Room Portraits

“Through challenging camera angles Menno Aden abstracts most familiar actual living environments and public interiors into flattened two-dimensional scale models. A camera that the artist installed on the ceiling of various rooms takes pictures downwards of the interiors. The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream.”

Menno Adens´website

XXXplicity

Pia Habekost explores the duality of typography as abstract ornament versus actual meaning. Informed by instances of personal experience to current events in urban culture, her typographic formations address topics of sampling, interconnection, and remixed narrative. 
In her most recent work, Pia translates the typographic explorations of her paintings into large scale urban sculptures nestled between street art and site specific land art. The sculptures are woven into surfaces of existing architecture like 3 dimensional graffiti. Through subtraction and addition, the typographic swarms oscillate between ornament and built form transforming its context.

Text and photos from Pia Habekosts´website.

 

Elsewhere

 

Elsewhere (2010) is a multi-projection video art work which seeks to phenomenally transform the reinforced concrete landscape of the Malmö C underground station into a wide open space.
Through a projection device that evokes the perceptual experience from the train, the viewers will be invited to lose themselves in images during their wait. The projections acting as windows, the station itself becomes a train that loses its spatial and temporal rails, itinerant across the earth.
From the salt flats of Uyuni to the roads of Saigon, from the plains of Siberia to those of Patagonia, from the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge to the Orinoco River to central Montreal to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg’s Soweto to a Kensington street to Oaxaca market to Plaza Mayor to the Sicilian coast to Jalpur to Alexandria to Fortune Bay to Kualalampur to Ulan Bator to Den Haag to Reykjavik to Marienville to Tallinn to Corbridge to Buenaventura to Faisalabad to Muscat to Adana to Kinshasa to Xiangkhoang to Arrecife to Krakow to Pusan*… the Malmö C station will travel the world. elsewhere, like a lost river, flows continually into an underground passage. It is said that one never steps in the same river twice; comparably, the elsewhere installation is elaborated in such a way that it is unlikely that a viewer on a fixed schedule will see the same image time and again.
In terms of tempo, elsewhere is conceived as a release for the individual viewer. The recorded images are slowed down, in contrast with the speed of everyday urban life, in order to ease the experiential flow of time.
In symbolic terms, this artwork highlights the importance of the Central Station as a node; in its primary sense, as a crucial railway link, but also metaphorically as a connection between the city and the entire world.

Text from the artists´ website.

Spaces of desire

This plan atlas compiles 15 typologies of dark rooms in Barcelona for anonymous male sexual encounters, where fantasy and real pleasure operate in constant negotiation. Researched by Pol Esteve Castello & Marc Navarro Fornós (2007), the plans of these barely furnished homes include structural elements with semantic relevance for collective ecstasy. The audacity of revealing the otherwise invisible plans, for outsiders as well as for insiders, plays with the irony of an intentional desecration. Darkness is mapped here through the exact location of light spots and TV monitors screening porn movies. The intricate partitions (panels, columns, corners…) and elaborate width of each opening (aisles, thresholds, glory holes…) are the basic elements defining these labyrinthine liminal spaces of desire. Holmes, O’Byrne & Gastaldo (Setting the space for sex, 2007) define them as refusing ‘to function in and be part of what Deleuze (1992) calls “societies of control”. Public gay sex spaces, such as parks, alleys, restrooms, rest stops, adult theatres, video arcades, bookstores, bars and gay bathhouses are often thought of as being filthy and residing outside “the social”. However, it is the public nature of the location and its on-site sexual possibilities inextricably linked with risk that intensifies the power and pleasure of the erotic encounter (Leap, 1999). Desire is not an “absence” (a lack of something), but a force that makes us move (Colebrook, 2002) To paraphrase Bataille, gay bathhouses are necessary “architectures of excess” that permit desire to free itself from the constraints of everyday life.’

text from www.deconcrete.org 

Anothony Mccall’s Five Minutes Sculptures