Cool Hunting

Giles Round at ICA
Native Londoner Giles Round creates sculptures and assemblages that resemble the confounding models of a minimalist stage set designer and his work is currently being shown at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Rectilinear frames evoke the woodwork of Donald Judd, twisting in space to create volumes into which he introduces monochromatic panels, lights and typographic studies. Like other minimalist artists before him, Round appropriates...

Kittiwat Unarrom: Bread Body Parts
Since 2006 Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom (whose family also runs a bakery) has used dough as his medium to sculpt gruesome renditions of hand, feet, heads, torsos and other body parts. The results are unnervingly realistic with eyes, lips and other details constructed out of cashews, raisins and the like. A lack of hair and blood-like glazes make the work all the more creepy....

Lucas Isawa: Koinobori
By combining traditional Japanese Carp-shaped wind socks with paper lanterns, artist Lucas Isawa has turned his floating and illuminated school of fish into a breathtakingly peaceful spectacle. Building on koinobori (wind socks decorated with colorful Carp and flown in Japan on Children's Day), Isawa uses bamboo to first construct the skeleton shell of his highly-detailed fish and then fills in the gaps with silk...

David Ryan
I first fell for David Ryan's work after seeing a couple of small pieces in Mark Moore's booth at Scope New York last year. Now Ryan is back with a solo show in his signature style at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica. (Click images for detail.) Ryan creates his very sculptural paintings by intricately stacking together brightly-painted pieces of MDF (medium-density fibreboard). I...

The Cloud: MIT Mobile Experience Lab
Located in downtown Firenze, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab put their brilliant minds together to create The Cloud, a large interactive sculpture. Consisting of 15,371 individual fibers and 65km of fiber optics, The Cloud senses human movement and tactile engagement provoking a variety of responses, including changes in light, animation and sound. We don't have anyone on the ground yet to go check it...

Alex Da Corte, Artist
Drawing on found objects (and people), kitsch and the banal, Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte makes multimedia work that belies its material origins. This video visits his studio/apartment and his recent gallery show at Fleischer-Ollman to gain some insight into his ideas and technique. We also interview Fleischer-Ollman's director William Pym to get his take on the young artist....