This week, check out the winning entry for the prestigious Loewe Foundation Craft Prize – as well as all the other finalists from current and past years – on Loewe’s new digital platform dedicated to the Prize.
Art and music fiends should check out Demon States, an immersive mixed-reality exhibition that showcases new material from feted Singapore electronic band The Observatory’s upcoming album.
And lastly, if you’re into flowers, the stylish botanical design studio This Humid House is holding online classes where they teach you how to create floral arrangements using found and easily accessible materials.
If you’ve been feeling the blues lately, take the chance to check out this immersive mixed-reality experience, titled Demon States. Borne out of a time of physical and psychological lockdowns, Demon States can be thought of as the manifestations of our inner demons and anxiety – and just as crucially, how people grapple with them.
It’s part of the ongoing SIFA (Singapore International Festival of Arts) 2021 festival, and will be debuting new materials from the upcoming album by experimental electronic band The Observatory and Japanese artist Koichi Shimizu.
Take in the various soundscapes through four separate installations – each work comprises a designed physical environment (by theatre practitioner Irfan Kasban) and a VR experience (by media artist Brandon Tay), with the audience invited to explore the space before donning the VR googles and headset.
And the best part: organisers say the exhibition is best experienced alone, which plays well with current social distancing measures in place at the moment.
Get your tickets here.
Ongoing till May 30. The various installations of Demon States are staged at The Arts House and the Esplanade. More details here
Fans of arts and crafts will probably be familiar with the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize – the Spanish maison’s feted annual competition that celebrates and supports crafts-based disciplines around the world.
Loewe has just announced the winner of the fourth edition: Chinese textile designer Fanglu Lin, whose cloth-based piece SHE (2016), influenced by the thousand-year old sewing methods of women of China’s Bai minority in Yunnan province, is pictured here.
The work reportedly astonished the jury with ‘its monumental scale (it measures some 550 x 3,000 x 6,000 cm) and breathtaking skill’. Lin’s winning entry as well as all 115 finalists of the Prize since its inception will be available for detailed viewing at Loewe’s new digital platform, The Room.
While the exhibition of the winner and finalists’ works were originally slated to be shown at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, ongoing restrictions saw Loewe recreating the museum’s hall with 3D technology. The works, which are also modelled in 3D, can be experienced through high definition 360-degree ‘close-up’ filming and augmented reality.
Visit the exhibition here.
Ongoing till Sept 30
Many of us are fans of This Humid House‘s spirited arrangements and now you can be guided by their team on how they create an arrangement. The botanical design outfit will be putting on a two-part video series as part of a series of programs by Design Singapore that focuses on using found and locally sourced materials – think cuttings from houseplants, fallen branches and market fruit and flowers – for arrangements for the home.
What’s more, you won’t even need fancy vases to house your arrangement: senior designers will demonstrate techniques that will allow any common receptacle that holds water like bowls and cups to serve as vessels for the arrangements instead.
We like how this is a subtle nod to sustainable practices, while still retaining an element of design. The organisers are also holding a contest where the public are invited to send in images of their floral creations. Winners can walk away with This Humid House’s brass vessels and kenzans (a device used in ikebana that serves as a base for the floral arrangement).
More details here.
Ongoing till June 2