FEATURING AMY THOMAS AND OLIVER IRVINE

This week we are featuring Amy Thomas and Oliver Irvine with their work “Imagined Land”: a theatrical playground in a juxtaposition between an imagined and a real world. The natural and the pre-fabricated.

This is how they describe their work:
The installation, like the imagination, has no boundaries. Viewer becomes artist, artist becomes viewer. The environment seeps out of it’s boundaries and requires the embodiment of both the subconscious mind and the surrounding space. Visitors (4,600) are given a ticket, which is exchanged for a lump of clay at a hole in the gallery wall. Viewers are asked to create objects from the clay that they feel will contribute to the unfolding environment. The visitors ideas are incorporated by the artists, who mould their precious clay objects into the installation. Over time the sculpted and installed objects become conjoined and calcified in paint and in clay, which is continuously applied by the artists in this imaginative land. The work becomes a collaboration; between artist and viewer and acts as a state of raw communication. The ‘imagined land’ detaches itself from reality, and into the subconscious; it highlights a deeper understanding of our imaginative process. The collaborative act and contributions build up to create a large installation, and are designed to provoke the idea of personal creation in order for change and preservation of the current environment. Visitors are not working in competition, but performing the same simple physical act that builds up a mass accumulation of personalized matter. The Installation becomes an evolutionary process as a new relationship has formed between artist, participant, space, material and time to create a cycle of change in an ‘imagined land’ of order and chaos.

You can read more about the artist HERE

This week we are featuring Hatuey Ramos-Fermin and his work “Transmit – Transit”. Hautey Ramos-Fermin is a Domincian-born, Puerto Rican-raised educator and multimedia artist currently based in New York City.

In Transmit – Transit he deconstructs an element of local space to investigate a detail of globalization. Working as an investigate journalist or a documental film maker, he has chosen to focus on taxi drivers and their daily life.

“Over the last several months, I have engaged with the livery cab driver community to learn of its reality, document it and create an engaging portrayal that is both attentive and serious.”, Hatuey Ramos-Fermin says.

“The final outcome of my investigation is a rich installation that attempts to capture the hardship and diversity of the trade. And the encompassing device of the installation is the live radio feed from cab livery dispatches surrounding the gallery. By incorporating the live radio dispatch, I transform the gallery visitor from art viewer to voyeur, listening in on the orders being transmitted all around us.

Radio transmissions that direct one human being to drive a vehicle to a specific site, pick up a passenger, and drive to a new destination.

It happens at all hours of each day; it is a common reality of the urban space and absolutely nothing exceptional. And yet it is fascinating to take a moment, listen and consider the wide implications of these transmissions.

By having people listen, I try to effectively dislocate peoples consciousness into a private space – that radio spaces employed between dispatch and drivers – transmissions that are only privy to when in a cab and even then hardly take note of.

But when these transmissions are re-contextualized within the gallery walls, when we are invited to listen, not as passengers eager to arrive at our destination, but rather as art viewers expecting to engage with creative work, the transmissions gain new depths.”

CLICK HERE to see more of Hatuey Ramos-Fermin's work.

FEATURING IEPE B.T. RUBINGH

This week we are featuring the artist Iepe B.T. Rubingh. Dutch born in 1974, Iepe has been living and working in Berlin since 1997.

Iepe is among other things the founder of “Chessboxing”, but here we would like to focus in his most recent painting work - “Painting Reality”.

On the 25th of April 2010, 500 liters of paint were dumped on Rosenthaler Platz in the center of Berlin Mite – a new color in front of every traffic light. The cars drove over the paint and became the “paint brushes”. The action was executed anonymously and for month’s people were guessing whether this was a “Guerilla Advertising Campaign” or an artwork.

We spoke to the artists and asked him some questions:

- Is “Iepe” your real name?

Yes it is. Actually my full name is Iepe Benne Tee Rubingh. Big Iepe, Ben and Theo were the three best friends of my father. Iepe in Dutch means elm tree.


- Is it true that you wore wooden glasses back in the days?

That's also true. In fact my father made them, as he was a carpenter. In the eighties he had a carpentry with his partner Rein. At a certain point, Rein decided to leave society and go to the outskirts of it; Iceland. My father ran the business by himself and got so caught up in it, that he never managed to visit his old working partner.

