art | Heartfish Blog

Re:Form School, a REDU project

Posted on October 12, 2010October 12, 2010 by Hijiri

On Sunday, I went to check out the Re:Form School, a REDU project — so glad I did, it was awesome! I saw cool art work, learned something new, being inside of an American high school (I graduated Japanese high school — so different!), saw lots of great designs, signs, typography… I enjoyed so much, what a great concept and a campaign!

Throughout history artists have lent their creative expression to ideas and issues of culture & politics, combining innovation with artâ€™s greatest strength â€” its ability to transcend boundaries and make an impact, while not relying solely on language. RE:FORM SCHOOL gathers together a diverse array of hundreds of the nationâ€™s most talented visual artists under one roof to celebrate that role and to send a loud message that the time has come to fix our ailing public school system.

RE:FORM SCHOOL is a high profile group art exhibition, event series and public awareness campaign, taking place in New York City. Thousands of artists, parents, community leaders, educators and grass roots organizers are coming together in a vibrant and creative space in order to shine a light on what is working, explore the potential of what might be and celebrate the role imagination, creativity and innovation will play in the process. (via Re:Form School website — see the video from their homepage also.)

Entrance on Mott Street:

Throughout the project, I saw these wooden type signs and I loved it.

These arrows, too… so great!

REDU room:

Paper house kit — so neat! I grabbed one, of course :)

A blackboard with “I can” message — so simple and strong.

The “Teach Me” wall:

There were lots of unbelievable facts… shown in an interesting art way…

This “High School Graduates” chart map is all created with pencils. (see the video here.) Where it’s empty, only 50.5 – 66.9% graduate high school…

Each belt had State’s name that is still legal to hit students… 20 of them.

This hallway caught my eye… with countries names… which led me to…

A boys bathroom sign — isn’t it cool?

& a girls, too…

Inside of the girls bathroom; “Smart girls are pretty.” LOVE that.

These might be my favorite. Awesome handmade (I think) types.

A free poster for everyone:

Hallway statues:

This room was interesting — the sound and the wave and the light were all making an art together… by Michael Murphy. You can see the video here!

A court yard had some cool art, too… I loved seeing people hanging out in here…

I hope the campaign was a success!

Gorgeous Paper Dress

Posted on October 6, 2010October 5, 2010 by Hijiri

Spotted this gorgeous dress in a lobby of 7 W building. And it is made out of paper leaves! Made me look even more.

Love the neckline, too…

Ever since October hit, it is officially fall here in NYC. This is perfect for the season, too.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway if you haven’t already!

DUMBO Arts Festival 2010 (Nights)

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Hijiri

One more post from DUMBO Arts Festival… nights!

For 3 nights, we enjoyed arts everywhere in DUMBO, it was so fun and inspiring. Some photos are taken by my iPhone + night time so apology for a bit of a fuzziness…

Projected art on Manhattan Bridge:

Short film was playing all throughout the weekend on a parking lot on Jay Street:

And this was pretty awesome — a projected guy was crawling all over the Manhattan Bridge!

In case you don’t know what you mean… the crawling guy was created in a computer (see the laptop?), kind of like a stop motion graphic, and as the guy crawls, this person behind the laptop was moving the projector so that the projected guy looked like he was actually crawling the bridge. Up, down, ceiling and everywhere. I thought it was really awesome!

This was an interactive art we enjoyed — you just move around and make the light streaks — pretty fun!

Me and my friend in here, can you see us? :)

These sculptural works entitled Animas by Seth Wulsin were great!

Animas is a series of painted three-dimensional portraits that explore the interior dimensions of mind and soul in the embodied physicality of space. Animas portray the presence of human materiality through a non-existent, yet visible volume. Each portrait is built up from cross sections of sculptural forms painted onto multiple mesh screens that are superimposed onto one another, generating an image. The image changes its character depending on the distance and angle of the viewer in relation to it, giving the sense that a single portrait contains numerous faces.