Mapping—symbolism or realism?

Landscape architect Hajime Ishikawa (related article on PingMag) maps the urban environment of Tokyo. His studies are reflections of both serendipity and symbolism. His GPS drawings within the city, while not an entirely new idea, reflect a Situationist curiousity about the mundane and familiar city environment. He says, mapping is “a kind of language — you understand where you are in this sort of diagram. Though no map can picture the real space and the real experience, you still understand where you are…” Ishikawa’s tracing of his route from his home to his office has personal significance and a kind of individual symbolism, while the animal drawing evokes questions of familiarity with and a offers a change of perspective of the the Tokyo streetscape.

Installation by Los Carpinteros at the Hayward Gallery, London

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) has created some of the most important work to emerge from Cuba in the past decade. Formed in 1991, the trio (consisting of Marco Castillo, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and, until his departure in June 2003, Alexandre Arrechea) adopted their name in 1994, deciding to renounce the notion of individual authorship and refer back to an older guild tradition of artisans and skilled laborers. Interested in the intersection between art and society, the group merges architecture, design, and sculpture in unexpected and often humorous ways. They create installations and drawings which negotiate the space between the functional and the nonfunctional. The group's elegant and mordantly humorous sculptures, drawings, and installations draw their inspiration from the physical world—particularly that of furniture. Their carefully crafted works use humor to exploit a visual syntax that sets up contradictions among object and function 
as well as practicality and uselessness.

Cityscape Fragments

Nina Sten-Knudsen

With her overwhelmingly large paintings, Nina Sten-Knudsen have turned her gaze toward a space of reflection tinged by an immense silence, where she enlists the aid of visual art references in her exploration of painting's present possibilities. Although Nina Sten-Knudsen consciously draws from the legacy of art history's great painters: da Vinci, Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer, the paintings she creates are far from traditional paintings. Nina Sten-Knudsen revitalise questions about space, perspective, figuration and approaches taken as given in painting, before the 20th Century did away with the figurative.

URBAN SURFING II

Sarah Bridgland

Sarah Bridgland

Sarah Bridgland creates these incredible tiny paper collage/sculpture/constructions from found objects and random ephemera...they're like little jewelry boxes full of awesomeness.

Electic light Shoes

The electric light shoes were designed for a Japanese footwear company, Onitsuka Tiger, by Freedom of Creation.

The shoe is 3 feet long and contains a miniature city inside, the stripes resemble streets and highways and tall building point out from the shoe’s opening. The huge shoe is intended to communicate Onitsuka Tiger’s Japanese roots.