Finally after 10 years he packed his suitcase and flew to Reykjavik. Rein picked him up with his car and they drove instantly to his house on the countryside. Rein first showed my father his little carpentry next to the house and gave him a present. It was a little trunk of a tree my father had never seen before.

'What kind of tree is this?', my father asked.

'It is the trunk of a tree that only grows on Iceland', Rein answered. 'You should check the quality, it's amazing!'

My father spend a week on Iceland having a great time with Rein and enjoying the impressive landscape before flying back to Rotterdam.

Just a few days after he had returned, I visited my parents. My father took me into the carpentry and showed me the little trunk. We started testing its quality by cutting of a piece, bending it, making it wet, heating it as well. It was enormously strong and flexible. The reason must have been that it had grown very slowly due to the very harsh climate. Then we thought what to make out of it.

'Glasses! We will make you a new pair of glasses! As the wood is so strong and flexible it will suit perfectly for the purpose of glasses!'

During testing we found out that the wood expended while heating it, which would be perfect putting the glasses in.

So my father started working on it. I helped him a bit grinding a part or two, but my father really putted a lot of effort and all his experience in it. At the end one could really say it was his masterpiece. We ordered the glasses. Using a hairdryer we heated the frame, putted the glasses in and plopp finished! I was the proud owner of father made wooden glasses and couldn’t stop telling the story for weeks.

Now there is one particular part of he story that I forgot to tell. This tree doesn't only grow on Iceland; it also grows only in the weekends. Somehow I always felt a certain energy in my head during the weekends at the time I wore those glasses...

- What does this story have to do with your latest work 'Painting Reality'?

Nothing. Except that one should enjoy life and create stories!

- Thank you Iepe.

You can see the Video for “Painted Reality” HERE.

You can read more about the artist HERE.

FEATURING NEW LIFE COPENHAGEN

This week we would like to update you on one of our own works - “NEW LIFE COPENHAGEN” - which is currently being shown at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Denmark. The exhibition is called “MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME” and features ten artists and artists groups from around the world, addressing the notion of hospitality.

Wooloo was invited to take part in the exhibition with our ongoing hospitality experiment NEW LIFE COPENHAGEN. The project connects foreign visitors coming to Copenhagen with local Danes who like to host interesting guests. Using these meetings as our platform, we invite our participants to live together – and to live in new ways.

The experiment began last year, when we secured accommodation for more than 3,000 activists and other visitors during the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Among the many Danish hosts for this event was a woman, who hosted a Brazilian man. She became pregnant during their stay together and has recently given birth here in Copenhagen.

Wooloo was invited to attend the birth of the world's first New Life Baby (it is a girl!).

In "MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME”, we present an image of the mothers placenta we took at the birth, notes from the mother (host) and father (guest) of their original meeting, as well as sign-up sheets for new hosts who would like to join NEW LIFE COPENHAGEN.

You can read more HERE

FEATURING CAROLINE BOILEAU

This week we are featuring the artist Caroline Boileau, and her work “A VERY PERFOMATIVE STRUCTURE”. Since 1995 she has been using installation, video, and performance, to examine the connections between the body and its environment and also question the body as a social construct. In her research she addressed the influence of medicine (historic, popular, and scientific) on the construction and understanding of what constitutes us as human beings.

This is what she says about her work:

“A Very Performative Structure is a mobile piece of furniture, a transformable structure waiting to be unfolded and interacted with. In shape and colour, it references a glass bookcase, a hospital cart or a large toy. It is a space where futile and important objects coexist and are displayed, sorted out and made sense of. It is first and foremost a performative structure, a teaching tool used to present the blurring of my social roles. This Very Performative Structure hovers somewhere between the cigarette girl, the femme orchestra and the bag lady’s cart. It is contaminated by its context and always on the verge of formal and conceptual re-configuration. Objects are added and removed. I can talk from behind it, show videos within it, and serve tea from inside it. In and around it, I am both subject and object, surveyor and surveyed, analyst and analyzed subject, doctor and patient, waiting to interact.”

You read more about her work HERE.