x.web.mr

This is the blog of sculptor Michael Rees, living and working in the New York area. I like mixing up posts of my own work, mini projects, and so on with reblogs. I have a straighter blog type website that documents my own work linked below. I've given up on making my own html web page and fully embrace the tumblr ethos. Chance favors the prepared mind. | website | wikipedia | google image search | recent collaborative exhibtion Tactical Play Exchange || Like Me on Facebook | NEWSLETTER

[keepingitneutral]

House in the woods

Courtesy: Lana Al Khabbaz

[keepingitneutral]

"Hotspot," Nesodden, Norway,

Courtesy: Oslo Works

[thesilicontribesman]

David Harding's 'Henge', Glenrothes, Scotland

[xwebmr]

Sweet!

[garadinervi]

Maria Mulas (photograph), Gianni Colombo, (photograph with silver salts), n.d. [© Maria Mulas]

[cavalier-consciousness]

+ andrews building stairwell, UTSC (1964) toronto

[equatorjournal]

David Iggulden, Condor I, Nazca, 1975.

“In the first century BC the Nazca Indians of Peru may already have flown in some type of hot hair balloon. This suppositions is based upon designs on a pottery artefact in Lima, and upon the puzzling lines and piles of stones stretching across 200 square miles of the Plain of Nazca. The stones are meaningless - until seen from the air, when they form patterns of massive birds and directional markings. A primitive hot hair balloon, copying the pottery design and using only materials available to this pre-Inca civilisation, was built and flown succesfully in Nazca in 1975 by the International Explorers Society; Briton Julian Nott piloted Condor I to 300 feet.” https://www.instagram.com/p/CCg4x2tgjtN/?igshid=1k3aa58vh35ed

[xwebmr]

Yo was

SocialistModernism

SocialistModernism

[architectureofdoom]

Movable above-ground testing chamber for the Huron King underground nuclear test, designed to improve the database on nuclear-hardening design techniques for satellites. Nevada Test Site, 1980.

[xwebmr]

Weird

[brooklynmuseum]

Imagine holding this quilt in your hands. What might it feel like? How would you describe the materials used? What words come to mind as you look at the patterns?

Viewers of this quilt and others like it have often remarked that, while at first it seemed chaotic or haphazard, there is an internal order or rhythm that emerges the longer one looks. Stitched from multiple pieces of cloth—whether from scraps, from cloth objects no longer usable or needed, or from reams of cloth purchased for this purpose—quilts like this one are remarkable works that demonstrate skill in design and in geometry. Whether cut from cloth purchased specifically for quilting or whether the pieces had another “life” before being incorporated into this quilt, all were carefully selected and meticulously placed by the artist Anna Williams, an African American woman whose quilting work gained recognition by collectors in the 1990s and continues to serve as inspiration for textile artists today. 

Anna Williams was born to the southeast of Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1927 where she was raised by her mother and grandmother, both workers on a local plantation. After helping them in the fields during the day, Williams would spend her evenings learning to sew and quilt from her mother and grandmother. “I would pick up the strings of materials that fell to the floor, and I started making dresses for my dolls using the strings,” Williams recalled. 

While Williams learned traditional patterns used in quilting from her family, she, like many quilters, improvises when she makes her own quilts rather than adhering to a specific pattern. This quilt is made up of triangles pieced together to form blocks. This “pinwheel block” pattern forms the underlying structure of the quilt, but Williams allows herself the freedom to deviate from it with additional strips of cloth as needed. 

Quilts are the product of great labor. There is the creative labor of selecting the cloth with patterns and colors that will fulfill the creator’s vision, and there is the physical labor - the many hours spent carefully cutting and stitching the pieces together. Often historically associated with women (though men have also been identified as quilters), this labor and the creativity involved in the creation of quilts went largely unrecognized until the mid-twentieth century, when museums began to hang quilts as forms of abstract art. Today, quilts continue to be shown in Museums, but are recognized in a multitude of ways - from being hung like abstract art to being appreciated as their own, unique aesthetic and art practice. 

