TREND I-SPY

Bathroom, Central State Hospital, Milledgeville, GA. (taken of photo at Clic with my i-Phone) Last Thursday night, my intrepid gallery-hopping gang of five and I left the opening of the must-see exhibit at hous projects, The Naked Truth in search of pizza and literally stumbled across another reception just winding down at Clic bookstore on Centre Street. Recently I have been rather obsessed with the beauty to be found in decayed and dilapidated matter, both natural and man-made. It feels timely, as part of the agri-tecture trend that I've been noticing recently. I fell instantly in love with the images on the walls at Clic of abandoned mental health hospitals. They're taken from a book of photographs by Christopher Payne called, Asylum, Inside the Closed World of Mental Hospitals. I shot the one above of a bathroom with my i-Phone. I love the vines crawling down the walls inside. Norwich State Hospital , Preston, Conn. Yankton State Hospital, Yankton, S.D. Sprin...

New artwork has been installed on The High Line since last year, a mixed-media piece by Valerie Hegarty entitled A utumn on the Hudson River with Branches. As Hegarty describes it, her piece will "appear as if nature has become the artist, altering the idealized image of the early American wilderness to be a more layered representation of the area and times today." Here is what the High Line website has to say, Valerie Hegarty's artwork often poses as artifacts of art history gone awry. Through the combination of real and fabricated components, Hegarty leaves the viewer to wonder at the veracity of the transformation. For the High Line, she will create and install a work that imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements. Hegarty’s painting is based on Jasper Francis Cropsey’s painting, a bucolic landscape that shows none of the affects of the Industrial Revo...

New York City was blessed this Easter weekend with the kind of weather we always hope we'll have on Memorial Day and so often don't. Having found Universal Force unexpectedly closed in observance of Good Friday, My Naam yoga buddy Elise and I decided to take the opportunity to pay a first-time-this-year visit to the High Line . I don't know who first conceived of reclaiming this abandoned elevated railroad built in the 1930s and turning it into a mile-long promenade but it was sparked by genius. Our trip got me thinking about agri-tecture which means combining organic and industrial building materials. There is something so poignant about the way nature will reimpose itself on a post-industrial landscape and the High Line underscores the wild beauty found in any similarly abandoned urban area. Later, I checked out the website of architecture firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro which had this to say about the project. The master plan for The High Line, an elevated railroad spu...