ColumnA retrospective: 2011 in heART.

The fusion of conscious art and sustainability into what we now call heARTbeat was first published this year in May. Seven months and dozens of heARTbeats later, we bring you the top five stories that made you take pause.

#5:  heARTbeat: #walkingtoworktoday Project by Michael Surtees

After this was published in July, Michael wrote to me:

I just wanted to mention how much I appreciate you taking the time to write a post about #walkingtoworktoday. You’ve given it a huge boost. It has been an interesting experiment watching how photo sharing has evolved and fragmented over the years. When I first started it, email and uploading images to Flickr from a mobile phone was slightly unusual. Now with apps like instagram it has become second nature.

#4: heARTbeat: Qi Wei’s Exploded Flowers Portend the End of a Season

Photography is a crowd pleaser with our readers, and Qi Wei’s Exploded Flowers struck a chord with a fresh take on perennial flora favorites.

#3: heARTbeat: Tomaas’ Photographs Consider Plastic as “The New Black”

Tomaas has a clean, advertising quality to his work that works beautifully for editorial. No wonder we all loved it. He’s selling reuse of the most ubiquitous and toxic throwaways in existence: plastic.

#2: heARTbeat: Ran Hwang’s Art Transcends The Idea of a Woman’s Work

Ran Hwang’s installations dazzle us with her scale and ambition. At the same time, the art of her labor forces us to stop and consider the time consuming results of these gorgeous odes to repetitive manual work.

#1: heARTbeat: Smoking Kids Photography by Frieke Janssens

Ultimately photography compelled our readers most in 2011. Frieke Janssen stunned us with a world that fortunately doesn’t exist, seducing nonetheless. Movie star looks and lighting give way to vignettes of children smoking. Janssen reminds us that anything in just the right light makes even addictive behavior that much more interesting to look at.

heARTbeat: Miru Kim’s Nudes – the Pig That Therefore I Am

Miru Kim’s bravery, sensitivity and originality made this my favorite heARTbeat of the year. With art, I aspire to be surprised, even a little shocked, and Kim does just that with this series.

Here’s to more artistic inspiration in the same vein in 2012.

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her trends blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

The post heARTbeat: Our Readers’ Top 5 Favorites of 2011 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Ran Hwang’s environments transport us to feelings, places, and concepts we find familiar and new.

As a first-world woman in the second decade of the 21st century, it may at times be hard to imagine that a “woman’s work” is still very much at the center of most working women’s days.

Work that involves, needles, pins, thread and buttons is not the stuff of high concept or great economic value, until perhaps it finds its way into the hands of a couturier or fine artist.

Ran Hwang’s hand startles us with skill, scale and her connection to process. Her installations transcend laborious tedium, and become bigger-than-life, dreamlike worlds.

Hwang says:

My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me find my inner peace. Pins are used to hold buttons onto the surface to form a silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so the buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I use buttons because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings.

 “By hammering thousands of pins onto a wall, I discover significance of existence. Like the monks practicing Zen facing the wall, my work is a form of performance that leads to finding oneself.”

As we gaze upon her patterns and environments, it is hard not to think of the hours of hand work involved. The fact that Hwang exhibits at a prestigious Swiss gallery, has been reviewed by prominent art critics, and continues to produce critically acclaimed work is not lost on the viewer.  Hwang entices us with her personal meditations and tactile visual language.  The work grants us our own visual meditation, leading to an appreciation for her ability to transcend simple materials, boredom, and our own perceptions.

Images Kashya Hildebrand & Ran Hwang

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her personal blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

The post heARTbeat: Ran Hwang’s Art Transcends The Idea of a Woman’s Work appeared first on EcoSalon.