To evolve and elevate the residential experience, we also bring public art into our Shiplake homes. Our onsite art installations are just one of the unique amenities you can find in our Shiplake homes that cater to your health, convenience, pleasure, and well-being. Having works by world-renowned artists on display at our properties is not only visually appealing but also allows for more meaningful connections to be made within the community – and what's a home without community?
Graham has been investigating the relationship between architectural environments and those who inhabit them since the late 1960s. His very personal and intuitive exploration of architectural space and perception has come to be defined by his pavilions.
Blurring the line between sculptural art and architecture, Graham's pavilions comprise steel, mirror and glass structures that create diverse optical effects. Created as hybrids, they operate as quasi-functional spaces and art installations. As studies of space and light, they are situated in public spaces, created for the public experience and are activated by the presence of the viewer.
Viewers are involved in the voyeuristic act of seeing oneself reflected while at the same time watching others. Whilst giving people a sense of themselves in space, loss of self may also result, as the viewer is momentarily unable to determine the difference between the physical reality and the reflection. The architecture of the pavilions results in a shift in perceptions
Dan Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942. He lives and works in New York City.
The Sky Leaks series consists of chromogenic prints installed in lightboxes, depicting two types of spontaneous imagery: cloud formations, and anomalies created by a film that has been damaged by exposure to light and water. Each of McFarland's cloud photographs contains anomalies unique to the mechanical and chemical process of analog photography.
Aptly titled Sky Leaks, the series is based on the term 'light leaks', which refers to equipment defects that allow light to enter a camera and distort negatives with burnouts, shadows, colour casts and streaks. Dependent on various factors, such as outdated, pre-exposed or moisture-damaged film, these inconsistencies are generally regarded as defects. In Sky Leaks, McFarland embraces such inadvertent occurrences as a means to examine photographic notions of temporality and spatiality.
Imbuing his images with a sense of subjectivity, McFarland draws on the notion that photographs represent an instantaneous snapshot in time or a 'decisive moment'. While the photographs in Sky Leaks appear to capture ephemeral moments, they also blur the boundaries between the mechanical elements of McFarland's 4 x 5 large format camera and the chemical process of developing film. Clouds, light leaks and film effects merge into a temporal disorder, no longer recording an instant, but rather a broader, more complex representation of time. Lacking horizons to ground the pictorial plane, the cropped close-up shots of clouded skies lead the photographs to lose their indexical qualities of space and perspective.
Subtly backlit by LED lighting and mounted well above eye level, the intimate cloud portraits are rendered in a luminous, lifelike manner. An intriguing depiction of Georgian Bay skylines, McFarland's Sky Leaks constructs an aesthetic system based on photographic idiosyncrasies.
Scott McFarland lives and works in Toronto. His work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and The Museum of Modern Art, in New York. His works are also included in numerous collections, notably the Walker Art Center, SFMoMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Larry Bell (born 1939) is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s. He is known foremost for his lifeline dedication to glass boxes featuring his refined surface treatment of glass and explorations of light, reflection and shadow.
Bell's art addresses the relationship between the art object and its environment through the sculptural and reflective properties of his work. He has said: "My work is about the properties of light and the way it interacts with surfaces — it's about volume and illusion." His understanding of the potential of glass and light allows him to expand the visual and physical fields of perception. He has said: 'Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.' Bell's surfaces work both as mirrors and windows, sometimes simultaneously. His sculptures appear material yet immaterial, hard yet ethereal, transparent yet saturated with myriad fleeting hues.
In 1966, Bell purchased a vacuum coating chamber which allowed him to deposit micron-thin films of different metallic and non-metallic substances onto the surface of the glass. Through thermal evaporation, he could create infinite variations in the colour, transparency, and reflectivity of the glass.
His large cubic glass works feature a four-panelled structure within a larger version of itself, allowing 2 colours to be fused through reflection and refraction. The space declared by these sculptures becomes the work, as the scale of the material begins to overwhelm the spectator. This creates the sense of a partial environment. Then the observer could walk around and into the unit, and at the same time, see through it. The sculptures will animate and be animated by natural light, with the varying conditions at different times of day repeatedly altering the visitors' experience of the works.
Lawrence Weiner (born 1942) is an American artist and an integral figure of the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s. Best known for his text-based work, Weiner creates subversive installations that alter an existing space or environment. Although he sees himself as a sculptor rather than a conceptualist, he is among the trailblazers of the 1960s to present art as language.
Weiner's composed texts describe process, structure, and material, and though Weiner's work is almost exclusively language-based, he regards his practice as sculpture, citing the elements described in the texts as his materials. Lawrence Weiner defines his sculptural medium simply as 'language + the material referred to. Accordingly, his first book Statements (1968) contains 24 typewritten descriptions of works, where only a few had been made, suggesting that a work's existence requires a readership rather than a physical presence, and addressing whether the imagined gesture or actual creation of work have any hierarchal difference regarding the assessment of art.
Self-taught as an artist, his urgency to make art broadly available and engaging, stems from his childhood in the South Bronx: "I didn't have the advantage of a middle-class perspective. Art was something else; art was the notations on the wall or the messages left by other people. I grew up in a city where I had read the walls; I still read the walls. I love to put my work of mine out on the walls and let people read it. Some will remember it and then somebody else comes along and puts something else over it. It becomes archaeology rather than history." (2013)
While Weiner's works exist only as language and can be displayed in any form, he is closely involved in the creation, detailing the size of the font, the surface texture and the placement of the paint or vinyl letters. He often invents new fonts.
Glenn Ligon (born in 1960) is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity. Based in New York City, he is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness. Ligon works in multiple media, including painting, neon, video, photography, and digital media. His work is greatly an expression of his experiences as an African American and as a gay man living in the United States.
Ligon engages the state of the world – and urges us to do the same – by posing questions rather than proposing answers. His art demonstrates how a given subject has permeated culture over time. Through his work, he pursues an exploration of American history, literature, and society.
Over the years, Ligon has created neon sculptures illuminating various phrases or words in charged and animated ways. Ligon's first figurative sculpture: Notes for a Poem on the Third World, is based on a tracing of the artist's hands in white neon covered in black paint. It is inspired by an unrealized film project that Pier Paolo Pasolini was planning to undertake in the late 1960s.
Pasolini wrote an essay explaining how he was going to make five interconnected films, shot in India, the Middle East, Africa, South America and in, what he calls, "the black ghettoes of the United States." In the essay, Pasolini contemplates how his interest in the struggles of the working class and marginalized people in Italy is connected to struggles around the world, and how this project can acknowledge and reach out to those other struggles. Ligon loved this idea of "the discovery of the elsewhere," the necessity of going beyond the boundaries of his own, particular political concerns. Ligon's neon, with its ambiguous gesture of greeting, protest, or surrender, is the first of a series of works inspired by Pasolini's project.