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Art Inside an Office

This blog is not only about Museums, Galleries and established artists. It is about the small, artistic things I see in my everyday life. Today, I discovered art, inside my office.

Working at a museum means that I experience art daily. The wonderful architecture of the building, the creative gift shop and the daily information I get for future exhibitions are only a few examples of art I experience. The Cycladic Museum is known for being inventive and unique. It manages to stay interesting by always developing and coming up with new ideas and activities. The latest activity of the Museum was a childrens creative competition. What do you think will happen, if you introduce kids to a museum’s competition? Magic!

The Museum of Cycladic Art is introducing a very unique competition for our young friends between the ages of 6-12. Kids are given a blank paper, with just the outline of a traditional Cycladic Seated figurine and all they have to do is let their imagination free and express themselves using any colors or materials they like.

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There are no limits to this project, so kids can make their statue  an old man or a young girl, dress it with different accessories, cover it with a superhero suit and even transform it into a musical instrument or a scary animal. As far as their imagination goes, the sky is the limit and it is not only fun but it is also an artistic experience. Ten kids, with the most interesting works, will join our Kids summer program for free, and the first winner will get the chance to see his/her work featured in our Children’s Program Poster.

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Have a look at the images presented. These are only a few of the wonderful works that our offices have received. We decided to transform our office to a more creative and colorful place by using the childrens drawings. I simply love the way kids have been expressing themselves and letting their creativity show through their unique works. They have incorporated different materials, colors, shapes and patterns. If you look closer, you can identify the inspiration from different artists and artistic genres through the colors, patterns and shapes used to fill the figurine’s shape. Their personality shines through in the way they add their own little details giving their statue unique features such as extra body parts, hairstyles and accessories.

I simply love the creativity of this project and how the children managed to transform our everyday office to a wonderful small gallery. Hope you enjoyed this post

Thank you for reading
Elli

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Win two Wonderful Art-Books

Hello everyone,

I have been thinking of doing a competition for a while now, and since I am now moving out of my house, I have two wonderful books, that I have already read, and I am willing to give them away, in order to show my appreciation for reading and following my blog for these past months.

Joining this competition is very simple, easy and takes only a minute. The only thing you need to do, is provide your email, in the form of a comment, below this post. The competition will be open for only a week, so don’t waste anytime and remember: Apply by 20/03/2014

After the competition closes next week, I will collect all emails provided, randomly select one, and  post the email of the winner on my blog next Friday the 21st of March. To thank you all for following my blog, commenting and motivating me, I am willing to ship worldwide, so even if you are not a UK resident, you have the chance to win these two wonderful books!

Graphic Design, Referenced:
A visual Guide to the Language, Applications and History to Graphic Design.
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500 Handmade Books: Volume 2
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I encourage you all to take a minute and participate in my competition. I promise that you will not regret it. Both books are very interesting and different and I am sure you will really enjoy them. If you want more information on both books, here are two amazon links, where you can take a sneak peak of their content, view some images and read their description.

Thank you for reading,
Elli

Vandal Lust

A few weeks ago, I created a post, asking viewers to answer ‘what is your favourite art form’. After looking at the results and comments, I personally found it hard to give just one answer. I really like to create paintings and mixed media art, take photographs and also create short films. At the same time, what I really love in exhibitions I visit are large scale installations. One of the reasons why I enjoy large scale installations is because I like  to take my time to view them, walk around them and try to the find small and beautiful details that are not that obvious at first sight.

A week ago, I visited Saatchi Gallery and viewed a work created by Andra Ursuta; Vandal Lust. Andra Ursuta was born in Romania in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York since 2000.

There is a thrilling and unnerving sense of destruction and metonymy in Ursuta’s works (sculptures/installations). Most importantly, the artist doesn’t steer away from using her personal memories and experiences, whether the damaged psychology of her country or her own body, which is often the inspiration of casts, to ignite her mixed-media creations. Ursuta’s narratives are convincingly bodied forth by a distinctively fractured, somewhat deprived sense of craft.

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What I understand from observing and researching Vandal Lust is that self-invention and self-destruction are endlessly interchanged. It is not very clear whether Longing and failure that fill the work are real or artificial. “By resurrecting an obsolete piece of battlefield technology generally reduced to recreational use by living history enthusiasts, Ursuta blurs the distinction between authentic private feelings and their reenacted, staged version.” (Source: zoominfo.com)

Vandal Lust is a life size tableau that was inspired by “The man who flew into space from his appartment’ and it centres on a crudely made catapult that seems to have been used attempting to launch the artist into space using a large medieval siege engine, built to the limits of space capacity and  based on reconstructions found online. The basic part of the installation, which is the catapult is not a solid monolithic structure but it includes a variety of materials ranging from cardboard, plaster, scraps of lumber, resin and remnants of destroyed or abandoned objects.

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The following section is a part of Ursuta’s interview with Christopher Bollen from interview magazine, focusing on her inspiration and what she tried to say through her installation.

“Vandal Lust borrows from  Ilya Kabakov’s famous piece The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment ? where the man is presumed to have successfully launched himself into space. In yours, there’s a dent near the ceiling and the figure curled on the floor. Is that about failure?

Launching and failing. I guess it could be seen as being about the art world, that trajectory. But it was more about knowing you will fail but going for it anyway

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What I really enjoyed about this work of art is trying to find hidden details, walk around the art piece and try to imagine the story behind it. Moreover, I liked how the installation had many different elements, the larger part which was the catapult, but also a human cast which was on the floor, as well as the bodies ‘effect‘ on the wall of the gallery. All these small details were there to help and lead the viewer towards understanding what the catapult was and what was the story behind the work of art. If one of the three elements were not there, the work would not make sense. After leaving the exhibition, I was very excited to go back home and research the artist and the messages behind her work and personally, I enjoy viewing works of art that are that effective and make want to think and research about them even after leaving the exhibition.

Do you think vandal Lust is an effective installation?

Thank you for reading,

Elli