Everest Recycled

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

 

(Reuters) – Fifteen Nepali artists were closeted for a month with a heap of 1.5 metric tons (1.7 tons) of trash picked up from Mount Everest. When they emerged, they had transformed the litter into art.

The 75 sculptures, including one of a yak and another of wind chimes, were made from empty oxygen bottles, gas canisters, food cans, torn tents, ropes, crampons, boots, plates, twisted aluminum ladders and torn plastic bags dumped by climbers over decades on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain.

Kripa Rana Shahi, director of art group Da Mind Tree, said the sculpting – and a resulting recent exhibition in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu – was aimed at spreading awareness about keeping Mount Everest clean.

“Everest is our crown jewel in the world,” Shahi said. “We should not take it for granted. The amount of trash there is damaging our pride.”

Nearly 4,000 people have climbed the 8,850 meter-high (29,035 feet) Mount Everest, many of them several times, since it was first scaled by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa in 1953.

Although climbers need to deposit $4,000 with the government, which is refunded only after they provide proof of having brought the garbage generated by them from the mountain, activists say effective monitoring is difficult.

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text and image courtesy of Reuters.com

Anthony Gormley | “Model”

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

(Reuters) – Britain’s foremost living sculptor Antony Gormley wants us to get inside his head with his latest work “Model”, a 100-tonne steel maze of cubes and squares, dark corners and splashes of light on show at the White Cube gallery in London.

The giant grey-black work, based on a human form lying down, is entered via the right “foot”, and combines the fun of an adventure playground with the unnerving quality of a labyrinth often plunged into darkness.

For the first time, the Turner Prize-winning artist who has always been preoccupied with the human form allows us to get inside, and draws parallels between the body and the architectural spaces we inhabit.

“I think we dwell first in this borrowed bit of the material world that we call the body,” Gormley told Reuters, standing beside the imposing structure made up of interlocking blocks.

“It has its own life that is unknowable. But the second place we dwell is the body of architecture, the built environment,” he added.

“We’re the most extraordinary species that decided to structure our habitat according to very, very abstract principles of horizontal and vertical planes.”

Model has plenty of surprises. The more nimble visitor can crawl through its left “arm”, which is a passage around three feet high, or clamber on to a roof bathed in light.

“There are places that you wouldn’t necessarily know are there,” Gormley said. As if to prove his point, he disappeared into a large raised “aperture” invisible in the darkness.

Sound also plays a part, with the resonance of voices and rumble of footsteps giving clues to the size of each space.”

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image and text courtesy Reuters.com

Judy Chicago: Deflowered

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

Judy Chicago: Deflowered

The American feminist artist Judy Chicago, who is best known for The Dinner Party, 1974-79, an installation of 39 dinner place settings for mythical and historical women, returns to London for the first time in more than 20 years to show her work at the Riflemaker Gallery (13 November-22 December) and the Ben Uri Gallery (14 November-10 March 2013), her first UK museum show. Chicago’s early works on paper will occupy Riflemaker’s three floors, as well as the acrylic work Birth Hood, 1965, and pieces from The Dinner Party. “We wanted to explore Chicago’s influence on contemporary art,” says Tot Taylor, the gallery’s director.

“At a time where one of the dominant influences in contemporary practice appears to be art created ‘from a female perspective’ it might be said that Judy Chicago built on the work which had been done by Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois”

Full article @ The Art Newspaper

image courtesy of Riflemaker Gallery