Art has been expanding its limits for a long time now and it comes as no surprise that artists became more bold in incorporating the nature into their work. Angel Orensanz is a good example of that, but the dutch artist Berndnaut Smildes took a step beyond and brought real nature to the inside.
With the use of smoke, precise humidity, temperature and light the Amsterdam-based artist creates clouds that travel in the inside of big empty spaces, like the HMK{HotelMariaKapel}, a international artist-run residency that hosted his exhibition Cumulus this year.
But you need to be lucky to see his exhibition in real life, after all, Smilde’s clouds are usually just seen in photos, since they are so ephemeral, just like the real clouds, the floating mass he creates desaperas as quickly as it materializes.
“you could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. you could also read it as an element out of the dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall. at the same time I wanted to make (for once) a very clear image, an almost cliché and cartoon like visualization of having bad luck: ‘indeed, there nothing here and bullocks, it’s starting to rain!”
-berndnaut smiled
But this artist is not the only one with a thing for clouds, NY-based architects Diller and Scofidio constructed the Blur Building in Lake Neuchâtel, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, back in 2002 for the Swiss Expo. The installation consists in a big cloud in which visitors can walk into, but also see from afar.
The pavilion is made of filtered water from the lake shot as a thin mist out of more than 10 thousand fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud of 300 ft wide, 200 ft deep and 65 ft high. To enter inside the giant man-made cloud that is controlled by a built-in weather station, visitors climb a ramp where they are given a personality test and then a “braincoat” with the data from the test.
When visistors passed each other the coat color changed depending on the compatility with the person next to them. On the top of the structure a bar served samplings of water from all over the world.
Sources: designboom,tumblr, itsnicethat, artlog, atlasobscura, kindofblurry
The Angel Orensanz Foundation 