Beyond their functionality and decorative beauty, however, quilts are also acts of care. Quilting is often a group activity, bringing together a community. In such gatherings or quilting bees, the stories shared between the artists are valued and the quilting community provides each other with both social and emotional support. When they are finished, quilts are used to care for the community and become layered with new memories. Another quilter, Lucy T. Pettway of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, described using the quilts she made for her children to lay on: “used to spread down quilts all the time at night. I spread a quilt down and let the children sleep until they get cool, you know. Then we’d get in the house.” The process of quilting can also be an act of self-care and means of expression.. As Williams herself noted, her nightly routine of working on her quilts was a way to “keep my mind off my troubles.”

What other ways can art be a part of care networks? What is the relationship between labor and acts of care? Share your thoughts with us, and explore some more of the quilts in our open collection. 

Posted by Christina Marinelli  Anna Williams (American, 1927-2010). Quilt, 1995. Cotton, synthetics. Brooklyn Museum, Gift in memory of Horace H. Solomon, 2011.18

[architectuul]

FOMA 7: When Bricks Are Put Together, Carefully

Our seventh edition of Forgotten Masterpieces is taking a field trip through Italy with architectural historian Luka Skansi. Get ready for more Forgotten Masterpieces.

Colonia Enel, Rimini (1961-63) by Giancarlo De Carlo | Photo Marko Pogačnik

There is much wonderful postwar architecture in Italy. This is something you can perceive only by visiting the many buildings scattered across its territory, and discovering on the spot its qualities, its spaces, and its ‘muscles’. 

Mercato dei Fiori, Pescia (1948-55) by Leonardo Savioli, Leonardo Ricci, Giuseppe Gori, Enzo Gori | Photo Federico Padovani

For me, to study that period means to understand a surprisingly rich context of built architectural works, of amazing experimentation with the relationship between structure and space, of remarkable constructive solutions, of astonishing freedom of expression within very limited technological and financial availability. A context in which architects developed an ability to build great architecture without resorting to useless symbologies, without searching for primary meanings in the field of architectural language, in individual poetics.

Tribune dell’Ippodromo di Tor di Valle, Rome (1958-59) by Julio Lafuente, Aicardo Virago, Gaetano Rebecchini | Photo Federico Padovani

Villaggio Eni, Borca di Cadore (1954-63) by Edoardo Gellner, Silvano Zorzi | Photo Luka Skansi

It was, in short, a period of extraordinary architecture, one whose architects didn’t need to build complex intellectual castles to justify their projects and ideas. A period that could teach us – and of course anyone willing to see it – that architecture is built, not theorized. Italian architecture of the 1950s and 1960s confirms those simple, but illuminating words of good old Mies: “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins”.

Palazzo del Lavoro, Torino (1959-61) by Pier Luigi Nervi, Antonio Nervi, Gino Covre | Photo Marko Pogačnik

Manifattura Tabacchi, Bologna (1948-60) by Pier Luigi Nervi, Nervi & Bartoli | Photo Vera Leanza

Stabilimento Siag Marcianise Factory, Caserta (1962) by Angelo Mangiarotti, Aldo Favini | Photo Luka Skansi

Stabilimento Siag Marcianise Housing, Caserta (1962) by Angelo Mangiarotti, Aldo Favini | Photo Luka Skansi

Over time I gained this (banal) conviction, of how much architecture (good architecture, obviously) can speak for itself, after you experience it: a visit, an experience of space, the understanding of a constructive rule, the relationships between its subsystems, all that which explains the work of architecture more than infinite and generic words, historical interpretations, theoretical conjectures. And in a country (Italy) dominated by architectural theory, one in which I myself was reared, I discovered in myself a great passion for the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, built by architects who were rarely the object of theoretical and historical survey: that of the Milanese professionals, the refined architects of Roman speculators, of the great Italian engineers, the renowned and unknown builders of modern Italy, those who produced heroic architectural accomplishments in Ivrea, Terni, Bologna, Rimini, Pozzuoli, and Borca di Cadore. An extraordinary architectural heritage that Italy owns and which – I think I do not exaggerate when I write – few Italians even know is theirs.

