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The Detroit Medical Art Project

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Installed by medical students from Wayne State University at Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, The Detroit Medical Art Project seeks to highlight the lack of healthcare for many of Detroit’s residents.

Asking questions like, “How do you take care of your patients when the community is falling apart all around you?”, the students created the project from scavenged materials and donated equipment to depict a medical clinic that is so desperately needed in the area.

There’s a video in the Detroit Free Press article that features some quick, but good, interviews with the medical students who created the project, and shows some of the installation process. It’s interesting to know that type of discussion goes on in the classroom for medical training, and quite inspiring to see the kind of dialogue being generated through an installation.

[via Wooster Collective & Detroit Free Press]

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Yochai Matos: Fluorescent Installations

Here’s a really beautiful work, Eclipse done with fluorescent lights by the Israeli artist, Yochai Matos. Along with light installations, he also does some interesting street art that deal with highlighting perspective, glitter, and 8-bit aesthetics.

I know when we were up in Peterborough, I had wanted to work with fluorescent lights, but from the little research I did, it seemed prohibitively expensive. Does anyone have any insight they could share on how one might work with these lights in this way, maybe specifically—does each light need a ballast, or is there a way of wiring in parallel that can get around that?

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And another work, Flame (Gate).

[via today & tomorrow]

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Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK

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After four days at our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at Artspace, we installed our work and presented our research findings  in the main space at the gallery. After nearly 96 hours in the city, we came to realize that everything is ok in Peterborough.

Undoubtedly, we realized this by comparing our experiences in Windsor. Small things such as the fact that the parking meters in Peterborough accept change all the way down to nickels, or larger things such as the incredible number of people who either plan to stay in Peterborough or at least plan to come back eventually, make the city of Peterborough ok.

Though these four days have been only the very first opportunity we’ve had to spend a concentrated amount of time in another city in order to try to engage in some level of research, we felt like we learned a lot. There’s something about the entrepreneurial spirit in Peterborough, at all levels, that has seemed to encourage the right people to stay in the city, and it’s this sense at the very base of everything that we experienced that we need to begin to translate back to Windsor.

This translation, at the very least, will turn into more dialogue with more people back in Windsor. There’s so much to be done here and yet it seems like if more people can be convinced to try to stick it out here, just a little bit longer, that maybe we will be ok too, eventually.

Continue reading “Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK”

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Beautiful Light by David Therrien

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorbould

4 LETTER WORD MACHINE is a giant illuminated computer-controlled / live performance text display by artist, David Therrien.

Recently exhibited at part of Nuit Blanche this past Saturday attached to Toronto’s city hall, the installation displays “the phenomema of light and electricity and the role of light in our belief systems, language, biology, natural world and cosmology – light as illumination, energy, information – and as a metaphor for good and evil.”

Guess how much I’d love to be able to work with something at this scale.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0cDE2g1QQs&feature=player_embedded

Ignore the music in this video, but watch the work come together in Scottsdale back in January 09.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Pike Loop: Architectural Fabrication

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Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler are using R-O-B, their Mobile Fabrication Unit robot, to New York to build Pike Loop, a 22m long structure built from bricks at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

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Positioned on the central mall on Pike Street, the robot will work for up to four weeks – in full view of the public – to construct a brick wall, a highly sculptural response to the specific identity of the site. For the Pike Loop installation, more than seven thousand bricks aggregate to form an infinite loop that weaves along the pedestrian island. In changing rhythms the loop lifts off the ground and intersects itself at its peaks.

Beyond awesome.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Gardens in Galleries & Architecture from Recycled Materials

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I don’t mean for this to be such a lazy post/reblog, but there’s a few images I’ve been meaning to post for a while. I figured they were good reference points for our magnetic planters project, among others, given the variety of display and function of these planters and the use of recycled materials (see below). So, consider this less any sort of critical discussion of these works, and more just a compilation of image research for stuff we’re doing and would like to do. That being said, I’d highly recommend following the links throughout to read more about the projects.

First up, pictured above is, “The Hanging Smoking Garden”, 2007 by Mikala Dwyer from vvork.

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Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas

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We recently decided to demarcate some of many accidental meadows across Windsor with these Naturalized Area signs. In hopes that these signs might momentarily allow residents of Windsor to look at these naturalized spaces for what they are—that is, wonderful additions to our urban landscape—instead of the result of a politically-charged issue, we spent the earlier part of this week designing the signs, getting them printed, drilling holes, and installing them.

Continue reading “Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas”

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Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach came to Windsor and did an artist talk, almost a couple years ago now. I remember in particular, her slide that stood in for her graduate work—it was just a blank slide, I chuckled and kind of shivered. Beyond that, I can’t remember a lot of her presentation, other than she also worked at a planetarium at some point, and published zines, but something about her practice stuck with me.

Her work that seems to make the rounds most often is pictured above—sweaters with (mostly) political messaging on them. Using a computer-controlled knitting machine, she often makes sweaters and matching skirts and then poses in them. The messages are somewhat immediate responses to current cultural and political climates, and it might be the immediacy of the response that I enjoy so much; well, the immediacy and the text.

Also, I thought it might be a good reference for the fun folks over at CNAP.