The picture above is of the sheet metal panel covered organic walls of the Experience Music Project building by Frank Gehry. I shot this will walking through the Seattle Center on my way from Queen Anne to downtown during some amazing sunny weather in my soon-to-be new home. That’s right, I’m in the process of moving up North to the Emerald City!

Posts lately have been spotty and few while things have been a bit busy over the last couple months but once the move is complete and I’m sitting happily in my new home in the Greenlake neighborhood, things will return to normal. Till then, posts will likely continue to be spotty but look forward to more posts coming out of Seattle on a regular basis very soon!

The photo above was taken while I was walking over a bridge in Venice, Italy where I had paused to take a picture and noticed that there were padlocks attached to many spots on the bridge and that each one had writing on it. I was told that this is a sort of urban legend, the ideas being that a couple would affix a padlock with a message, their names or even just their initials on it and then throw away the key thus locking their love forever.

Once I noticed the padlocks, suddenly it seemed as if they were everywhere and particularly popular in Italy. I can only imagine how many have to be cut off on a continual basis. While this can be seen as an unfortunate act of grafitti on a beautiful historic bridge, it’s interesting to think about the desire to make one’s mark on a place they’ve been or leave something behind as if leaving a piece of themselves in that time and space to live on forever. Forever together in this case. And our craving as humans for the romantic.

This somewhat recent craze seems to have exploded in Italy in particular, due in part to a novel written in 1992 by Federico Moccia titled Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo, translated as Three Metres Above the Sky and gave way to the English film, “Three Steps Over Heaven”. Another novel followed in 2006 titled Ho Voglia di Te or I Desire You. The romantic rite mentioned in the books say that young lovers will spend their lived together forever if they place a padlock with their names on the third lamp post from the Corso Francia end of the Ponte Milvio in Rome and then throw the key into the Tiber River. This tradition has taken hold of many cities in Italy including Florence, Venice, Naples, Lecce and others. The craze has gotten so out of control that fines are being given out in some cities and in the case of the Ponte Milvio, while there is no fine yet, a website has been set up for people to leave a virtual padlock and even throw their key into the Tiber.

This craze stems beyond Italy however and seems the origin actually lies in the Hungarian city of Pécs where a fence, not a bridge, was the object of the padlock fixation dating back some thirty years.

But the locks of love don’t stop there, they spread out throughout Europe and beyond. A few more photos below, like a fence in Riga, Latvia, another in Cologne, Germany and even Zhangjiajie, China. It’s interesting how our love for the romantic spans generations and cultures.

images via Lisa Town, PioPio, adriennf, Khriszianfabry

Tara Donovan, installation artist out of Brooklyn, New York, creates pieces made out of everyday ordinary objects like drinking straws, cups, fishing wire and paper. These simple objects when are then transformed into amazing textural and topographical works of art. The individual object then is almost no longer recognizable in it’s original form but has taken on a new life form. The installation in the image above feels like some sort of life form bubbling out of the ceiling, reflecting light in different ways throughout the form. But the piece is made simply with a sea of styrofoam cups and hot glue. A detail shot is below.

Below are images of an untitled piece from 2003 that uses paper plates held together by hot glue to form highly texture spheres the look almost soft and fuzzy from a distance.

“Haze” was made in 2005 from stacking an amazing amount of clear drinking straw to create a sensual wall that bubbles up in places that gives it an almost liquid look.

The following piece uses ripped up tarpaper that has been stacked into an undulating landform titled “Transplanted”. It was firt exhibited outdoors in the IBM Exhibition Space on 57th and Madison Ave. in New York City in the fall of 2003. Following it’s time in the outdoors, it was moved into the Ace Gallery indoor exhibition space.

images via Ace Gallery

I love maps, all maps and many can even resemble works of art like the recent map work by Karen O’Leary. It seems so simple, just cut out the non-circulatory pieces of city maps like Paris, New York and London and yet the result is stunning. Karen carefully cuts each map by hand using either standard maps or paper from rice to cardstock.

The above images are Sydney, Australia at the beginning and the Paris, France just above with Rome, Italy and New York City below.

Mannheim, a city in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, is known as the City of Squares due to the unique organizational structure of it’s city center which sits at the confluence of the Rhein and Neckar rivers. Instead of giving the streets names, the blocks have been named. Well, not exactly names…they have numbers and these numbers are organized according to the game of chess. Needless to say, it can be a little interesting to navigate as a foreigner.

A friend Laura Wilson, an artist who moved to Mannheim several months ago, explained a little of what she thought of her new home. She remarked that it’s a nice city to live in with a good combination of industrial, city culture, and nature with the Rheine and Neckar Rivers running both around or through it. She feels the city is easy to get around with Stassenbahn (the interurban train) and bike however the chess board city center has been a bit complicated but she’s getting used to it. She explains how the city center blocks are organized with a system that extends from the 600 meter long Mannheim Castle frontage:

Starting from the castle, squares on the left-hand side are named A to K, whiles squares on the right-hand side are named from L to U. Square numbers always begin with 1 along the central axis and ascend to the surrounding streets. House numbers begin at the corner located next to the castle. From A to K, numbers count clockwise, from L to U counter-clockwise around the squares.

images via demarests, bing

Amsterdam-based photographer Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk has created a series titled The Andromeda Strain that focuses more on the notion of discovery than the place itself. The images conjure up thoughts of a space or time perhaps untouched or undiscovered by humans. I personally found some of the imagery, shapes, patterns and colors to be incredibly intriguing and thought provoking. Words from the artist about this series, via featureshoot:

After making many landscape photographs I realized the search for special places is more important than the place itself. The notion of discovery has been always intimately linked to photography. The cliche of the photographer as an explorer of unknown and rough places became a starting point to construct images. I played with the “National Geographic:-language essentially without leaving my hometown. I searched for locations that, after small interventions, can fit in an imaginary travelogue. Using low-budget special effects and lighting I staged natural phenomena and imagery. To this work made on location I added still-lives constructed in the studio. Referring to nature and scientific photography, the tabletop landscapes create confusion on the overall status of the series. I often choose material that has a perishable or unpredictable quality, like foam or spaghetti. No Photoshop is used to achieve the effects. The artificial and the real, and the different sources the image is based on, should be present simultaneously.

images via Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk

80’s style video games arrive and begin the attack, ultimately conquering the planet and turning it into one giant pixel. Video by OneMoreProduction.