Steel, Light and Shadow

Larry Kagan creates wall-mounted wire sculptures that seem to resemble abstract art pieces when the lights are off, but create complete images when illuminated from just the right angle. The New York-based artist bends, twists, welds and meticulously arranges steel rods beneath a single beam of light to produce these illusions.

He says: "We are more or less aware of the presence of shadows, since they tell us something about our environment, but we do not actually look at them – unless they call attention to themselves by some unfamiliar or unexpected behavior. My challenge was to induce viewers to actually look at the shadow rather than solely at the steel. I began shifting more of the narrative burden to shadow. The more content the eyes could detect in the shadow, the more time and attention they would expend on exploring its details."

Below is a selection of Larry's shadow art. Visit his website for more.

Comments

Weirdly Charming

If you’re a fan of art that makes you do a double-take, you need to check out Richard Brener . Based in the UK, Richard is an internationally collected artist who works primarily with ink, fineliners, and gouache. When you first see his pieces, they actually look pretty playful. Then you realize the entire canvas is packed with thousands of tiny, ghost-like shapes he calls "champs." They’re all squeezed together like commuters on a rush-hour train, and the level of detail is honestly mind-blowing. Richard spends hundreds of hours drawing these little guys over and over. It’s obsessive, very intentional, and a little bit wild. The cool part is that the longer you stare, the more the vibe shifts. Check out more photos below:

These master glassblowers make the difficult look easy

I've never seen Glas before and I'm absolutely delighted that Aeon Magazine uploaded the short doc on its Vimeo channel . Directed by Bert Haanstra, the 10-minute film about glass making won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 1959. "[ Glas ] contrasts the production of hand made crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, nearly 60 years after it was made."

This prosthetic leg is 1,500 years old

A lot of people have shared about this on social media, but since we live in an era where new information is hurled at us constantly, things like the 1,500-year-old prosthetic foot are easily forgotten. So here it is, a prosthesis made of wood and an iron ring dating from the sixth century. It was discovered in 2013 in Hemmaberg, Austria, but it was only recently that the findings about the foot have emerged. "The wood has deteriorated, and all that remains is an iron ring, barely over three inches in diameter, to stabilize the device. There is also a dark staining on the lower leg bones, perhaps left from a leather pouch used to strap the prosthesis to the man’s leg. Besides preservation challenges, there’s another reason that few prosthetic devices survive in the archaeological record: It was tough to survive grisly amputations in pre-antibiotic times." Read 'Mind-Blowing' Archaeological Find: Wooden Prosthetic for a Medieval Foot at Atlas Obscura.

finding cain

Search This Blog