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ROA’s Giant Animal Lanticular

I recently stumbled upon a really neat post by Wooster Collective that featured work by Roa. This piece was found in London, England on a warehouse building with very interesting dimensions.  The picture changes when it is viewed from a different angle.     I haven’t heard of his work prior, so when I dug  a little deeper, I found out that he’s been painting all sorts of animals on buildings and walls around Europe. I think it’s a very cute concept, especially because his paintings of wildlife are specifically found in urban settings.  Something as noticeable as this would be really fun to see on some of the bland buildings around the city, don’t you think?

There are more photos of Roa’s work under the cut.

Continue reading “ROA’s Giant Animal Lanticular”

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Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Garden

Patrick Blanc's Vertical Garden

Projects such as this Vertical Garden seem to be easier and easier to find, which hopefully means that they are becoming realized more often and in more locations. This particular project is a vertical collection of plant life that Patrick Blanc recently completed on a corner of the Athenaeum Hotel in London, England.

According to the project summary located on the hotel’s website, “It’s a fairytale dream of a wall, erupting with trailing tendrils and flowers eight storeys high above Piccadilly’s red buses like a living tapestry. As well as hosting native plants and flowers, way down below beside our Garden Room there’s the world’s biggest collection of non-nettly-looking nettles – or Urticaccae… This humid microclimate is the perfect spot for the more exotic species.”

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A building of one’s own

All Citizens, Bruno, SK

I spent a good part of my afternoon today reading through the blog archives of All Citizens, an artist-owned shop and periodic performance/art venue in Bruno, Saskatchewan (90km east of Saskatoon, population 495, as of the 2006 census). Two Vancouver artists, Serena McCarroll and Tyler Brett, evidently purchased the building for $6500, and they keep it open as a shop one day each week (Saturdays) in addition to maintaining a farily active events calendar. Because one can do that.

This bears repeating: one can do that.

Spaces are exciting. The same empty building or floor can be, depending on the occasion, a gallery, a shop, a cafe, a meeting place, a performance venue, a studio—a lab, if you will. Places like Load of Fun in Baltimore are exciting; Chicago’s apartment galleries are exciting; BCL’s space downtown this month is exciting; the forthcoming storefront exhibitions for Windsor’s Visual Fringe Fest—despite the unfortunate association with fringe theater—will no doubt be exciting (I did one last year, and I may yet do another one before I pack it out west, this summer).

Now, there aren’t quite buildings to be had in Windsor for $6500, but I happen to know—because trawling real estate listings is one of my stranger hobbies—that there are vacant commercial properties available in this city for the same cost one might pay for a new car. In fact, if I was going to be staying in Windsor past July (I am not), I would be sorely tempted to make an offer on this cigar shop downtown (on Ouellette between Park and Wyandotte), which is listing for $25k. To put that into human terms, a mortgage on the place would be comparable to what many people pay each month for cable television.

I mean, really now.