COWBOYZOOM

BUT IS IT ART?

Chihuly and Architecture

in Books Comment

Chihuly and Architecture, 2021. Published by Chihuly Workshop; co-distributed by Abrams. © 2021 Chihuly Studio

Chihuly and Architecture, 2021
Published by Chihuly Workshop; co-distributed by Abrams

“Whether rippling like sheets of frozen water, enclosing space in a perfect sphere, or reaching out like the fingers of a fantastic sea creature, his luminous sculptures are breathtakingly beautiful. […] By grouping them in gardens, plazas, train stations, canals, and architectural masterpieces, Chihuly has also changed the face of public art.” —Eleanor Heartney

Chihuly Workshop and Abrams Books announce the release of their latest collaboration, Chihuly and Architecture. The large-format publication is available May 18, 2021 online, and at select bookstores, distributors, museum shops, boutiques, and galleries.

Chihuly and Architecture celebrates four decades of Dale Chihuly’s spectacular site–specific glass installations. This publication, which is being released in honor of the artist’s upcoming 80th birthday, examines architectural commissions, temporary art installations, and museum exhibitions. An exploration of entire rooms and galleries, glasshouses and castles, and travels from the canals of Venice to the Citadel in the Old City of Jerusalem, the book provides rare insight into Chihuly’s inspiration and global footprint.

The essayist, Eleanor Heartney, is a New York–based art critic and author of numerous books and articles about contemporary art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

About Dale Chihuly:
Dale Chihuly is an American artist noted for revolutionizing the studio glass movement and elevating perceptions of the glass medium. His work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide, and his major exhibitions include Chihuly Over Venice, Venice (1995-96); Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem, Jerusalem (1999); and at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2008); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, (2013); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, (2016); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2017); Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands (2018); and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, (2019). Chihuly Garden and Glass, a long-term exhibition located at the Seattle Center, opened in 2012.

Opening May 2021:
Dale Chihuly: Glass in Bloom marks the artist’s first major garden exhibition in Asia. Featuring iconic large-scale installations situated within Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, this exhibition is organized in collaboration with Hustle & Bustle.

For more information visit chihuly.com

Cura. 36

in Magazines Comment

CURA. 36 Cover A

CURA. 36 Cover B

CURA. 36

“Art as radar acts as an early alarm system.” — Marshall McLuhan

The power of art to anticipate future social and technological developments inspired the new issue of CURA. 36 to investigate the notion of futurity through the work of some of the most visionary and promising artists of the contemporary landscape.

“In a period in which the material became a threat or risk of contamination due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the immaterial, the surrogate space where we accept other materialities, has become increasingly centralized” Gareth Damian Martin argues in the essay devoted to the work of Ed Atkins, who is featured on the double cover of this issue. However, as Lumi Tan writes in her contribution on the artist, “the visualization of alienation and confinement that Ed Atkins has put forth over the past decade feels now queasily familiar.” Moreover, in a dialogue with writer Vivian Rycroft, Atkins explores some of the key themes that inform his upcoming solo show at the New Museum in New York, in which the relationship with the self and the limits of one’s own representation are widely addressed.

In a progressive process of dematerialization of reality, the physical world gives space to the prefiguration of a virtual world that decodes new conditions, “in order to survive the climate, extinction and social crises of our time” (…); “We tend to think of ourselves as separate from the rest of the world, entities that inhabit and perceive a reality defined by objects in three-dimensional space” writes K Allado-McDowell in the book for Ignota Books written in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, a neural net that generates text sequences.

“It turns out that learning how to see the world around us is pretty hard to do,” claims Trevon Paglen, and on the essay on his work Emma Enderby continues, “If the future always flies in under the radar at a moment when technology is quickening past humanity, Paglen contemplates this future and the need to expose certainties so that we might gauge that new reality and ask if it could be different.” On the other hand, “if one accepts humans as one among many organisms, then culture, economy, and technology are part of the extended phenotype of homo sapiens, contiguous with the rest of nature (Timur Si-Qin with Mostafa Heddaya), and “if matter constantly converses and changes, there are no total opposites, so in a way metaphor is the only way for us humans to understand or grasp the world.” (Guan Xiao with Sarah Johanna Theurer). “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed” argues Yuri Pattinson in conversation with Bart Van Der Heide.

Also featured in this issue:
Klára Hosnedlová in conversation with Anna Gritz; Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen and Adam Jasper on the Anonymous Club; Michael Connor about Mélodie Mousset’s work; Alberta Whittle with words by Nicole Yip; Sung Tieu written by Paul Rekret; Jes Fan with words by Pavel S. Pyś; Mire Lee with a text by Natasha Hoare and Alisa Baremboym introduced by Noam Segal.

Cura.