Palazzina in via Archimede, Rome (1950) by Amedeo Luccichenti, Vincenzo Monaco, Riccardo Morandi | Photo Luka Skansi

Stabilimento Raffo, Pietrasanta (1956) by Leo Calini, Eugenio Montuori, Sergio Musmeci | Photo Marko Pogačnik

Istituto Marchiondi Spagliardi Baggio, Milan (1953-57) by Vittoriano Viganò, Silvano Zorzi | Photo Federico Padovani

Talking a bit more about the fifties and sixties would do us all very well: ‘us’ here comprising architecture schools, architects, academics, and students. In particular Italian schools, to help them surpass their rootedness in the anachronisms of themes with regard to the 1970s and 1980s, the conviction of the primacy of theory over professional practice, of urban design over architecture, with the continuous repropositions of tired concepts and methodologies, derived from the same endlessly perused books, aspects that no longer have anything to do with the problems of today’s architecture and cities. 

Ponte sul Basento, Potenza (1967-76) by Sergio Musmeci | Photo Luka Skansi

But the benefit would also extend to us – architects, historians, and theorists, so as to re-establish a direct, fresh, and genuine relationship to built work, to the work of architecture. To avoid useless interpretative speculation, superficial historical reconstructions, chitchat about architecture’s involvement with external factors. But rather to rediscover and – as Gio Ponti used to say – “Love Architecture” (Amate l’architettura), both the raw material (matter) and its counterpart (space).

Villaggio Matteotti, Terni (1970-75) by Giancarlo De Carlo | Photo Luka Skansi

Ponte Indiano, Firenze (1972-78) by Fabrizio De Miranda | Photo Luka Skansi

Monumento alla Resistenza, Udine (1959-69) by Gino Valle, Federico Marconi | Photo Luka Skansi

Furthermore, something we should also avoid is the vulgarization of this same architecture: its confinement to the tabloid format of a curious postcard, as an attractive but decontextualized phenomena, a mere beautiful and abandoned ruin. The vulgarization that implies not understanding the environment that produced it, the amount of experimentation invested in it, the enormous technical and visual culture of its authors, and ultimately, the enormous latent potential for today’s architect, to learn from these marvelous works, from these structural figures and spaces. All that stays behind the great structural forms of Nervi, Morandi, Musmeci, De Miranda, Zorzi, the refined junctions of those prefabricated elements of Zanuso and Mangiarotti, the wonderful spaces of the colonies of De Carlo and Gellner, the conceptual dialogues of Valle with history, the lightness of assembly of elements by Morassutti.

_____

FOMA 7: by Luka Skansi 

Luka Skansi is an architectural historian, assistant professor at University in Rijeka, Croatia. He holds a Master of Science in Architecture from IUAV (Venice), and a doctoral degree from the School for Advanced Studies in Venice, obtained in 2006 with a research on pre-revolutionary Russia. His research interests include Italian Architecture and Engineering of the 20th century, Russian and Soviet Architecture, the Architecture in ex - Yugoslavia. He wrote books and essays on Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, Gino Valle, Pier Luigi Nervi, Myron Goldsmith, Jože Plečnik, Nikolaj Ladovskij, Moisei Ginzburg, Peter Behrens, Manfredo Tafuri, Vladimir Braco Mušič. Recently he curated the exhibition Streets and Neghbourhoods, on Slovenian architect and Harvard Scholar Vladimir Braco Mušič (MAO Ljubljana, 2016) and participated to the 2014 Venice Biennale (section “MondoItalia”) with the installation The Remnants of a Miracle.

[xwebmr]

Trying out tumblr again!

[xwebmr]

Drawing Your own Path Podcast

A conversation from November of 2018! I so enjoyed speaking with the artist John Simon on his podcast Drawing Your Own Path.

