A Russian retiree’s beautifully painted satellite dishes do double-duty as works of art and functioning receivers for the orbiting descendants of Sputnik.

Love of Satellite

Russia knows satellites: the success of Sputnik-1 in late 1957 shocked the world and jump-started the Space Race. Fast-forward six decades and Yuri Kuznetsov, a retiree from the Ivanovo region, is compelling the world to appreciate Russia’s love affair with satellites once more… though in a much more down-to-earth manner.

Retro Retirement

When Kuznetsov retired from his career as a sailor, he returned to his small home village of Voznesenye. Like far too many retirees, however, he soon found that being at rest day after day was making him, er, restless. What’s an old salty seadog to do?

Inspiration from Above

Friends advised Kuznetsov to take up a hobby as a way of keeping himself busy. Having once been a painter – art, not houses – he figured he’d dust off his palette and crack open the ol’ paintbox. The only question left was… what should he paint? The answer came to him from above. Not TOO far above, mind you, just about rooftop level. Like, the place where people mount home satellite receiver dishes. Cue mental lightbulb!

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Dish Nyet Work Painted Russian Satellite Dishes

Seamlessly connecting realistic facial features with organic architecture, these sculptural works bridge reality and fantasy, natural forms and built scenes blurring scales and dimensions.

Artist Yuanxing Liang, a graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts,deftly connects heads and landscapes — the latter populated with ponds, trees and bridges — in wraparound works.

One of these, Peach Blossom Island (above), was created for the Wonder Festival in Shanghai. It was inspired by the fable of Peach Blossom Dragon Spring, a phantom-dreaming world equally surreal in legend as in the sculpture.

Many of the elements in these works transition with remarkable clarity from human to architectural forms, with windswept hair morphing into tree branches or vegetation-covered hillsides, or crumbling faces breaking into rocky facades. The effect brings the viewer inside the mind of the figure, making it easy to imagine they are lost in thought in the landscapes spilling out all around them.

Old furniture, lamp parts and other cast-away ephemera from domestic life transform into finely crafted architectural models in the hands of artist and designer Ted Lott, who uses a bandsaw as a tiny sawmill to produce the pieces.

In a new collection of work, Lott explores the hidden lives of domestic objects like suitcases, train cases, trunks and furniture, inserting timber frame structures just as thoughtfully assembled as the real thing. Lights installed inside each one impart a sense of habitation and illuminate all of those beautiful details.

Previously, we covered Lott’s “Habitation Series,” in which vintage chairs, stools and tables are taken over by the framework of parasitic miniature architecture. The structures almost seem to have grown organically according to the proportions of the original furniture, like fungus, each one entirely unique.

In his artist statement, Lott says he draws inspiration from the replacement of hand-crafted local materials with industrially produced materials and a resulting loss of traditional skills.

“By combining a diminutive version of this building system with chairs and other objects pulled from the everyday domestic environment I honor the logic and engineering brilliance of stud frame construction, taking what we usually only see when we pass by construction sites, and exaggerating it in a way that renews our vision and understanding. The work uses the bandsaw as a scale sawmill to generate perfectly proportioned raw materials. An engagement emerges between the architecture and found objects, each bringing it’s own visual language while differently scaled systems try to occupy the same space. Unexpected solutions often emerge from the two finding ways to accommodate the other, and pointing to the deep relationship between the design of domestic objects and the architecture of the space itself.”

In a 2014 interview with 365 artists 365 days, Lott explains that he grew up living around cities as big as Chicago as well as tiny towns with populations under 400. “That tension between those two environments has continued to be a source of fascination, from the greater concentration of wealth in cities, to the differences, and similarities in the built environments and everyday lives of people who reside there,” he says.

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For a sense of the scale of these works, check out Lott’s Instagram, where you can see images and videos of the work in progress.

via This is Colossal

Scottish artist David Mach is best known for his sculptural installations and surreal collages, but his largest work yet turns a heap of 36 red shipping containers into a new arts and event space in Edinburgh. Named Mach1, the unusual building is a collaboration with architecture studio Dixon Jones, and will add a new point of interest to an undeveloped corner of Edinburgh Park, a 43-acre business park masterplanned by American architect Richard Meier.

The shape of the new building takes inspiration from piles of rocks on the Fife coastline, the color of nearby Forth Bridge and the industrial heritage of the area. Once completed, Mach 1 will stand 15 meters (about 49 feet) high and stretch 50 meters (about 164 feet) at its longest point. Inside, visitors will find a coffee bar and double-height exhibition space used to showcase the Edinburgh Park masterplan through drawings, information boards and scale models.

The project’s developers and investors, Parabola, plan to use the space as a marketing office for the complex as well as a flexible event venue. Construction on Mach1 is set to begin early next year, while other new developments in the park, like a new public square, offices, shops, restaurants and sports and leisure facilities are in various stages of planning and construction.

““I was already working with Pangolin on a few ideas with shipping containers when this opportunity came up,” says Mach in an interview with Edinburgh News. “I seem to have become an accidental architect with this, which I’m sure architects will have something to say about. But it’s not a pretend thing – it’s a real piece of architecture.”

“Shipping containers are really interesting to me architecturally. They are really honest and are also really familiar to people. They also go all over the world. But this will be different to anything else that has been built of them before, which is what you really want as an artist.”

“We’re still working out whether every bit of it will be from real shipping containers, but it will have to look as if they are all real containers and it will be very strong. You should be able to drive a tank over it. I think people will look at it and think they have seen it before, like a king of Inca thing you’d find hacking your way through the jungle.”

The leap from sculpture to architecture might seem unexpected, but this isn’t the first time Mach has experimented with shipping containers. Previously, the artist has incorporated them into sculptures like Sydney’s “It Take Two” and “The Temple at Tyre.”

Japanese art director Yuni Yoshida is well known for her surreal digital creations, particularly those manipulating the human body into unnatural forms, but a new series takes the opposite approach. “Layered” is a collection of food photography in which fruit, burgers and other food items are cut apart and rearranged in pixelated or spliced forms, making them look like Photoshopped images.

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For the pixelated series, Yoshida selected the color palette in a given arrangement of food and sourced “pixels” from a variety of other foods to recreate the tones. Look closely at the “pixels” in the pineapple image, for example, and you’ll see that most of them aren’t pineapple at all, but the effect is brilliant.

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Yoshida uses a variety of techniques to achieve her signature surrealist style, from obvious digital manipulations to clever use of materials and photography angles. You can follow her work on Instagram.

The “Layered” series is yet another example of imagery that appears to be Photoshopped, but really isn’t. Check out 36 more fake-looking photos.