art & new music

Sunday, April 8, 2012

CAI GUO-QIANG GUNPOWDER PAINTINGS

Art.sy Films | Cai Guo-Qiang | Sky Ladder

Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder at MOCA Geffen 2012.
Ignition drawings of gunpowder made in March
Crop Circle Fireworks explosion in April.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Cai Guo-Qiang's new work ("Sky Ladder") at MOCA.

I volunteered to assist with Cai's Sky Ladder piece at MOCA .... and that's my exacto work in the image below - the stencil of the flying dragon and the little passenger people - which will be used on Friday's piece.

That work consisted of a number of stencil images placed on a very long roll of paper covered with gunpowder

and exploded to create a new work by Cai Guo-Qiang at MOCA Geffen.

The 3 works created at MOCA along with another piece about crop circles were displayed to the public from April 8 thru July 30, 2012. The gunpowder was provided by and overseen by Pyro Spectaculars by Souza of LA.

Cai’s Desire for Zero Gravity

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Last night, the work of dozens of volunteers culminated in an exciting finale. Cai lit the fuse of his first gunpowder drawing for MOCA, Chaos in Nature, filling the museum with a blast of eruptions followed by huge clouds of smoke.

When the air cleared and the protective layers were lifted from the canvas, an immense drawing depicting trees, lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes in earthy shades of brown and yellow, was revealed.

Today, volunteers began work on Desire for Zero Gravity, Cai’s second gunpowder drawing. We cut stencils based on images of humans attempting flight and diagrams of flying machines and feng shui that Cai has collected over the years. Check out these source images which demonstrate Cai’s fascination with the universal human desire to fly and the stories of so many failed attempts.

Cai with the Russian Rocketeer I worked on.

Day 3, we worked on small stencils that related to Cai's life, from his first childhood drawing of a Dragon ships that headed into outer space to cave men to the unique design of the human ear; all personal icons to him. They were lit on a very long sheet of paper and then hung on the gallery walls at CAM Geffen.

The work took over the entire length of the South wall.

It was interesting to see how he worked, how he "wore" the role of the artist, and how he rallied volunteers to help him make his work.

MOCA was going broke, so it did not purchase the entire piece, but I understand it ended up purchasing some of the work when a benefector was eventually located. China Airlines had a private night during one of the explosions, so they may have been the patron.

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Friday, November 11, 2011

Masters of Motion Graphics

"When Juan Gatti saw the first cut of Pedro Almodóvar's new film "Volver," he was struck by how vividly the personalities of the leading characters, the women in a working-class Spanish family, were reflected in the colored patterns of their clothes.
He could be forgiven for focusing on something so esoteric, because Gatti designs the title sequences of Almodóvar's movies. For Volver's titles, or end credits, he created an animation of the flowers, leaves and spots on the women's aprons and dresses. "Pedro is very clever at building his characters with details like that," Gatti says. "And I love the idea of taking everyday images, and giving them a graphic sophistication.""
from NY Times "Graphic images to seduce the filmgoer" by Alice Rawsthorn, published 7/30/2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/style/30iht-dlede31.html

"While he was browsing in the bargain bin of a book store on Third Avenue in Manhattan, the young graphic designer Saul Bass was struck by the spiraling images in a book about the 19th-century French mathematician Jules-Antoine Lissajous. He bought the book and experimented with ways of replicating those spirals. “I made a batch. Sat on them for years,” Bass recalled. “And then Hitchcock asked me to work on ‘Vertigo.’ Click!”"
"Witty, gregarious and intellectually inquisitive, Bass executed each project in a seemingly simple, yet expressive style that reflected his fascination with constructivism, modernism and surrealism. In the book, Mr. Scorsese describes his designs as having “found and distilled the poetry of the modern, industrialized world.”"
from NY Times "The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star" by Alice Rawsthorn, published 11/6/11 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/arts/design/saul-bass-made-the-title-sequence-into-a-film-star.html?_r=1&ref=design