garypoulton

New art district | Argentina

May 2, 2012 / garypoulton / No Comments

“The Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros is showing three large-scale installations at Buenos Aires’s Faena Arts Centre in May. They have created a new site-specific sculpture especially for the arts centre’s 700 sq ft “Sala Molinos” exhibition space and are also installing two earlier works—a Piper Comanche single-prop plane pierced by arrows and a sprawling shantytown neighbourhood built entirely from corrugated cardboard. The exhibition, which runs from 17 May to 1 August, is the second such commission for the two-year-old kunsthalle after Ernesto Neto’s enormous hanging sculpture O bicho suspenso na paisagen in 2011. Neto’s work was funded as part of the centre’s Faena Arts Prize, Latin America’s biggest award for visual artists, which has its second edition this year.” Read more.

The Art Newspaper

Cloud fly through

May 2, 2012 / garypoulton / No Comments

I was initially a little skeptical hearing about creating a cloud fly through in’ Motion’ using only four photographs and some cloud brushes in Photoshop. But……check it out yourself some interesting possibilities here.

Originally posted at Planet 5D’s blog site

ArtExpress at the AGNSW

March 11, 2012 / garypoulton / 1 Comment

I was at the AGNSW leg of the 2011 ArtExpress exhibition recently and had the opportunity to snap a few images on my phone. Any art teacher here in NSW knows what this is about and should be deservedly proud that senior high school students have the opportunity to have their talents nurtured by such a group of committed educators. For anyone from outside NSW see my post at Adobe Education Leaders for a fuller explanation of the selection process. Of course it’s wise to remember that the curatorial decisions of the various galleries are just that and may not necessarily represent the best of the pool of works put aside for the curatorial teams.

On another note, the show at the Armory Gallery at Newington is the biggest of the exhibitions with Bodies of Work from over 60 students on display. I saw the show last week and it’s truly worth the visit. The Armory show is themed around representations of the landscape and as usual there’s some extraordinary work there. The students, their parents and teachers are no doubt justifiably proud.

Small faculty promo…we have 3 students from Wyndham College in that show and one at AGNSW

These exhibitions speak highly of the quality of art education in NSW.

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See the full selection of works from the Art Gallery of NSW

I’ll be posting slide-shows from other venues in the coming weeks.

Sydney Teach Meet, March 2nd

March 3, 2012 / garypoulton / 1 Comment

I attended my first of these meetings yesterday and came away glad that I had gone despite the bad weather and the 260km round trip. Not knowing anyone there was an interesting experience, a veritable ‘stranger in a strange land’ scenario. My only connection was by virtue of being among those who were enthusiastic enough to be doing this in their own time knowing full well that their efforts would not be acknowledged under the tattered standardized professional development umbrella that NSWIT provides to keep the accreditation juggernaut dry and protected from the elephants in the room.

Kudos to the organizers for running such a well co-ordinated event and to the presenters for making it relevant. I would loved to have seen some info on the presenters provided on the schedule. Being new to the event I had no idea who was presenting what outside of whether the presentation was a 2 or 7 min gig. Some names were familiar to me only by virtue of their web presence and references in some publications. People like Alice Leung, Dan Haesler, Bianca Hewes and Chris Betcher were the only names I had any connection with and none I had met other than Chris by virtue of a chance encounter at Sculpture by the Sea a number of years ago. So it was good to put a reality stamp on 2 out of 4. Time was pressing and I would have liked to join Chris Betcher at an informal talk but the things I wanted to discuss were probably not relevant in this forum so I went hunting for something else and found it in the main auditorium simply by virtue of the fact that 2 of the 4 people whose names I recognized were presenting in the first session.

I missed Bianca Hewes presenting on Edmodo, (just a calculated guess extrapolated from the introductory talk). I’ve been using Edmodo for years and was curious to see what her focal points would be

By the time session two had come around I had run out of time for the day and with a two hour trip home ahead of me I had to call it a night.

