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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Canadian Duo Creates Life-Size Origami Costumes for Ballet Dancers

Montreal-based artists Melika Dez and Pauline Loctin joined forces in January 2018 to combine their imaginations in a creative collaboration. The end result, PLI.Ē Project, fuses Dez’s abilities as a motion photographer with Loctin’s experience in paper artwork and showcases dancers across the globe sporting hand-folded paper costumes. Loctin specifically designed each dress’s shape and color palette into the dancer who would be wearing it, and Dez worked to situate her models in iconic surroundings from the streets of New York City into the Louvre Museum in Paris. Loctin’s paper creations vary from resembling traditional ballet tutus to folded experimental contours.

Dez shares that the job came together in 2 stages: first as a studio shoot professional ballet dancers wearing Loctin’s creations, and afterward as a worldwide undertaking photographing dancers and costumes outside.

 

“Paper can be a delicate material to work with, and that is precisely the reason why we decided to make the impossible, possible. Whichever element we would be confronted with, water (rain), wind, we desired to show that we are limitless.”

You can view more from Loctin on Instagram and out of Dez on Instagram.

H/T fubiz

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An Artist Creates Giant Suspended Sculpture from Thousands of Pieces of Origami

Award-winning architect Kody Kato has produced a fantastic, gravity-defying hanging installation made entirely out of 5,500 pieces of origami.

On display at G.F Smith’s White Space gallery before the end of June, the sculpture is created from Takeo newspaper and has been assembled by a group of envelope manufacturers off-site, while over 20 university layout students assisted in setting up the piece in London.

The artwork is a piece of G.F Smith’s Beyond Surface takeover at which you are going to have the ability to find out more about some of their most exquisite, innovative and technically innovative papers in the world.

In addition to seeing Kato’s magnificent installation, you will have the ability to try your hand at The fantastic Paper Aeroplane. Developed by long-term collaborators Produced Thought, the plinths allow you to learn more about the science supporting papermaking by embracing laboratory equipment and looking at how weight and fold are intrinsic to the performance of a sheet.

Read more: Website

 

h/t Creativeboom

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Realistic Paper Sculptures of Animal’s Portraits by Calvin Nicholls

Canadian paper artist Calvin Nicholls continues to build striking likenesses of wildlife, featuring birds, bears, and foxes left in haut-relief sculpture. Despite working in monochromatic palettes of a beige and white paper he imbues the animal portraits with a sense of liveliness and realism. Innumerable slivers of paper create lifelike feathers and fur, and each creature is shown in a naturalistic pose–snuggled down for a rest, or wings elongated in flight.

You may see a video of the process and installation here, and discover more of the artist’s works on his website and Facebook page.

 

Meticulously Cut Paper Art Looks Like Elegantly Inked Illustrations of Spirit Animals

San Francisco based artist Kanako Abe generates hand-cut, intricate paper art, that at first glance look like pencil drawings. She started working with paper in 2012 when studying the Japanese art of Ise-katagami–a conventional stencil technique utilized for complex designs on Kimono fabric. Abe uses the same Japanese Ise-katagami cutting tools but on black newspaper, in addition to an X-Acto knife, a cutting edge, and–most significantly–incredible patience. The resulting hand-cut creations depict woodland spirit animals and mysterious forests that research “everyday moments and thoughts.”

Abe’s growing portfolio of animal cut-outs includes a reassuring moth which lets you “have faith in yourself, and you will notice the light,” and also a supernatural fox with “connection to a magical realm.” Abe records each piece on Instagram, occasionally showing how her art casts a gorgeous shadow when held against a light surface. Based upon the design’s intricacy, Abe’s smaller bits can take around 15 hours to complete. “I find curvy lines require more time than geometric patterns with straight lines,” she clarifies.

Keep up to date on Abe’s work on Instagram, where she also shares her works in progress.

An Artist Creates Complex Sculptures Only from Cardboard

Daniel Agdag‘s whimsical, complex sculptures are crafted entirely from cardboard and depict eccentric machines. The Australian performer, who’s also a filmmaker, labels his work “sketching with cardboard,” as he does not utilize intricate planning, measuring, or sketching to pull off each piece, despite its own meticulous appearance. Instead, the plays with the elements until he pleased.

“He will tell you that he gets things out of cardboard,” says MARS Art Gallery at Melbourne. “He is modest. This declaration in no way illuminates the delicate kind and bizarre narrative of his work. To say he compels the medium to its limits is an understatement. His process is quite much like freehand drawing. He spends a great deal of time thinking and absorbing objects in the built environment, their wonderful information and acts, which leads him to shape narratives. After this is firmly resolved in his thoughts, various components of the work start to emerge, fitting together to compliment the overall idea slowly.”