Zac Hacmon’s AFTERLIFE series hints at the ‘in-between’ spaces

Artist Zac Hacmon is known for utilizing architectural design and ubiquitous materials to develop simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable non-places: spaces without history or identity, yet are entirely familiar. His work elevates and bends traditional architecture and material usage, focusing on techniques and elements both from the old and the modern, creating “super-modern” architectural models for space-age, futuristic and imaginary worlds. He aims to challenge accepted notions of necessity, functionality, and memory.

Afterlife, a series of tile-based sculptures consisting of 4×4 inch white industrial tiles, encouraging viewers to consider  memory, time, displacement and altered states of ‘being’. The artist began to consider this portal-like concept with the recent loss of a loved one.

The tiles are representative of the artists’ everyday surroundings; subway stations and domestic areas. Public spaces relating to and reflecting the private, each influencing the other. One of the sculptures is equipped with 16 grab bars suggesting safety and security, yet defective.

Several forms are sealed with transparent glass acting like filters or triggers, capturing the space inside these structures, giving a false sense of depth and the notion of another dimension within the form. Viewers are momentarily disoriented by what seems familiar and logical, yet they eventually realize the opposite is true.

Hacmon describes the individual pieces as “devices”, operating with efficiency rather than as a passive object. These “devices’ can be considered, portals; a gate or gateway to somewhere unknown. Shown together, the series of sculptures can be seen as multidimensional or shrine-like.

“I’m interested in the ‘in-between’ spaces, like corridors, borders, transit hubs. There’s something fascinating that draws me to this, like the psychological shift that occurs between places, between a person’s role in one location to another. In my work there’s an attempt to catch the moment of the shift itself. The fragments in my work come from these places, like the ceramic tiles, reminding us of a subway station that is in-between destinations. These places, and alterations of role can offer a sense of freedom.” Zac Hacmon

Zac Hacmon (b. Holon, Israel) is an artist based in New York.  Hacmon uses architecture as a mediator and is interested in notions of the non-place: spaces without history or identity. His work operates with the efficiency of a device rather than as a passive object.

Check out his work at www.zachacmon.com

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What Color Should Your Logo Be

One of the key aspects of establishing your brand identity, the color scheme you choose to represent your company can determine what your customers expect from your business. With this in mind, it’s important to design a logo reflective of your values and choose colors representative of the same to ensure you’re projecting the image you desire.

With that said, here’s how to determine what color your logo should be.

Know Your Customer First

Before you engage in any form of outward communication about your organization, you must get to know your ideal customer. How educated are they? Are they professionals or laborers? What is their income level? How do they perceive themselves? What problem are they coming to you to solve? This will help you determine which colors will be most attractive for your purposes.

 

What Different Colors Convey

Colors (both primary and secondary) have long been associated with certain concepts and mental states.

 

Here’s a brief overview:

 

Red: Strong emotion, passion and intensity, love and hate. The color is known to motivate people to take risks as it intensifies feelings of power, energy, and aggression. It’s evocative of activity, emotion, trust and intensity. Red also decreases analytical thought.

 

Yellow: Optimism, hope, cheerfulness and warmth are frequently symbolized with this tone. Yellow encourages communication, stimulates the nervous system and is indicative of clarity. The color also reflects youthfulness, personal power, free will and self-esteem. Yellow evokes sensations of joy, life, energy and freshness.

 

Blue: Coolness, the sea, the sky, calmness and tranquility. Rae often represented in blue. It stimulates trust, security, orderliness and cleanliness. Blue is also known to increase productivity in office spaces. Conducive to communication, truth and self-expression, blue tends to incite comfort, faith, conservation, understanding, and confidence.

 

Purple: Long considered a regal color, purple has been associated with wealth, success and wisdom. It can also soothe people. Purple has been used to represent creativity and imagination. Additionally, the hue is tied to glamour, power, nostalgia, romance and introspection.  

 

Green: Good luck; nature and health are associated with green. It symbolizes money and new growth, raises moods and promotes images of fertility. Known to relax people, it is also the color to which the human eye is most sensitive. Green evokes feelings of calmness, relaxation, trust, peace and hopefulness.

