Ana Mendieta

           

         Ana was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba but came to the U.S. at a young age. She used her own body as both subject and media to explore issues of gender and cultural identity. The naked female form along with nature is in many of her pieces. She self-labeled her own genre of art called “earth-body art.” One theme in her early performance art was violence against the female body. Later Mendieta focused on a spiritual and physical connection with the land, which typically involved carving her imprint into sand or mud, making body prints or painting her outline or silhouette onto a wall.  Sadly Ana Mendieta fell 34 floors to her death from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment. The only other person with her at the time was her husband of only eight months, prominent minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. 

Burning Man

    

        Burning Man is an annual experiment where a temporary community “dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance” comes together. There are no rules on how you should behave or express yourself at this event (“save the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large”); rather, it is up to each participant to decide how they will contribute and what they will give to this community. It’s a bunch of diverse people who come together and form their Utopia. They finally release and enjoy all their artistic ideas. They feel like they belong here and can participate. As they say in their website “You're not the weirdest kid in the classroom — there's always somebody there who's thought up something you never even considered.” You're there to breathe art. The theme for 2011 is Rites of Passage.

Burning Man is a crazy mixture of art and expression easy to say its not for conventional people. Its a place where you are literally free to do as you please. But one thing to keep in mind if you plan to attend is that you need to provide everything vital for your own survival in the desert.

Lauren Bon

Lauren Bon was born in 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut and currently works and lives in Los Angeles, California. She has a Masters Degree in Architecture from MIT and an Art BA from Princeton. Bon is also trustee of the Annenberg Foundation and Founder of “Not A Cornfield”. Thanks to her education, artistic initiatives and access to funds she has developed impressive land art projects. Just to name a few of her pieces there is “Bees and Meat”, the “Releasing Fear Project”, “Farmlab”, “Anatomy “ and “The Strawberry Flag.”

Lauren's project titled "Releasing Fear" at the Belfast Art Festival in 1999 aimed at releasing children's fears by ritually burning the pieces of paper on which these fears were written on. Each kid was asked to put down one fear, some reported several. But only one boy said that he wasn’t afraid of anything.  Later as planned on Halloween night Lauren's rafts with torches floated down the Lagoon in Northern Ireland.

Another piece titled "The Strawberry Flag"

Strawberry Flag has been instrumental in defining space for the people who need it the most. Veterans are working daily on the site and on artwork. They are developing new skills to transfer to the outside workplace. They are part of an art work, an artwork that reclaims lives -- in this case by cultivating strawberries.

Her most Famous piece is "Not A Cornfield" which was when she cleaned 32 acres of land and planted one million seeds."This art piece redeems a lost fertile ground, transforming what was left from the industrial era into a renewed space for the public." She chose corn because of its origin and how it has migrated around the world.

Bon seems to be an artist who is trying to solve both social and environmental problems. She produces green Art projects that also say something about an underlying social problem.

FarmLab

 
     So I chose to go to Farmlab because my artist Lauren Bon happens to be the founder. When I first got there I wasn't sure if I was in the right place because it wasn't what I expected and there were no huge signs. But after I asked people they told me which door to go into! As soon as I got in I started taking photos and and walking around the place. Then a lady came and told me I needed permission to take photos and walk around because it was a private gallery or something like that. Luckily I had taken photos of most of the place. After that she also told me a little bit about the project she said it was a urban area that they were turning into a green place. They were creating a green place that could work with the urban area. She also said they have free workshop every few weeks where they make things like basket out of the plants they grow around there. I also learned a little of the process they use for their garden.

So the first step is to collect rain water they have about 10 of this bins that collect water. Most of them are around the building but there are a few scattered ones.

Then they filter the water, with the bamboo looking planter on the left of the picture and with this thing in the center they somehow clean the water.

At the end they store it in these tubes, which they later use to water the plants they grow and the plants in the state park right behind their building!

Pictures of all the plants they have so far!

