Curiosity #CKTK

Working in collaboration with the conservation and collections departments of The Prado Museum, Madrid, The Louvre, Paris and The National Gallery, London, the artist scanned X-ray, infrared and ultra-violet renditions of Old Master paintings – including works by Uccello, van Dyck, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya and Velazquez amongst others. Monochromatic and energetic, the resulting photographs possess a graphic power strangely suggestive of the New York School artists, or a Gerhard Richter abstract. The title of the new series, LEAD, refers to the presence of the metal in 17th and 18th century paint. This is what the X-rays show, bouncing back off lead pigments and transforming the paintings from recognisable images into otherworldly scenes, as if the viewer is given access to a separate reality below the surface paint. Guijarro has taken a scientific process used to demystify the paintings, and in doing so made them more unknowable, blurring the divisions between science and art. ...

On December 9, 1964, saxophonist John Coltrane led a quartet that featured pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where countless jazz recording sessions were held in the 1950s and ’60s. For photographer Chuck Stewart, Van Gelder’s was a short drive from his home in Teaneck. That day nearly 50 years ago the band recorded a Coltrane composition titled  A Love Supreme,  a profound expression of his spiritual awakening divided into four movements—“Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” “Psalm.” For its soaring ambition, flawless execution and raw power, it was hailed as a groundbreaking piece of music when it was released in February 1965, and it has endured as a seminal part of the jazz canon. The work and its composer will be highlighted anew this April during  Jazz Appreciation Month , an annual event launched in 2001 by the National Museum of American History, whose...

With aerial footage from fifty-four countries, 'Home' is a depiction of how Earth's problems are all interlinked. The film HOME by Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a beautifully shot panorama of the Earth and the damage done to it by modern humanity. It includes a moving narration about the evolution of the Earth, nature, agriculture, humans, and the crises of habitat destruction, energy depletion, climate disruption, degradation...of the environment, health, economic disparity, and more. They are well integrated in the film, but many assumptions in the script make this film hard to recommend unless accompanied by a reality check on energy and the value of traditional ways. Statements such as "education is a privilege" treat upbringing and learning as if they are only modern phenomena. The same thinking produce the statement "The memories of thousands of years' scrabbling for food [as hunter gatherers] faded [with the agricultural revolution]." So...

Jason de Caries Taylor is the artist and the diver behind the Musa Project in Mexico and Grenada Underwater Park, West Indies. He graduated from London Institute of Arts in 1998 with a BA Honours in Sculpture, and besides being a qualified diving instructor and underwater naturalist, Taylor is also an award winning underwater photographer. Tom’s photos where he captures the effects of the ocean on his evolving sculptures is what earned him the recognition. In 2006, Taylor founded the world’s first underwater sculpture park, in Grenada. This amazing monument is now listed as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic. Later in 2009, Taylor Jaime Gonzalez Cano of The National Marine Park, Roberto Diaz of The Cancun Nautical Association created MUSA. The MUSA Project (Museo Subaquatico de Arte) is a monumental museum with a collection of over 450 public sculptural works, submerged off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, one of the world’s most unique travel destinat...

Samsara is a Sanskrit word that means "the ever turning wheel of life" and is the point of departure for the filmmakers as they search for the elusive current of interconnection that runs through our lives. By dispensing with dialogue and descriptive text, Samsara subverts our expectations of a traditional documentary, instead encouraging our own inner interpretations inspired by images and music that infuses the ancient with the modern. From sweeping landscapes to time-lapse sequences of the night sky and from exclusive looks into the processing of food to the consumption and effects it has on the human body, Samsara is nothing short of astounding. Modern technology, production lines, and human robotics are juxtaposed against a backdrop of deserts, garbage mounds as far as the eye can see, and traffic congestion in modern centres. The time-lapse footage is simply transcendent. Simply astonishing. The richness, depth and clarity of colour and image achieved wit...

Originally published in 2008 by Taschen, SOUL i-D is a compilation of several earlier projects that had been put together over the previous ten years. The best of i-D's special projects including contributions from artists and designers such as David LaChapelle, John Galliano, Sam Taylor-Wood, Juergen Teller, and Terry Richardson Soul i-D is a 600-page visual anthology of ideas and images featuring personal insights and contributions from some of the most creative names in contemporary fashion, music, art, and design. Looking at issues that affect all of our lives, from family values to global responsibility and personal lessons learned to inspirational survival stories, all of the best special projects are here and with the mix of quirky irreverence that has been part of the i-D vocabulary since its launch by Terry Jones in 1980.    Contributors include: Ron Arad, Giorgio Armani, Christopher Bailey, David Bailey, Bono, Neville Brody, Hussei...

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for  National Geographic : to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk. Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers. As the debate polarizes America and the intensity...

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics -- like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day. Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.   His 2003-05 series "Intolerable Beauty" examines  the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day : cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.His latest series of photographs, "Running the Numbers,"  gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption . Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.In April 2008, Jordan traveled around the world with  National Geographic  as an international eco...

Alejandro Guijarro Momentum 4th October – 9th November 2012  The impetus, either of a body in motion, or of an idea or course of events (i.e. a moment).2. Physics (of a body in motion): the product of its mass and velocity.  Momentum is a 3-year project in which Alejandro Guijarro travelled to the great Quantum Mechanics institutions of the world. Using a large-format camera he photographed the blackboards as he found them, and this exhibition will display the results in life size.  Before he walks into a lecture hall Guijarro has no idea what he will find. He begins by recording the blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall is included, the blackboard frame is removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. Effectively these are documents. Yet once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Colour comes ...