Cloud Gate, Chicago 12/29/09

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve I drove out to Chicago with my daughter Gillian and her partner Kim( Kim goes to school there). I’d never been to Chicago and had always wanted to go to the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. I also wanted to see the public sculpture known as “The Bean” ( which is actually named “ The Cloud Gate”) luckily its just outside the museum in Millennium Park .
Installed in 2004, the sculpture is made of“stainless steel plates over a fortified steel frame. Under these plates, it is actually hollow on the inside. It was built and finished in place, on site because it was too heavy, bulky and dangerous to transport as one completed piece into Downtown Chicago. Also, after it was built, it had to be polished and have its seams removed, giving the appearance of being one large shiny object, instead of being the sum of many shiny stainless steal plates.”
It’s the work of “ Anish Kapoor, who is an Indian sculptor originally from Bombay, but now residing and working in London. He designed it, and the City of Chicago Millennium Park Project folks created it.”I’ve liked what I’ve seen of his work in galleries, so I thought this would be good.
As you get close to it, the size of it is overwhelming. The entire world around you, reflected in the curved surface is mesmerizing.
Gillian particularly liked the snow and how it broke up on the surface as it melted. I was impressed by the anamorphic quality of the underside. It was like some swirling vision of the world, surrounding a mirror image of the people below it in a circle in the center. It seemed magic and beautiful on that clear, cold winter afternoon in Chicago. We had a great time.
Quotes from billslater.com

Armory Show2010/ Parker's Box

I went to see the show at Pier 92 and saw some things that excited me. The first was at Galerie Forsblum from Helsinki Finland. I saw a piece by HC Berg called Vortex that had a handful of people stopped dead in their tracks. It was a multi dimensional box of curved plexiglass and cut out pieces... beautiful and mesmerizing.
Another gallery I liked was Sicardi Gallery from Houston. they were showing
a lot of geometric art from South America including Geraldo De Barros, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesus Soto and Thomas Glassford. Their work is about color and light defining space.
I then went over to an opening in Willliamsburg at Parker’s Box for a show
called Unidentified Living Objects. A show of sculptures that seem to be alive with some mechanical help. The gallery is divided into rooms with each sculpture in its own room.
When you first come in you’re in a space with a huge black bulbous air filled mass by Pierre Ardouvin that gains and loses air in a rhythmic pattern like breathing. The next room had Gereon Lepper’s Borderline Walker. He’s from Dusseldorf and had gone to the Academy there. My friend John Bjerklie had helped install the piece so he introduced me to him. I couldn’t help but ask him about Beuys and he said he had once come by his studio that he'd shared with another sculptor who knew him but they hadn’t had a conversation.Gereon said all of his pieces were kinetic and incorporated the input of some form of energy, though not the spiritual energy Beuys was interested in. The press release from the gallery says: “The German sculptor, Gereon Lepper investigates the influence of energies on structures and form. He is interested in the potential of an overlap between technical and natural principles. In his work, the frontier between machine and animal worlds becomes confused. The artist's "Grenzgänger" ("Borderline Walker") is a three-legged, motorized object, attached to a central pivot with the ability to navigate an assortment of obstacles. This work is at first very mechanical, remote, and cold. But this isn't just another curious spider made by an artist. On the contrary, if the viewer observes the inexorable and relentless progress of the "Grenzgänger", looks at the details of its uncanny anatomy, appreciates the strength of its legs, focuses on the delicate rubber soles that bend and extend themselves in an uninterrupted movement, the whole machine morphs into a surprisingly elegant dancer, slowly twirling around the room, almost up to the ceiling. Like an astronaut exploring an uneven and perilous planet, pushing down on its ballet-shoe-space-boots, "Grenzgaenger" manifests the stubbornness, dedication and determination only known in the realm of the living...”