From his site: iclock.

Michael Rees and I are friends from the early digital art days in NYC. He is an innovator in the integration of technology and sculpture experimenting with robotic marble carving, 3D modeling of inflatables, and AR activated imagery.  We discuss work from his ongoing exhibitions, the relationship of his work to the world, and then, of course, we talk about the creative process and what it means to make things in the digital world. 

 Michael's shows: 

Grounds for sculpture: http://michaelrees.org/2018-synthetic-cells-site-and-parasite/

Aldrich Museum: http://michaelrees.org/aldrichonedge/

NermanMuseum: http://www.nermanmuseum.org/exhibitions/2018-08-02-michael-rees-pneumatopia.html

[cabinporn]

This summer our friend Inga Hansen invited us to her family “cottage.” Upon arrival, by boat, we were treated to a massive A-frame on the coastline near Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia

Over 50 years ago Inga’s grandparents purchased a peninsula-shaped parcel for $850. The secluded farm island had only one other inhabitant at the time (there’s 4 homes today). The family got to work over the next 5 summers building in the home in the style of a Viking longhouse. The cabin is 60-feet long, and 24-feet tall. Every last original window is miraculously intact, surviving many brutal storms. In spite of availability, the cabin remains off-grid with no electricity or running water.

[danismm]

Mayes house - Don Erickson - 1954/56 - Glen Ellyn - Illinois

[straccitemporanei]

Piero Bottoni Monumento ossario ai partigiani bolognesi, 1954-1959 Via controspazio ott 1973

[xwebmr]

Clown Town

by Michael Rees

Clown Town opens for 1 month on October 21 2016 from 6:00p to 8:00pm at Bravin Lee Programs, 526 west 26th street, suite 211, New York, New York.

 When looking at art many people are tempted to ask “what is this about?”  In Rees’ case the answer is “Who wants to come up on stage and let me guess what’s in your pocket?”

 Send in the clowns.  Every opinion has the same clown-nose shape form and weight and is equal to every other opinion no matter how scary or stupid.  This is the farcical neighborhood in Michael Rees’ Clown Town.  The exhibition includes big clown shoes, a shooting gallery that sculpts a sculpture, an inkwell monkey head with alternating sign that says “ Winner” then "Loser", a man in a barrel suit and on.  Rees mines these ideas through a continuous thread of his elusive and ineffable Pynchonesque story telling.

 Clown Town, Michael Rees's first show at Bravin Lee Programs, showcases 12 new sculptures in marble, plastic, plaster and aluminum. Each work is supplemented with photographs embedded with augmented reality technology, thus inviting audience interaction through a smart phone or tablet app. This augmented reality aspect adds layers of semiotic experiences to the sculptures and image triggers.  This exemplifies that while clowns often prompt uneasy laughter they are a manifestation of our need to test the limits of who we are.

 Michael Rees’s show is a light comedic picaresque mediated as a sculptural experience. Each sculpture contains an episodic juxtaposition of form, imagery, and augmented reality that plumbs some aspect of post internet foolishness. The ludic tenor of the works in Clown Town points to anxious times and to shifting definitions of the world around while a sense of fatalism and of powerlessness in the face of cosmic forces suffuses each work.  The various clowns in the exhibition are exposed through small vignettes. Rees takes the clown motif and juggles it as an increasingly fitting, effective and well-used symbol for our unbelievable times.

 This inescapable clownish aura of Michael Rees’s works is felt as variously exuberant, silly, incompetent, abject or grotesque. Clown Town looks into a post-sculptural condition stuck within a transformative trajectory that takes us from the existential to the artificial.  Rees transports the viewer through an ideational house of mirrors, deftly shuffling technologies, medias, images and characters while playing with one's sense of the real.

[cyberclays]

Mobile Weather Station - by YURIY ROMANYK

[xwebmr]

mechanic love with drawing and rendering

[xwebmr]