London-based light artist Chris Bracey is currently displaying his works in his first solo exhibition at Scream Gallery in London titled 'I've looked up to heaven and been down to hell'.

The artist, who learnt his trade from his father, has manipulated his lights into incredible designs using themes which mix religious iconography, retro fairground bulbs and neon advertising styles.

Bracey has also provided dramatic installations for films such as Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Batman films.

Many of Bracey’s works are self-produced neons, referencing popular culture – “Shine A Light in the Darkness of Your Soul” was written by Martin Gore from Depeche Mode and “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” is from a song by The Smiths.

His work also draws upon iconic imagery such as tattoo designs and the sights of Las Vegas and Soho, London.

The exhibition is on display until the 1st June 2013.

Comments

Comments

The V&A Museum was lucky enough to gain access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the museum's latest attraction.

The sold-out exhibition, titled 'David Bowie Is', features over 300 pieces, including costumes, photographs, album covers and video exerts from films and live performances.

Spanning the career of the Brixton-born musician, the retrospective also includes some more personal items such as never-before-seen storyboards, handwritten set lists and lyrics, as well as some of Bowie’s own sketches, musical scores and diary entries, revealing the evolution of his creative ideas.

The exhibition was brought together by the V&A's theatre and performance curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh and will explore the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades.

'David Bowie Is' opened on the 23rd March and will run until the 11th August 2013. Find out more here.

Comments

Daniel Rozin's Mirrors seem to be pretty normal sculptures until you take a step closer, then they shift to mimic you. 

Currently exhibiting at Bitforms in New York until the 6th April, his 'mirror' pieces shift the patterns formed on them to mimic the viewers shape in real-time. This is done via cameras that detect shapes and cause the LEDs to change the pattern on the screen. Whilst not recreating a persons image perfectly, the screen will copy movements made until the person steps out of range.

The exhibition, called Angles, features some of the artists other kinetic work, which also interact with their surroundings and work on a principle of merging the geometric with the participatory.

Comments

Comments

Comments

For the 2012 Abu Dhabi Art Fair Japanese artist, Tadashi Kawamata, created a huge structure out of chairs.

Comments

The Design Museum  has opened a new exhibition containing some of its permanent collection.

Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things will be on display on the top floor of the current home of the Design Museum, broken up into six themes or "stories". 

The 'Identity & Design' story features items that contribute to national identity such as the K2 Phone Box by Giles Gilbert Scott, UK road signage by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, and the London 2012 logo by Wolff Olins.

The 'Taste' story charts the influence of modernism on British design and includes pieces by Marcel Breuer and Erno Goldfinger.

'Why We Collect' features recycled designs from Jasper Morrison's table made of bicycle handlebars to the Campana Brothers' Cartoon Chair made of soft toys.

'Materials & Process' charts the development of plastic technology.

Whilst 'Icons' follows iterations of the Anglepoise Lamp.

'Finally Fashion' focuses trends from the 1960's to the 1990's.

The exhibition was designed by Gitta Gschwendter and consists of the objects being displayed on rough, chunky shelving alongside contextual images and documents. It will run until the museum moves to its new home next year in the former Commonwealth Institute building in South West London, which is currently being redeveloped by John Pawson.

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

At this year's 100% Design, (19 - 22 September 2012, stand E360, Earls Court) Formica Group has partnered with design resource studio Material Lab to create a unique pop-up gallery showcasing its latest innovative surfaces and materials.  

"Both Material Lab and Formica Group believe that being able to see, touch and feel materials is key to the design process as architects, designers and specifiers need to understand how their vision can come to life through the selection of materials," says Simon Wild, European Marketing Director at Formica Group.  

The Material Lab pop-up gallery features Korten from the DecoMetal® range, AR Plus® High Gloss Laminate and also the latest addition to Formica Group's product portfolio, Formica® Magnetic Laminate.  

The rich tones and intriguing surface relief of Korten evoke the look and feel of one of the favourite materials of modern architecture, corten steel. The handmade design incorporates iron particles, which make each individual sheet unique, creating a strong visual statement for any project.     

To find out and see more get along to 100% Design this week.

Click here for more info.

Comments

If when someone mentions Formica you think about the kitchen then think again. Formica® laminate is an amazingly versatile material and the Formica Bespoke service allows you to capture any image in laminate.

In a celebration of the city of London and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Formica Group has partnered with photographer Henry Reichhold in a T5 Expo exhibition at the check-in area of Heathrow Airport, London. The original creator of High Pressure Laminate (HPL), Formica Group is delighted to be part of this exciting event supporting artists of today and tomorrow.

The exhibition opened on 30th July 2012 and will be running for three months until October 2012. The exhibition features two large images (3 x 12.5 meters) scaled to match the extraordinary Royal events of the Jubilee weekend 2012: the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Carriage Procession. The images are captured in Formica® laminate using the Formica® Bespoke artwork service structured to facilitate virtually limitless, unique design.

