Sculpture: Singing Glass

"Singing Glass" by Japanese artist Mika Aoki

Aoki creates exquisite glass sculptures inspired by her fascination with the visible and invisible qualities of the medium. What at first appears to be high-speed macro photographs of water droplets, turn out to be physical stationary sculptures carefully crafted from glass.

She often derives her inspiration from the forms found in microscopic life such as spores, fungi, viruses or even sperm. With a masterful command of light and glass, Aoki depicts these propagating life forms in a haunting yet beautiful fashion, which she calls “singing glass.”

Sculpture: Hot Spot

"Hot Spot" by Mona Hatoum, 2006.

Installation: Mushroom Cloud of Steel

"Nuclear Mushroom Cloud of Steel" by Subodh Gupta

Made as a protest against the tomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gupta created this massive mushroom cloud out of pots, pans, and kitchen utensils.  It weighs 26 tons, it measures 36x36 feet, and it took three cranes to lift it and seven days to install it.

   

Sculpture: Cardboard Art

Cardboard Art by Chris Gilmour

Using only cardboard, glue, and the tears of the homeless, Chris Gilmour creates these jaw-droppingly intricate cardboard sculptures.

Sculpture: Avengers Assembled

"A Superhero in Every Aisle" by Guy Seese

A design for the gate fold insertion in Entertainment Weekly #1203 Summer movie edition, made out of everyday objects you can find at your local Target.

Sculpture: Aeolus

Aeolus

Most of the sound sculptures we see involve some sort of electronic or digital reaction. It’s rare to find something fully analog that will really blow your mind. Aeolus is a sound sculpture that relies only on the wind, amplifying its movements and giving us a sense of its presence like never before.

The piece is an arch adorned with a crown of round steel pipes that point out in all directions. As the wind blows through Aeolus, it creates a range of ambient tones that shift with the direction and intensity of the wind.

Installation: The Great Monkey Project

"The Great Monkey Project" by James Grashow

"Cardboard sculptor" James Grashow recently made headlines for his "Corrugated Fountain" installation, but this earlier piece is far more whimsical. Back in 2008, Grashow created 100 life-size monkeys out of cardboard and hung around the San Jose Museum of Art's lobby. As he says, "The more monkeys you have, the more the space between them starts to jump. The ceiling becomes an abstract painting." It's hard not to smile when you see them. Do you think they throw pack material?

Sculpture: Spare Parts

"Spare Parts" by Mike Turner, 2009

"The Spare parts represent the more successful versions of the mutant forms in the preserved series of works, engineered from embryonic cells, attached and fed by tubes attached to strange metal devices these body parts are grown as spares in the case of an accident, illness, or old age that requires the owner to have their original features surgically replaced."

Sculpture: Open Mind

"Open Mind" by Cuban artist Yoan Capote

"The Last March of the Walking Trees" by Yoan Capote

Tolkien had it right, trees did used to walk like men, but he over one crucial detail: they had actual feet and wore shoes to cover their tootsies. A glaring ommision, sir, but hard to explain in the context of Middle Earth, I suppose.

   

Sculpture: Embodiment

"Embodiment" by Eric Franklin

Photographed by Brad Carlile

Sculpture: T-Rex Fossil

T-Rex Fossil Sculpture from Walter Werbe

This needs to be on my lawn. Walt Deko is selling a massive T-REX skeleton constructed of of reinforced fiberglass for roughly US$29,734. I'm pretty sure that this is the best way to protect your garden from lawn gnomes and other such invaders.

Sculpture: Mind Shut Down

"Mind Shut Down" by Subodh Gupta, 2008

Sculpture: Anatomical Neon

"Anatomical Neon" by Jessica Lloyd-Jones

A series of blown glass lights meant to focus attention on how energy is used by the human body.

"Following an International Visiting Artist Fellowship, Jessica was awarded an Arts Council Wales and Wales Arts International grant to undertake a research and development project at Urban Glass, New York. Collaborating with internationally renowed glass artists and neon specialists she produced new sculptural anatomical neon artwork inspired by biological electricity, the prescence of natural electrical activity in the human body."

"Blown glass human organs encapsulate inert gases displaying different colours under the influence of an electric current. The human anatomy is a complex, biological system in which energy plays a vital role. Brain Wave conveys neurological processing activity as a kinetic and sensory, physical phenomena through its display of moving electric plasma. Optic Nerve shows a similar effect, more akin to the blood vessels of the eye and with a front 'lens' magnifiying the movement and the intensity of light. Heart is a representation of the human heart illuminated by still red neon gas. Electric Lungs is a more technically intricate structure with xenon gas spreading through its passage ways, communicating our human unawareness of the trace gases we inhale in our breathable atmosphere."

Installation: Net Sculptures

Net sculpturesby Janet Echelman

Inspired by the local materials and culture of Mahabalipuram, an Indian fishing village, American artist Janet Echelman creates enormous fishing net sculptures nearly as large as the buildings hosting them but light enough to ripple in the wind in constantly changing patterns.

Sculpture: Bike Chain Sculptures

"Dystopia" by Korean artist Seo Young Deok

Photographed at the Insa Art Center

   

Sculpture: Origin

Origin: A Responsive LED Sculpture by United Visual Artists

At the 2011 Creators Project New York event, United Visual Artists' massive LED sculpture Origin attracted spectators like insects to bright light.

Set in the foreground of the Brooklyn Bridge, the artwork was continuously engaged with its environment through the buzzing dialogue between the visual light and sound.

The 10m × 10m cubic lattice is composed of 125 two-meter cubic spaces mounted with linear LED strips, allowing it to emit varying light patterns in all directions, as well as audio from a network of speakers (bass and treble) which generates real-time loud ominous sounds.

Sculpture: Steampunk Corkscrew

This monster of a device is officially the worlds largest Corkscrew. It was created by a mechanical sculptor called Rob Higgs of ONEOFONEHUNDRED LIMITED, who launched the device with an unveiling by the Prince Albert of Monaco. Using hundreds of bronzed metal springs, gears and other parts, this incredible machine uncorks and pours a bottle of wine with Rube Goldberg-worthy complexity.

Sculpture: Microsculpture

Microsculptures by Willard Wigan