These Nopales are Beautiful!

Overall I think the purpose is to think of the environment and realize how much of it we have killed to build our communities. Its now time to think of ways to help it grow and embrace it as a priority in our lives.

Second Life

This is my first attempt at finishing one look but I had trouble erasing the original outfit and hair style for some reason!

Stelarc

The Blender

Stelarc was born in Limassol on the Island of Cyprus in 1946. He has performed 25 body suspensions and other numerous projects utilising his body. Most of his work includes prosthetics or some kind of "techno" gadget that enhances the human body. His work The Blender was pretty weird but it caught my attention, it is a bubble that contains fat from Stelac and Nina Sellars that was taken out during lipo. Then it periodically turns on and blends the content and they even included audio! Although I understand that he is trying to get his idea across I think some of his surgeries are a bit extreme. 

Stelarc & Nina  Sellars

His work is "based on the central idea that the human body has become obsolete or rather; biologically inadequate."

In his words, the human body "malfunctions often and fatigues quickly; its performance is determined by its age. It is susceptible to disease and is doomed to a certain and early death. Its survival parameters are very slim - it can survive only weeks without food, days without water, and minutes without oxygen."

Erwin Redl

Erwin was born in Austria in 1963. His artistic medium is LEDS in two and three dimension. His work to me visually seems elegant and simple. It's purpose is to seduce your senses yet leave room for you to create your own fantasy in his work. This is one of the artists' whose work I would really like to see!

“My work reflects upon the condition of art making after the ‘digital experience.’ The formal and structural approach to various media I employ, such as installation, CD-ROM, Internet and sound, almost requires binary logic, because I assemble the material according to a narrow set of self-imposed rules which often incorporate algorithms, controlled randomness and other methods inspired by computer code.”

Toni Dove

Toni Dove is best known for her electronic media, interactive movies, and installations. In her work she likes to provide multiple point of view that bring importance to evey character. After watching a couple of her pieces it is easy to see how much effort she puts in the films and the sound tracks. In particular I like this video because of the bubble and the softness you imagine. I also like the tiny bits of humor in it.

"To make the cimamatic experience something that we can improvise. So the idea is to create a dense multiy layered almost sculptural form of cimema that you can navigate and shuttle through in real time."

Mariko Mori

Mariko Mori was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1967. Mori is known for her cyberfeminism and futuristic installations. She initially studied fashion and later became a model in Japan. Feeling confined by Japan's culture of conformity she moved to London where she began to study art. Mori was always looking for ways to express her individualism and give power to women. She believes that womens' own resignation has a big role in the position that they play in Japan's culture. Mori also urged women to take the roles that men gave them and turn it to something that represented them or helped them. In other words "own it". 

Most of Mariko Mori's work is a fine mixture of real life and fantasy it is so intertwined that if you separate the two I don't believe there would be any art.



Here she dresses as a "mermaid" at a local artificial beach in Tokyo. So she is at a fake beach pretending to a mermaid and no one even pays any attention. She actually uses images of herself in most of her work which she says goes back to her work as a model and even to her childhood when her father would take countless pictures of her. She likes and has become accustom to the spot light.



Her later work was about enlightenment and meditation. She embraced technology with open arms and wanted to go as far with it as she could without losing core tradition. So on the surface most of her work seems very futuristic and technologically advanced but once you go a little deeper you see traditional issues or topics.

One traditional value that came up often in her work was Buddhist values. The concept of oneness and the world existing as one interconnected organism. Models for overcoming national and cultural borders.

"The 21st century is rapidly approaching; it promises a new era when a city in space may well become a reality. In the future, we can transcend our national borders to share one consciousness as interconnected life forms and truly global being. It is my hope that Beginning of the End will serve as a symbol of the eternal harmony of the human spirit" - Mariko Mori

This is one of her latest pieces were she erected a pole on a rock and several feet away she set a capsule that illuminates in different color s depending on the flow of the current.