Taken from the 54th floor of Europe’s tallest building, the newly built Shard that towers over London Bridge, the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant panorama was shot through glass on a rainy day. The skyscraper was shrouded in mist and clouds, resulting in a unique and dramatic backdrop of this historic event. The final image was created by combining over 200 pictures together in a giant jigsaw puzzle and then subjecting them to intense image manipulation to cut through the veil of weather.

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Carriage Procession photo captures the incredible excitement and vibrant energy on the day. As the Royal coaches drive past the cheering crowd, the image of thousands of waving arms and flags creates a spectacular visual display.

Henry Reichhold specializes in digital imaging and works with a large variety of technology, ranging from mobile phones to high resolution cameras.

The results are stunning images capturing the spirit and atmosphere of each subject, be it cityscapes or enormous panoramic images such as the ones being exhibited at the T5 Expo. Continuously exploring new ways of showing his work, Reichhold chose Formica laminate to create this unique display.

Comments

'The Gallery of Lost Art' is a year-long online exhibition curated by the Tate and developed by UK creative studio ISO.

The exhibition displays artwork that has disappeared due to theft, arson, rejection or simply been discarded by the owner.

"Art history tends to be the history of what has survived," reflects the gallery's curator Jennifer Mundy, 'but loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of.

"The website is visually structured as an open warehouse floor, viewed from above, with different chalk headers on the ground delineating the subject of that area of the gallery: destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, or ephemeral. users can zoom into particular areas, and by clicking on specific projects they can access essays, photos, film footage or interviews, and other material about the artwork."

Why the the piece of art was lost is also documented and the site will add one new piece each week for six months. Six months after the exhibition closes the website will disappear itself.

Click here to go to the site.

Comments

To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of AWN Pugin, a master in the use of colour, pattern and ornament and who was an ardent campaigner for the Gothic style, CAMAC Design partnered with the Fashion & Textile Museum to organise a wallpaper design competition.

Best known for his interior designs of the Palace of Westminster, Pugin was one of the first to promote the idea of 'honesty' and 'propriety' in ornament and design, enlisting ornament as a moral influence in society.

CAMAC Design has partnered with the Fashion & Textile Museum in London's Bermondsey Village, which was founded by iconic British designer Zandra Rhodes. The museum showcases a selection of designs from entries to the 4th Annual Student Wallpaper Design Competition during its current exhibition Pop! Design, Culture, Fashion.

A second display of students' work is also on show at Ramsgate Library in Kent until 20th August. Ramsgate is where Pugin designed and built The Grange, his family home, and also nearby St Augustine's church.

The full exhibition will be held in London from 14th - 20th September, forming part of the 10th London Design Festival. Set up to build links between new designers entering the creative industries and the professionals already in it, CAMAC Design is a new company founded by Caroline McNamara, an experienced event and exhibition organiser, and Vice Chair of TEXERE, Textile Education and Research in Europe.

For more information please click here.

Comments

In an exhibition called 'Fit', at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design, Vaughan Oliver and Jonathan Barnbrook invited leading British designers to submit their own Olympic posters.

See more of these great posters here on Design Boom or pop along to the exhibition.

Window Galleries, Kings Cross, 29 June – 30 August 2012

Comments

Comments

Review by Samantha Dawe, Director, The Think Tank
Clerkenwell Design Week 2012 basked in some very welcome warm sunshine but that didn’t stop us being inside and having a good look around.   Particularly this year it seemed that lighting was at the forefront of some intriguing design options and what was being shown would certainly create an impact in any space.  

As part of an expanded programme for CDW, a new site was included for exhibition space – the buildings and grounds of the Order of St John. Upstairs the light streamed through the stained glass windows but that did not dim the impact of Vessel Gallery’s display of unique and limited edition lighting.      

Whilst Tsai and Yoshikawa’s sculpted piece ‘Blooming Spark I’ was centre stage, each piece displayed was a work of art in its own right.  

 
 

While big is not always best, Guinness Book of Records holder Beau McClellan’s (world’s largest chandelier) eponymous company had presented a stunning large-scale lighting installation which hung in the Farmiloe Building and appeared to change colour.


     






































Looking down from the upper tier of the Building on this installation and the Anglepoise stand was a moment to savour.          














The heat was rising but we took the plunge and continued to climb where we spotted Lightyears’ elegant lamps, highlighting the best qualities of minimalistic Scandinavian design. Simplicity is beautiful.  


                     











Alongside this Swedese, exhibiting for the first time at CDW (we were told), was showing pieces launched at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair but again it was the lighting that caught our eye. Maybe it was that the pieces lent themselves so well to creating atmosphere and intrigue in this quirky building where they seemed right at home.

Comments

Comments

Hovering like ghostly apparitions of architecture these fabric installations by Korean artist Do Ho Suh create new environments within his exhibition that uses silk and metal structures.

The artist’s architectural sculptures have been brought together for an exhibition called ‘Home Within Home‘ at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea.

Previously on display at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, they explore the idea of home and the sense of cultural displacement that comes with immigrating to a new place. 

See more of these beautiful structures here on Design Boom

Comments