The sinister relationship between nature and artificiality pervades Portia Munson‘s “Reflecting Pool,” her fourth exhibition at the PPOW Gallery. Initially inspired by the innate utopian beauty of flower structures, the Massachusetts-born artist scanned intricately arranged flower petals and scavenged dead animals to create a series of mandala-like images.
Alongside her prints of petal-adorned wildlife shrines is the “reflecting pool” itself, an above-ground pool with thousands of manmade plastic objects floating at it’s surface. All in shades of blue, the objects are bits of trash Munson collected from streams and landfills. The installation is “a reminder of how rapidly plastic objects are produced, consumed and discarded to then spend the majority of their synthetic existence as waste, leaving nature to wage the long-fought battle of decomposition in landfills and ocean gyres.” “Reflecting Pool,” Portia Munson, April 4- May 4, PPOW Gallery, Chelsea
Avoiding much of art fair season havoc, some of us may found ourselves at Chelsea Waterside Park when for a few hours on May 10th, the park featured a collection of curious, unique 3D-printed objects, each designed by a group of artists. Concurrently, the objects were offered for sale via the Shapeways website, a service…
For one hour on August 16th, Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard will present his interactive piece Labyrinthitis inside a floating cube in the main gallery of Eyebeam in Chelsea. Tones generated from within Kirkegaard's inner ear will be modulated to specific frequencies and ratios to "spark audible emissions within the audience's own ears." The physiological changes will generate a third…
This group of Philadelphia-based artists and scientists is fascinated by the stuff you throw away. So fascinated, in fact, that they've spent the past 15 months collecting, photographing, recording, and analyzing garbage, compiling their findings into a Taxonomy of Trash website and book. Now, the artist, photographer, biologist, and sound…
