Peter Callesen-From A Single Sheet of Paper

Someone from ArtPapers sent me a link to this persons work a few weeks ago and I'm still utterly fascinated with it. I'm actually beginning to see trends in my own tastes, and you dear reader may see them as well. There was the Brian Dettmer works that swept me off my feet earlier last year and now Peter Callesen.

How can you not find these fascinating? Single pieces of paper that literally come to life. Callesen creates characters and entire worlds with simple snips of scissors. Some of the work is even disturbing. For example, the dying birds. They are not real, but there is still such a heart-rending emotion attached to the visual of these beautiful, delicate little forms struggling. You can almost hear the tiny thumps of their panicked hearts.

I very much like his explanation of these particular works. "A common theme in many of my works is a reinterpretation of classical fairy tales as well as a more general interest in memory in connection to childhood - for instance in my performances Castle, Folding and Jukebox. These playful performances exist in the lost land of childhood, between dream and reality and it is in this meeting or confrontation of these two conditions, in a kind of Utopian embodiment, that these works of art become alive, often in a tragicomic way.

This interest for the romantic is extended in my later exhibitions White Shadows at Esbjerg Art Museum and From dust to dusk, but here with less focus on the confrontation between dream and reality leaving more space for the poetic aspect as well as the possibility of a reality behind or within the dream."

Please do visit his site. These are just a few photographs that are available. I'd LOVE to see his work in person.

http://www.petercallesen.com/index.html

City in India Sitting on It's Architectural Heritage

I read a fascinating article in the New York Times today about a small, modernist city in India called Chandigarh who has recently fallen victim to a sort of "Antiques Road Show" phenomena of its very own. For the last few years a handful of bright antiques dealers have become regular visitors to the government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city concieved by architect Le Corbusier in the 1950's. They've been snapping up disused stocks of furniture create by the architects colleagues to equip the city.

It's doubtful that anyone would have blinked an eye--just a bunch of teak junk being carted off by some foreigners. Fine. Big Deal. Good riddance. Wrongo-or at least in the opinion of Christie's Auction House in NYC. A pair of teak, cane backed and bottomed chairs created for a civil service office will go on sale in the near future with a starting reserve of $8,000 to $12,000 buckeroos.

No surprise some turbans blew off in Chandigarh.

A local architect Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture says "we found out we were sitting on a pot of gold, quite literally. But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was BIG money to be made." (that's why they're dealers Mr. Wattas-its their job).

There was nothing illegal about the purchases made by foreign dealers, much of which was being thrown away or sold off for rupees by the city's administration. But, quite belatedly heritage experts are lamenting the loss of a vital part of their city's original design.

The majority of the design of the city was completed by Le Corbusier's cousin Jeanneret. Jeanneret was passionate about creating simple, functional, long lasting furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding Le Corbusier buildings. There were no shops in the new city to buy furnishings-so the architects literally had them created. Jeanneret didn't stop with the interiors of city buildings, he also designed manhole covers (with beautifully detailed maps of the city embossed in them) light fixtures, lampposts, even the pedal-boats in the man-made lake in the middle of the city.

A Paris dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, first came to Chandigarh in 1999, and started buying at government sales. Much of his collection was auctioned at Christie’s in New York last summer: a manhole cover, designed by Mr. Jeanneret, molded with the map of Chandigarh, was listed with a reserve of $20,000, alongside daybeds, stools, armchairs and bookcases.

Kiran Joshi, a professor of architecture at the Chandigarh College of Architecture, agreed that the dealers were perhaps not to blame. “It’s not the collectors that were the problem,” she said. “The problem is our perception of heritage. We thought it was junk; our government thought it was junk.”

The city authorities, who are applying for Unesco World Heritage status, have ordered that no more furniture be auctioned, and prisoners in the local jail have been commissioned to start restoring some of the broken pieces.

Oh, I'm so jealous.....