 

Orange: Happiness, sunshine and the tropics are frequently symbolized with this color. Reflective of excitement, enthusiasm and warmth, orange is also related to sexuality, creativity and pleasure. The color stimulates sensations of enthusiasm, determination and introspection. It also symbolizes good value.

 

Black: This color evokes luxury, formality, power, strength and solidity. It is also associated with mystery, magic and the unknown. Black can incite sensations of boldness, seriousness and masculinity.

 

Colors Tied to Industries

Depending upon the industry in which you’re doing business, certain color trends may dominate your field. As an example, when you design a logo, tech tends to favor blue (think Microsoft), while retail goes with red (like Target) and agriculture (quite naturally—no pun intended) goes with green (such as John Deere).

 

Variances Among Cultures

You should also consider the brand values you want to convey and be aware that different cultures perceive certain colors in different ways.

 

While green symbolizes youth, fertility, and new life, it can also represent infidelity. Chinese men avoid green hats, because they indicate their wives have been adulterous.

 

As you can see, color plays a significant role in both branding and perception. It’s important to keep these concepts in mind when you’re deciding what color your logo should be.

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Eerie Sandpaper Paintings Make us Consider Destruction

Spanning both the symbolic and poetic space between drawing, sculpture, and installation, Turkish artist Civelek is interested in the concept of creation vs. destruction. The artist’s new new body of work on view at Istanbul‘s Pi Artworks employs the humble, ready-made, and contradictory material: sandpaper.

Raised in Istanbul, Turkey, during a time of heightened geopolitical instability, the artist often witnessed the precarity of daily life firsthand. Bombings at synagogues, consulates and banks, often close to his routes to school, a recurring memory. Tall buildings with their entrances blown out were a common scene, and the artist reflects upon how normalized this became. Surrounded by cyclic creation and destruction, he began to consider the act of elimination as a form of creative authorship itself.

As an adolescent consuming Western mass media, which was over-saturated with images of violence solely for the purpose of entertainment, these disparate and oppositional experiences provoked the artist to confront and synthesize certain dialectical relationships– between creation and destruction, author and audience. The experience instigated his exploratory research into the nature of materials.

Early in the development of his practice, Civelek opened a space called The Destruction Company, where visitors could come and destroy different items. Over time, these explorations matured, were simplified, and became more subtle and metaphorical, taking inspiration from Auto-destructive artistic practice of the early sixties and leading to the body of work presented in this exhibition.

Number 3: Grit contains three different groups of work in the same medium, all utilizing sandpaper. Sandpaper is a material imbued with conflict and juxtapositions: it is used in the process of creation, the thoughtful, slow, and superficial manipulation of surfaces and objects. When implemented as designed, it can create smoothness and polish, yet it remains abrasive and potentially destructive. The sandpaper series can be considered a study of material properties that expose how an object can be destroyed and how to destroy it–a combination of artistic intentions and chance operations.

Presented in the space will be a series of “paintings” comprised of a range of varying sandpaper grits in a variety of colors and textures, several sculptures, and a large-scale installation of an oversized roll of sandpaper, sweeping down from above and spreading across the entire gallery floor. Upon first glance the piece seems non-threatening, playful even. As the audience inhabits the exhibition space, interacting with the installation, the tactility of the sandpaper floor becomes apparent as it  wears down the soles of the shoes of those who walk across it, while simultaneously being destroyed itself.

Visitors are asked to sign a detailed waiver before interacting with the piece.

Grit: Number 3 will be on view at Pi Artworks through December 23

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Mind Boggling Timepiece Converts Motion Into Alluring Patterns

Relying on the systematic motion of the second’s hand, the Humism converts that practical cyclical motion to some more decorative, more alluring, more amazing.

Inspired by the kinetic art movement of the 50s, the Humism watch rejects the idea that time should be about amounts and measuring units, but instead than motion, because time as an entity keeps shifting.

