Pinar's Blog – April 2012 Archive (64)

Do you ever feel like someone's watching you? This incredible stainless steel eyeball sculpture by Moscow-based architecture firm SPeeCH Tchoban & Kuznetsov is capable of "looking" at all of its the visitors in its environment at the Cortile d’Onore of the Ca’ Granda's courtyard. The high-tech sculpture, called Architect's Eye, is a smooth and reflective spherical…

Placing your empty cardboard boxes in the recycling bin is one way of effectively dealing with the common material, but artist Chris Gilmour opts to sculpturally mimic objects with them instead. The English sculptor reworks average cardboard boxes to construct incredibly detailed replicas of varied objects ranging in size from a teacup to a grand piano. It's hard to believe…

California-based digital artist and photographer Michael Oswald, better known as MichaelO, transforms photos of women into sensual sci-fi fantasies. Using his expertise in graphic design and general artistic skills, the artist takes photos of models and then reworks the images to reflect a new scene. His work combines the utilization of photo manipulation through editing tools…

New York-raised, London-based photographer Jacob Sutton is probably best known for his fashion photography or his directorial stint in a video of a snowboarder surfing at night with a custom LED suit on. Every medium the artist works in depicts his touch of haunting beauty. Sutton's photo series known as…

Across a vast expanse of country land, lofty electrical towers always seem somewhat out of place. They clash with the natural aesthetic of the environment, yet they are needed in this high-functioning world we live in. Moscow-based design studio Design Depot has realized a design concept that has the potential to remedy this visual dilemma—deer-shaped transmission towers. The…

We can hear sound but how does one visually represent it? Artist Daniel Palacios takes a go at visualizing noise with his kinetic sculpture called Waves that consists of a long, sturdy string of rope attached to a turbine on each end. The interactive structure responds to movement in both a visual and an audible manner.

The number of people that are present within the same room and…

Marilyn Monroe



Celebrities and pop culture heavily impacts each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not. We are constantly being marketed to as shoppers on the hunt for the next great thing. Iconic figures like Elvis Presley and Madonna, though entertaining, could simply be seen as figurative representations of albums and other goods an audience…

Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro is known to construct enormous spheres with layers of complexities. One of his monumental orbs stands tall as the centerpiece of the Courtyard of the Pinecone at the Vatican Museum. The structure titled Sfera con Sfera, translated as Sphere within a Sphere, is a bronze statue that appears golden as the sun shines down…

Style makes all the difference in giving off the right first impression, whether you're a female fashionista or a man with refined taste. While we're more aware of the endless sources of trend-watching sites designated for women, there are some fantastic sites for men to feel inspired and keep their finger on the pulse of the latest trends. In our latest installment for…

A few months ago, we introduced you to tape artist Max Zorn with his incredible layering technique used to produce astounding portraits made of packaging tape. I was absolutely blown away by his layering method and medium of choice. Equally innovative and using a similar…

We live in an age where everything is being reverted to the digital. This year will mark the end of analog TV in the UK when London officially switches to digital on April 18, 2012. To commemorate this transition, renowned artist David Hall has created an installation featuring 1001 different tv sets, ranging in boxy size, age, and condition, that are each running on…

Historical monuments adorn many public city streets across the world, but how often do we come across an interactive swing affixed to said monuments? Polish artist Kamila Szejnoch's public installation titled Swing, which is from her 2008 project series called Carousel Slide Swing, adds a playful element to the bronze Berling Army Soldier Monument in Warsaw, Poland.…

Lisbon-based photographer Jose Pombo modestly refers to himself as an amateur photographer who likes landscapes at sunrise and sunset, preferably near water. However, his work is anything but amateur. The landscape photographer captures stunning images of vast seascapes that whisks a viewer away into a fantasy world. It's hard to believe that these misty beaches accented with stretching…

There's so much beauty in the world that it's difficult to capture it all, but Bristol-based photographer Martin Turner takes a go at it in his breathtaking landscape photography. From the rolling hills of Cumbria to the open fields of Warwickshire, Turner composes aesthetically stunning shots of areas where nature and architecture merge. It's absolutely astounding that Turner manages…

How cool are these individual bubble rooms? French designer Pierre-Stéphane Dumas has put a new spin on camping outdoors with his series of tent-like chambers shaped like igloos, under the name Bubbletree. Each bubble suite is fit to be fully furnished with enough space for a bed and resting chairs. They come in two forms—transparent and half-opaque—for different…

London-based photographer Dan Tobin Smith, in collaboration with set designer and art director Rachel Thomas, captures the silhouetted profile of a woman in multicolored layers. The creatively dreamy works in this series titled Paper Profiles appear both illustrative and sculptural. While some may speculate that the image is digitally rendered, it is in…

Why make out the hands of a clock when you can just read the time? In 2009, Alice shared QLOCKTWO, a text-based wall clock, with us. Nearly three years later, German design company Biegert & Funk have unveiled their wristwatch version of the innovative time-telling design called QLOCKTWO…

Could this be the perfect reading hideaway for all the bookworms out there? Colombian artist Miler Lagos constructed this self-sustained dome made entirely of books, titled Home, for an installation exhibit late last year at MagnanMetz Gallery in New York. Remarkably, there is nothing holding the novels together…

There are certain iconic figures in pop culture that can be defined simply by their hair. In this minimalist series by graphic designer Patrícia Póvoa, we see some of these legendary coifs that need no introduction. The silhouetted hairstyles stand alone against a radiantly colored backdrop in the Portuguese artist's series titled Copyrighted Famous…

Most of us use shopping carts as mobile storage units while we are perusing for goods at a store or supermarket, but designer Matt McVeigh finds more artistic use for the metallic wagons. The Australian artist creates a variety of miniature sculptures that replicate a series of swirling shopping carts, in addition to his life-size installations, representing the…