Compasses

Sand drawings, circled by grass and the wind, ongoing collection, Curonian Spit, Lithuania, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, fall 2011

The oldest living things in the world

La Llareta #0308-23b26 (up to 3,000 years old, atacama desert, chile)

Welwitschia Mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; namib naukluft desert, namibia)

Underground Forest #0707-10333 (up to 13,000 years old; pretoria, south africa)

The oldest living things in the world (OLTW) is a project in process by the american photographer Rachel Sussman in which she searches, visits and photographs "continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older". She also says: 'I am trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale." It's also interesting to just read about this different living things as they all are somewhat odd and extraordinary. You Rachel Sussmans TED talk about this project here.

Herbarium of unknown

I got this herbarium consisting of grass specimens as a present. The maker of it is unknown. The sheet are labeled with name of specimen, date and place of finding in a beautiful old handwriting. The grasses have left direct prints on the opposite pages.  

Herbarium At Home is a volunteer-based project that aims to catalogue and make available the wealth of data represented by the historical herbarium collections held by universities and museums in Great Britain. Everyone can join and help label (and in return look at the most amazing examples for free).

Raphael Hefti

 Installation view, Fluxia, Milano 

Raphael Hefti, Lycopodium, 2011, Photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium, dimensions 100 x 160 cm, unique copies  


"Raphael Hefti is an alchimist in his own right, he forms steel bars fragile as glas, lightens up whole mountain valleys or grows mushrooms on buckets in the exhibition space. His faszination and in- terest in the aesthetic potential of chemical processes and technical procedures is also the starting point for his work on view at Kunsthalle. In memory to Phlogiston (2010/11) and Lycopodiumprints (2010/11) are large format black and white and color photograms which have been exposed with the spores of the Lycopodium plant. The fine pored powder, which is known as medicine in Homeopa- thie and because of his high inflammability was called „witch craft xxx“ in the Middle Age , is used by Hefti as the light source of his images. The composition is foremost an accidental one – similar to the methods used in Drip or Action paintings in American Expressionism or Andy Warhols re- ference to these (Piss Paintings, 1977-78) – and the image composition is based on the immediacy of the material’s touch on the image carrier, every trace are to be visible. On the black and white photograms the light leaves surprisingly fine structures and layers, the color prints depict a spectre of lucid colors with unexpected depth." Kunsthalle Basel, 2011

Max Ernst - Histoire Naturelle

"Histoire Naturelle" by Max Ernst consist of of a portfolio with thirty-four collotypes after frottage that he made in 1925. Like the nature prints this works are assembled from physical surfaces that he printed in the of him invented frottage technique to construct his own, surreal images. 

You can see more of the prints here.

Neeta Madahar

Work by Neeta Madahar. See more here and here.

[all Neeta Madahar. From the series Sustenance. 2003; Cosmoses. 2007; Flora. 2009. Top to bottom: Sustenance 79. Cosmoses Black VIII (Positive). Christina with Fresias]

beatriz diaz

beatriz diaz's 'geographica' project. "this is a series of imaginary landscapes created from appropriated and manipulated photographs. the images originally came from my parent's collection of national geographic magazines from the late seventies." see more here.

[all beatriz diaz. geographica.]

christine rusche

work by christine rusche. see more here.

[all christine rusche. from the series fictional landscapes. (overpainted photographs, ink-pen on photographs). 2000-3.]

matts leiderstam

work by matts leiderstam. see more here.

[all matts leiderstam. top to bottom: view (papagopark). 2007. first seen (detail with book on timothy o'sullivan). 2008. on site. 2001.]

gwenneth boelens

work by gwenneth boelens. see more here.

[all gwenneth boelens.]

peter piller

photos labeled 'dirty clouds' from peter piller's arial view archive. see more here.

[all peter piller. arial view archive. 2004.]

petra cortright

some new work by petra cortright. see more here.

[all petra cortright. new landscapes. 2009.]

hugo arcier

hugo arcier's 'boolean nature' project. as he explains about the work: "in logic and computer programming, a boolean operator is a type of variable between two states. in computer-generated imagery, boolean operations enable us to subtract, add or create an intersection between two objects. in this series i subtract a sphere from a landscape...a sculpture completes the image by representing the missing part. the sum of the image and the sculpture forms the landscape in its entirety." see more here.

[all hugo arcier. from the series boolean nature. 2008. top to bottom: rock (image). sea (sculpture). sea (image).]

bryan graf

work by bryan graf. see more here.

[all bryan graf. from the series walden swamp.]

jason frank rothenberg

work by jason frank rothenberg. see more here.

[all from the series fossils. top to bottom: clouds, texas. 2006. misty. 2003. aaron. 2005.]