Cool Hunting

Tropolism: John Powers
Rekindling dormant grade and grad school fantasies at Tropolism today, Brooklyn-based artist John Powers' geometric sculptures, installations, drawings, and paintings reference fine art, pop culture, and his own obsessively imagined, completely fantastical worlds. Triggering deep childhood fantasies of "landscapes like the surface of the Death Star in Episode IV: A New Hope," as well as memories of architecture models, Tropolism picks the Sci-Fi Wahabi...

Carsten Höller
Carsten Höoller, creator of the magnificent slides shown at the Tate Museum earlier this year (above left, click on image for detail) and a beguiling room of 10 ft. mushrooms hanging from the ceiling (above right, click on image for detail), is a renaissance man of sorts. A scientist with a concentration in olfactory communication in insects, he saw a problem with a profession...

WA Video Installation
Transforming the 17th century facade of Knoll's Paris headquarters on St. Germain, WA is a site-specific video installation by WIKA. Launched last week, the piece constructs the made-up history of the design company's founders Hans Knoll and Florence Schust, playing on the real way the pair used a minimalist approach to design to define Knoll Using a two-screen format and high-tech projection, the screens...

Ugo Rondinone: air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world
If you happen to be walking in Battery Park City over the next few months, you might be surprised to see two leafless white trees that look like they were plucked from the enchanted forest in the "Wizard of Oz" and plopped down in Lower Manhattan. Don't be scared, they aren't evil anthropomorphized trees, but rather a new project by Ugo Rondinone, called "air...

Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin
Massive and baroque, Petah Coyne's haunting sculptures belie their humble material origins. Using wax, hair, beads, ribbons, bows, and fake flowers, the New York-based artist's work conjures fairytale and myth. Some seem to tell more contemporary stories, like the towering white pleats of "Untitled #978 Gertrude and Juliana (The Whitney Women)," which. pictured after the jump, is featured in her current show "Above and...

Judi Harvest
New York-based artist Judi Harvest's work constantly looks to the illuminated cosmos for inspiration. Her upcoming September installation at Venice's famed Caffé Florian, Venetian Satellite, will be similar in form and aesthetic functionality to her Venice installation Luna Piena, a sped-up lunar calendar of 2,070 blown glass spheres that's on view at the Valaresso vaporetto stop through November 2006. (Pictured left.) Like Luna Piena,...