Worthwhile? Definately. I’d recommend these events to any educator. i”ll certainly look to presenting at the next one.

Moroz Ice City

February 4, 2012 / garypoulton / 1 Comment

“Russia’s brand new hyped-up Moroz City (Frost City) comes courtesy of the annual Snow Architecture Festival, which set the challenge of building an entire city made of ice and snow from the ground up to more than 100 architects, sculptors, artists and volunteers from all over the country as well as Ukraine, Serbia, Estonia, Finland and Belarus. It now stands at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park measuring 2500 square-meters and complete with 500 chunks of ice and 1000 blocks of snow.” Artshub

Read the full article here

Unfortunately the links to the official website and video from Artshub are broken but a quick search for “Moroz City” will land quite a few hits.

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images courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

2nd Mona LIsa uncovered

February 4, 2012 / garypoulton / No Comments

“A copy of the Mona Lisa has been discovered in the Prado which was painted in Leonardo’s studio—created side by side with the original that now hangs in the Louvre. This sensational find will transform our understanding of the world’s most famous picture”. The Art Newspaper

Image (detail) courtesy of ‘The Art Newspaper”

Read the full article here

Olive | The movie

December 10, 2011 / garypoulton / 1 Comment

Shot entirely on a Nokia N8 by independent filmmaker Hooman Khalili, Olive opens next week in over 2000 US cinemas on Dec 16th (without the backing of any of any major studio). Full reviews and info on the making of the movie + trailer can be viewed at http://olivethemovie.com. No doubt Nokia will reap some kudos from this, but the film’s director said of Nokia “that they just sent me the phone” and that “after March of 2011 I never heard from Nokia again, they disappeared”.

In an interview with Wall St Journal Khalili said the process was not that simple

“There was a lot of things making this nearly impossible for us,” said Khalili.

The Nokia N8 shoots in high resolution, but before Khalili and his crew could start filming, they had to hack the phone to turn off the auto focus and the auto zoom.

“The camera thinks it knows what you want to focus on, but it doesn’t know,” @Wall St Journal

This was also shot before the advent of 35mm lens adapters for phones so the team had to create rigs that allowed lens attachments for the phones used in the making of the movie.

The movie was independently financed by former Facebook CPO (Chief Privacy Officer) Chris Kelly and stars Academy Award (twice nominated) actress Gina Rowlands who agreed to do the movie purely on the audacity of the concept.

The following 480p trailer is hosted on YouTube, where sadly, the kiddie experts who haven’t the vaguest idea of the implications that this project carries, post the traditional, nay required, poorly informed comments.

Hats off to Khalili for this adventurous undertaking.

Leonardo in London

December 5, 2011 / garypoulton / 2 Comments

“Just as Leonardo’s Last Supper followed a Leitmotiv of triples (three windows; groups of apostles in threes) to honour the Trinity, so there should be three triumphs in connection with the remarkable exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in London: “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan”.

As it happens, the triumphs are unmistakable in two parts of the enterprise. The curator Luke Syson’s achievement in gathering together nine of Leonardo’s 15 surviving paintings is an astonishing feat. It seems extremely unlikely that such generosity among the scattered owners of these masterworks will be repeated in the foreseeable future”……..

Read here

Reunited, sort of: the Louvre’s (left) and the National Gallery’s Virgins are installed on opposite ends of the fourth gallery, making it impossible to get more than the vaguest idea of how Leonardo changed his mind over the years.

Art on shifting sands

December 5, 2011 / garypoulton / No Comments

“The Guggenheim is certainly not cancelled,” the US ambassador, Michael Corbin, told me. “It’s just delayed due to cash flow problems and the Arab Spring”. This was at an exhibition of Middle Eastern artists hosted in the residence to show his general support for the role that art is playing in Abu Dhabi policy. There were more signs of official approval for the idea of art. A huge red ball is appearing in surprising places, such as the Zaha Hadid-designed bridge, and in shopping malls. This is an installation by Kurt Perschke to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).”- The Art Newspaper