Etsuko Ichikawa - Deai (2005)

Artist’s statement:

“These works are glass pyrographs that are made by drawing with hot molten glass, leaving the immediate charred tracery of my movement with the heat. 

It is a way of capturing a fleeting moment and eternalizing it, and it gives the viewer the opportunity to see a gesture.”

Stunning.

“Leviathan,” Anish Kapoor’s newest piece, opened Wednesday to huge amounts of critical and popular praise (though not completely without qualms).

It’s hard to pass judgement on the project, since it’s obviously a quite experiential,  phenomenological piece (visitors have likened the piece to a series of giant, echoing wombs). But just looking at the pictures make us feel that I’m-going-to-miss-it panic that sets in when seeing or hearing about a far-away piece that’s clearly going to be become one of those historically seminal works

Kapoor has dedicated the piece to detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Design Boom reports that he commented “as a colleague – I don’t know him personally – I feel that as artists we have a communal voice and it’s important that we stick together, that we have a sense of solidarity with each other. Perhaps all museums and galleries should be closed for a day across the world. I think some such campaign needs to form itself.’

Drawing Water is a constructed landscape shaped by the relationship between where water falls and where it’s consumed within the United States. It builds images to expose the reality that water is channeled, pumped, and siphoned to locations far from where it falls. Although the paths are imagined, Drawing Water is based on real data and it reveals a clear truth about water resources and use.

Drawing Water plays a bit upon the 19th-century theory that “rain follows the plow.” At the time of its inception, that theory promoted Westward expansion, under the belief that plowing fields encouraged cloud formation and rainfall. As long as people plowed fields, they believed, water would come to them. Although we recognize climatological reality isn’t influenced by our farming (in the manner hoped), Americans still live with an illusion of resource availability following need.

The project is realized as a series of high-resolution print images as well as an interactive, animated map. Each print displays the cumulative rainfall across the United States for a season, starting with Spring 2010 and continuing through Winter 2011. Each line in a print corresponds to a daily rainfall measurement. The length of the line and its initial placement are determined by the amount of rainfall measured and where it fell. The final placement and color of each line are determined by the influence of urban water consumers. The more water a city uses, the stronger its pull on the rainfall. As rainfall is pulled farther from where it fell, it changes color from blue to black

Gerhard Mayer’s “walldrawings”. Quite something.