i'm back

surprise!

life is a tragedy for those who feel

and a comedy for those who think

jaison cianelli

i luckily get to meet a lot of artists through my job, probably the best part about it. i always wonder the path that brought them to that point - if they knew it would work out for them. my best guess is no, and that's why it's always so satisfying to see and meet these anomalies. there's inherently a bit of resistance involved, and i admire that.

the other day i met a special artist who put a smile on my face, which i later told him in the elevator - federico herrero is inspired by the landscape of costa rica, where he is from, and the ways people there paint their houses and fences in pretty pastels, spilling color onto their surroundings in a habit that is inherited and assumed, playing with the sunlight.

he described the commission - a large-scale mural - as a part of one continuous landscape that he is painting all the time, on different surfaces, to surround people with a musical arrangement of color. he hopes it encourages presence, an experience of the way colors - like sounds - move through a space in our minds that is beyond words and borders, like a universal alphabet. it is where light is, the artist says. i couldn't have articulated it better. i was always smiling at him.

i love him so much

oh! and did i tell you he does playgrounds:

this brings me to my next point which is that there was a playground design competition in surface magazine, leading me to believe that creators are grasping the aesthetic value of playgrounds, that something i humbly premeditated is taking hold.

my play and place essay touched on a lot of emerging concerns - a lack of awareness of the spaces around us, i am guilty as well, and the bleeding together of the private and public simulacra, the external and internal via devices, apps, and spellcheck.

people are beginning to wake up to the power of the playground to initiate out-of-routine contact with the world, a creative experience stewarded by the hands and the body that feeds the absorbing mind. it's great - i love it. we should all make playgrounds out of unconventional materials and see what happens!

"If there’s anything that ties these projects together, it’s the idea of the multifunctional—that good, sound playground design needs to be something that’s fluid and can be experienced in many different ways, from various angles, with no one-size-fits-all model."

"Fluid worlds of exploration, independent of scripted beginnings and ends, they invert the notion that new playspace requires new ground. This design uses infrastructure’s free gifts, providing shelter from sun and rain and robust structures capable of suspending miles of play, to create new playgrounds in underserved urban neighborhoods and activate spaces vulnerable to privatization. Connecting neighborhoods separated by the world of on and off ramps, the aerial play spaces are constructed from the recycled debris of temporary infrastructures: netting, tubes, cables and scaffolding, concrete pipes and water-filled highway barriers. These materials change from one geographic location to the next—an infinite variety in an infinite world of leftover space.”


more later!