate actively growing moss, grass, vines, mushrooms and even crystals.
Raised on a growing platform like an elvish throne, Michel Bussien’s ‘Growing Chair’ helps us get back to our roots with a clear polycarbonate frame that is filled with greenery as the plant inside grows. The artist says “To move further we need to incorporate the living matter that surrounds us. Let us use the complexity of living nature and include it in our creations. These creations will then redefine the way we reconstruct nature.”
All that water that drips off your body when you emerge from the shower could be feeding live moss, which is just squishy enough to provide a super-comfy surface to stand on. This unusual bath mat features three different types of moss that thrives in the moist environment of a bathroom.
Free of waste and man-made materials, the ‘Pooktre Chair’ by Peter Cook is an entirely natural piece of actively growing furniture that is lovingly shaped over seven to eight years before being replanted in the yard of the purchaser. Each chair is a work of living, functioning sculpture.
It may not be the most comfortable chair ever, but it’s certainly unique. Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka starts with a polyester elastomer skeleton, seeds it with living crystals and submerges it in an aquarium to provide the perfect growing environment and a month later, this sparkling piece of artistic ‘furniture’ is what results.
The artist said “…I have pondered on challenging the history of design by creating an epoch-making chair grown from natural crystal structures. Today, a rapid development of technology, particularly the use of computer renderings, has ensured and made various things real. I want to believe, however, there is something in nature that defies all human imagination.”
Pretty greenery and crystals aren’t the only natural materials that can be made to grow on furniture. Perhaps one of the last living materials you’d expect turns up on Shinwei Rhoda Yen’s ‘mushrooms ate my furniture’ chair, a simple modern wooden bench that provides a habitat for fungus. The chair naturally biodegrades after a few years exposed to the elements, giving itself over to the life that it sustains.
The ‘Terra Grass Chair’, pictured above, is a simple cardboard frame that you assemble, cover with dirt and plant with grass seeds. Water it regularly et voila, you end up with your very own DIY grass furniture. You could create your own version with an old, less-than-pretty chair using the same process for an even more eco-friendly option.
While most indoor living furniture requires a bit of maintenance, not to mention the occasional mess of dirt and water, the ‘Oxygen of Green’ low table is worry-free but still green and alive. The table features a bed of tillandsia air plants, which live off the moisture and nutrients in the air while also enriching your home with oxygen.
How about furniture that incorporates plants in a subtle way, as accents? Kinokoto’s table includes a narrow planting strip that provides a little bit of greenery while leaving most of the tabletop surface functional.
While grow lights are a great way to maintain an indoor garden, it can be hard to make them fit into the décor of a home. Judy Hoysak turns a mini garden into a piece of functioning furniture with the ‘Vege Table’, a coffee table/self-watering planter equipped with lights that can grow lettuce right in your living room with minimal effort.
For outdoor areas that are low on both space and greenery, such as balconies or rooftop gardens, perhaps combining furniture and plants is the way to go. That’s the approach taken by 5.5 Designers with ‘Mobilier a jardiner’, an outdoor furniture collection that incorporates planters into the backs of chairs and benches. Just don’t plant anything thorny!
It’s messy, and not always pretty, but Kai Linke’s plant-centered design is more experiment than functional furniture. Link plants quick-growing grasses, bulbs and bamboo in clear frames that skew and force the plants’ growth patterns, sometimes resulting in overflowing roots, grass growing sideways and other unusual configurations.
This might just be an ordinary albeit sleek and modern chair if not for the addition of a single pot on one of the back legs, allowing for a touch of greenery or, if one desires, a vine that travels up the leg of the chair and entwines itself around the frame.
This table isn’t going to last very long – and that’s exactly the point. While most eco-friendly furniture is designed with a long life in mind, the Auto-Cannabalistic Table will inevitably consume itself as the recycled paper egg cartons it’s made from decompose under the weight of soil and water.
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Hammock Free School 
