Urban Montage by Charlene Weisler

Paris Paper City

PARIS: The Paper Architecture exhibit at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine amazes with art made completely out of paper. http://untappedcities.com/paris/2013/02/12/strong-and-light-paper-architecture/

Street Artists Create An Urban River

Now THIS is neat: A group of guerrilla lighting designers left 2,000 transparent plastic bags in the middle of a busy footpath in Caracas, Venezuela. The street team, Luzinterruptus filled each bag with water, tiny lights, and even plants and fish. Thankfully, the fish were plastic toys, but did get passers-by to look twice, prior to closer inspection.

Billed as a Garbage Bag River, here is the full story. The installation encouraged people to take these “mini ecosystems” home so the river could “circulate around the city, in the hands of children and adults.” The idea behind Portable River is explained by Luzinterruptus:

"With the piece, Portable River, we wanted to bring a river of water to the center of Caracas, for which we had to package it and lay it at rest, quite an unusual thing, because there it is normal to see it overflowing the streets every time it rains,” they explain. “We wanted to stop it for one night so that people could sit down and admire its beauty and perhaps, think about the value of this element, essential to life and the challenge presented in bringing it closer to the citizens, especially in the big cities."

Impaled Pumpkins A Tradition in Cobble Hill Brooklyn

Untapped Cities reports of a wonderful tradition in the neighborhood of Cobble Hill Brooklyn - they impale the used Halloween pumpkins on a iron fence. Read the entire article here.

I love to photograph decaying pumpkins that are left on the street in NYC after Halloween but it is a real treat to see so many in one place. Their expressions are priceless. Here is one of Aby Sam's great photos. There are more at the link.

BTW, Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

Inflatable Street Art

Amazing and very creative - Joshua Allen Harris' street art has to be seen:

 

Faile's Prayer Wheel

Faile is a Brooklyn based art collective which helps keep the neighborhoods vital and interesting. Take for example their Prayer Wheels which come and go on the streets of Brooklyn. Once located on North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this public sculpture / street art installation has moved around town. Where it is now is anyone's guess.

These sculptural works are engineered to spin in place while people meditated to their favorite images from the collective. Keep your eye out for one of them and see what the oracle offers you.

A Bench Made Out of Metrocards

This bench is made out of New York City Metrocards and if you are a savvy New Yorker, you may find that some of these cards have value on them so the bench may be worth more than you think!

This in from TreeHugger:

In New York's subways, you see a lot of discarded Metrocards. It's sad, not only because most people drop them on the floor rather than in a trash can, but because the cards are rechargeable, and there's no good reason to dispose of them in the first place. But NYC-based artist and designer Stephen Shaheen has come up with a unique way to recycle old cards, or at least 5,000 of them: he's made a one of a kind bench.

Watts Tower in Los Angeles

This has been on my to-post list forever but now with the news that a new benefactor for the watts tower has come forward, I am posting it now.

In my mind, The Los Angeles Watts Towers in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was one of the first modern street art mosaic works. Built by Simon Rodia, The Watts Towers consists of seventeen major sculptures constructed of structural steel and covered with mortar. When I went there many years ago it was just this great sculpture in the middle of a neighborhood. Now it appears to be a tourist destination with admission tours and everything. I support whatever keeps the Watts Tower going.

Tiny Cardboard Box People Appear All Over Singapore

Street art does not ahve to be two dimensional. In fact using the concept of discarded amazon cartons to make figures and misenscenes fits into my definition of street art too. Here, Singapore-based artist Anton Tang takes unused plastic figurines and repositions them in Lilliputian set-ups full of humor and pathos, thus reimagining what it means to be human.

Recycled Clothing As An Art Form

Working "in the now" and with discarded objects, is always interesting and exciting to me. Street artists and graf artists use walls and other urban forms as their canvas. And now, Derick Melander uses discarded clothing as his art form.

 

Artist Derick Melander creates large geometric structures from carefully folded and stacked second-hand clothing that weighs between five hundred pounds and two tons. What seems like a straightforward process – procuring the clothing, sorting it by colour value, folding and stacking it – soon takes on a life of its own. Read more at - http://eco-chick.com/2010/04/5555/amazing-art-sculptures-made-from-recycled-clothing/

 

Motorcycles from Japan

Part of the street art zeitgeist is the low brow art, hot rod, car culture mindset that artist Robert Williams celebrates (and deconstructs) in his amazing paintings.

I am not a car fan but I can appreciate design. So when I found this link of Japanese motorcycles on Good Experience I was intrigued. While not part of the NYC graffiti mindset ... yet, it does have that cool urban feel. Well, judge for yourself.