With a 316L surgical-grade steel body, a sapphire crystal onto the front and rear, and a Japanese Automatic Seiko NH35A motion onto the interior, the watch has some pretty impressive specs, but none as striking as the revolving detail on the front. The minute and hour hands present themselves as an obstructed along with an outlined circle round the border, but what’s really nimble is the seconds dial, a”vanishingly thin” laser cut dial with a design detail which makes one revolution every 60 seconds. Behind it is a static dial using a mirror image of this next dial’s art. When the energetic dial spins against the stationary disc, it creates some remarkable psychedelic patterns you’ll probably spend more time looking in the actual time. But then again… that’s the point. To enjoy time’s motion instead of to be bound by it!

Designer: Humism

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An Italian Design Studio Create Furniture from Eroded Travertine Encased in Resin

Italian design studio Alcarol has teamed up with Tuscan rock company Vaselli to make a table and stools created of eroded Travertine encased in resin.

Presented at BSPK, a furniture gallery curated by Nicola Gallizia, throughout Milan design week, the table and stools are manufactured from Rapolano Travertine — a kind of sedimentary rock which has been bandied around Siena, in Tuscany, for centuries.

Alcarol and Vaselli took blocks of this eroded travertine stone and cast them in transparent resin. The resin that strengthens and keeps the stone’s cavities is then polished to create perfectly angled blocks and slabs.

Fixed onto a burnished steel base, a slab of Travertine that fades into clear resin creates a low table, while the blocks of stone and resin are cut into ideal cuboids to design the stools.

The designers stated that clear resin was chosen as it resembles the water where these stones lay submerged through various eras.

 

Travertine, which can be white, tan, cream colored, and even rusty is a terrestrial sedimentary rock with a crystalline-texture.

For centuries it has been quarried from the Italian town of Rapolano, which is known for its hot springs where the Romans used to shoot thermal baths.

The stone is formed by the precipitation of carbonate minerals, frequently at the mouth of a hot spring or in a limestone cave, and its porosity is a result of the existence of organisms like macrophytes, bryophytes, and algae.

It’s been utilized as a construction material as the period of the Etruscans around 800 BC.

The travertine bits are the newest in a lengthy set of resin furniture created by the Italian design studio based on precisely the same idea.

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Secret Meanings and Psychology Behind the Most Successful Logos

Retro-futuristic “Container’s” and the act of choosi

Inspired by 17th-century Dutch tulip vases, architecture, and retro-futurism, Erica Prince‘s ‘Containers‘ series features an array of ceramic vessels that inspire their users to find creative ways of utilizing them.

The Containers are beautiful on their own, easily passing for purely aesthetic, abstract sculptural works. However, Prince’s interest lies primarily in the way people interact with the sculptures on a functional level. Containers is a manifestation of the artist’s desire to bring awareness to the simple, meditative act of choosing and arranging objects.

Prince’s biomorphic Containers have versatile, tube-like openings, allowing the pieces to take on the personalities of their users as they are filled with flowers, makeup, fruit, or whatever else they may be used for. Containers reflects the artist’s belief that traditionally feminine endeavors such as arranging and organizing personal items shouldn’t be viewed as superficial, but rather that these rituals can be important for self-actualization.

“We are surrounded by machine made objects and their perfection isn’t so special to us anymore. Handmade objects slow us down- their nuances imbue them with personality and energy, reminding us of our humanity.”

See more of Prince’s work, and read about her Transformational Makeover project at EricaPrince.com

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DIY Hammock for Summer Rest

New Electric Industrial Design for Nike Skateboard Concept

South Korean industrial designer Jaehyuk Lim came up with this intriguing concept for the Nike Cruiser Board, an electric personal transportation device that is user-friendly, charge and transport around.

“A lot of individuals are using the Personal Mobility but if you’re not utilizing Personal Mobility, it’s very tough to carry around. I designed the Personal mobility device, which is easy to transport and charge at precisely the same time.”

Many boarders carry their boards hand when they are not using them. When you docking in ‘Cruiser Backpack’, you can recharge the board”.

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