Art: 1.26

Artist Janet Echelman planned to give painting exhibitions in Mahabalipuram, a fishing village famous for sculpture, but her paints never arrived.  So she seeded her art with what she learned from the fishermen there and took it to the city.  In fact, to many cities.

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Janet Echelman, 1.26/Tsunami, Tumblr

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Janet's site has a glorious array of her many sculptures.  She also maintains a studio on Tumblr.  To see how one of her pieces is set up, take a look at this video slideshow about the installation of 1.26/Tsunami:

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And for a truly inspiring talk about her work and taking imagination seriously, here's her talk given at TED.

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This is a person who really knows how to make lemonade from a serving of lemons.

-- Marge

Kinetic sculpture

Alexander Calder is probably best known for creating the first moving sculpture in modern times, dubbed mobile by Marcel Duchamp (a truly interesting character).  This example of Calder's work comes from the Park West Gallery blog; it shows one of his mobiles installed in the Guggenheim Museum.

Alexander Calder:  "Red Lily Pads" (Nénuphars rouges), 1956.

Kinetic art/sculpture has come a long way since then.  Often artists work to make their installations as immersive as possible.

This first video shows several works installed in Atlanta.  It's one of the best videos I've seen on art with each artist telling what he/she had in mind when creating the work and talking about the viewers' responses.

This next video shows the world's largest kinetic art sculpture, installed in Singapore.  How it was created is quite different from those seen in Atlanta.  The technological level is very high.

Excuse me while I go collect the parts for my next piece.

-- Marge