HandFalls

Ichi Ikeda (JPN)

Using the imagery of hands and lotus flowers, the project sends a strong message: “let’s create a new landscape for the future from here and now and contemplate the idea of a renewed relationship between the nature and the human beings”. The multiple images of hands holding clean water suggests that this water is perhaps not only the very same that grows the leaves and flower of lotus landscape created out of floating photographic images, but the hands themselves stand for a society fully loaded with hope and wishing for a good future. Joined, the images of natural flowers and human hands depict a new kind of a landscape woven by both nature and human crafts, hinting us all to find what the artists has called the “primary relations” between our life and surrounding environment, in order for it to become one and the same.

With the aid of an undiffused light source and the ponds surface to create a “water mirror”, the murmuring flow of air effervesces from below the ponds surface and like a breath across the water’s surface transfigures into soft wavering effects across the structure of the Museum’s façade. Unlike an ordinary mirror that faithfully reflects the object placed in front of it, the effect coaxed off the pond’s surface is best understood as a language of the environment in dialogue with the entire surroundings.

Deephorizon

UBERMORGEN.COM (CHE)

With the Deephorizon, the supreme discipline of art -oil painting- has come back. Following the explosion and sinking of a BP oilrig, oil gushed unabated for three months into the Gulf of Mexico, raising the prospects of a historic environmental disaster.

Winds from the Southeast nudged the slick northward, floating near the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi where it began to paint the coastlines. Conclusively, oil painting evolved into generative bio-art, a dynamic process the world audience could watch live via mass media. With an oil painting on an 80.000 square miles ocean canvas with 32 million liters of oil never before has this art form been as relevant and visible as today.

To create the Deephorizon work aerial images from the oil spill were used exclusively. However, the right to use them "as is" was renounced and the decision was made by the artists to adopt the use of a special digital imagery technique to transform the aerial images into “Half Ready Mades”, producing a statement about the disconnection of form and color and about contemporary and futuristic imaging procedures.

Ubermorgen.com has stated “the visualizations of the oil slick of Deephorizon represent the “Verkuenstlichung” (“artificiality”) of nature and the Vernatürlichung (naturalization) of art.”