(Image: Ron Pinkerton, reproduced with permission)
Urban art, growing out of or concerned with city life, has been spawned from vandalism and graffiti and is now a recognised comment on the fabric of our cities and modern lifestyles. Abandoned and decaying structures or the junk items of urban society are being recycled to create new sculptures and images, often designed to shock or surprise the spectator. Here are 10 clever examples of urban, abandoned and recycled art.
1. Unregistered Cities by Jiang Pengyi
(Images: Jiang Pengyi, via Blindspot Gallery)
Unregistered Cities is a series of urban art and social commentary by Jiang Pengyi. Pengyi’s crumbling miniature cities are created within the crevices of Beijing’s more traditional abandoned houses as a comment on the decline of ancient culture in favour of rapid development and urbanisation. The artist enjoys working with photography and experimenting with light, drawing the viewer’s attention to different aspects of the tiny sculpted high rises, the damage, the smoke clouds and the flames. Strikingly, despite being imaginary, some buildings within the models do appear to refer to ones which the spectator will recognise from real cityscapes within our own rapidly changing world.
2. Subverting the Coca-Cola Ban – With a Giant Coke Can
(Images by Icy and Sot (see Facebook), reproduced with permission)
This giant coke can may look like a fun piece of urban art but it may be a rather daring example of social commentary by stencils artists, ICY and SOT from Tabriz, Iran. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned imports from Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel and Nestle, the artistic duo responded by decorating a large storage tank on a hill overlooking Tabriz. Keen skateboarders, ICY (born in 1985) and SOT (born in 1991) claimed that painting the giant abandoned container was to draw attention to the environmental issue of empty coke cans littering almost everywhere. The young brothers are now based in Brooklyn, New York. They have held exhibitions and created pieces of outdoor art in many locations around the globe, including Paris, San Francisco and Amsterdam.
3. Recycled Art: Britain’s Iconic Red Telephone Boxes
(Images: Steve Fareham, cc-sa-3.0; sharkbait; Don Swanson; cc-nc-sa-3.0)
Britain’s traditional red telephone boxes began with the K2, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880- 1960) in the 1920s. Born of a long line of important architects, Scott was responsible for a host of British landmarks, including the former Bankside Power Station (now home to the Tate Modern). Perhaps Scott’s blend of the Gothic tradition with modernism is what gives the iconic telephone kiosk its lasting appeal and adaptability. Decaying ‘currant red’ boxes are being refurbished to produce urban art installations or recycled to provide ATM cash machines, garden toilets, libraries, flower boxes, fish tanks and even cocktail bars!
4. The International Car Forest of the Last Church
(All images by Ron Pinkerton, reproduced with permission)
The International Car Forest of the Last Church is an art installation near Goldfield, Nevada. Around 40 old vehicles have been recycled to create this eerie scene of cars, buses and trucks which appear to have rained down in to the desert sand. Graffiti and solar lighting add to the alien-invasion feel of these planted, placed and stacked hunks of metal. The project allegedly began in the early 2000s when Michael Rippie began burying the nose end of cars on his land in order to gain a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The roadside curiosity inspired artist Chad Sorg, who began working alongside Rippie in 2011. As well as attracting other artists, the car forest has hosted live bands and is apparently free to view at all times.
5. The Ziggurat: Urban Art Inside an Abandoned Detroit Factory
(All images by Scott Hocking (see website), reproduced with permission)
In the late 2000s, Scott Hocking spent eight months at 6051 Hastings St (owned by the City of Detroit) turning 6,201 floor tile blocks into a wooden pyramid called simply The Ziggurat. Ziggurats were terraced step pyramids built as part of religious temple complexes in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau. Hocking’s Ziggurat was constructed within an abandoned factory called Fisher Body Plant 21 (built in 1921). As well as being used as a secluded art space, FB21 once built Buick and Cadillac bodies, provided shelter for the homeless during the Great Depression and saw the construction of P-80 Lockheed Shooting Star planes and FG-4 (F4U-4) Corsair shipboard fighters during World War Two.
6. Rebirth 2013 – Urban Art Installation in China
(Image: Youth.cn)
Rebirth 2013 or Regeneration 2013, is a sculpture by Gu Yuan and Sun Yeli at ‘Jiangcheng No.1′ Creative Culture Park in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. In 2013, the structure was made from 13 scrap-worthy cars skewered on a metal post to stand as a sturdy 10 metre tall tower of junk metal. Nearby is another car with just one other placed on top of it, complete with graffiti-style paint spray finish. The urban art installations are part of a creative venture which is seeing an inspirational park and artist studios grow out of a 28 workshop-strong former factory site, in this case, the factory where China’s first walking tractor was produced in 1957. Notably, in the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone by Taizi Lake, the WEDZ Cultural and Artistic Creativity Park is due to be completed by February 2015.
7. Street Artist Creates ‘LEGO Bridge’ on Abandoned German Railway
(Images: Martin Heowold (MEGX), reproduced with permission)
This LEGO bridge is certainly a piece of urban art designed to surprise its audience. Martin Heowold, known as street artist MEGX, enjoys projects which will help people perceive their surroundings more positively. After the abandoned Wuppertal Northern Railway in Germany was turned in to a cycle and pedestrian route called Nordtrasse in 2010, MEGX was given the task of transforming this old concrete bridge in to something fun. MEGX built prototype models using his children’s LEGO bricks to find out which pieces would make an attractive bridge in the shape of the real one and what scale ratio would work with the actual bridge’s dimensions. His clever use of colour and shade also adds the effective 3D detail of the interlocking elements of the blocks, which is what makes this optical delight look so convincing.
8. Animal House: Part of Detroit’s Heidelberg Project
(Images: Bob Jagendorf, cc-3.0; Gehad Hadidi, cc-nc-sa-3.0)
The Animal House is part of the Heidelberg Project, which can be found in a two-block area of Detroit’s East Side. Tyree Guyton began this unusual urban art form on Heidelberg street in 1986. Guyton gathered children and adult volunteers together to help collect discarded objects or ‘Magic Trash’ to decorate abandoned buildings. Some of the original buildings have been demolished but the symbolic colourful dots of the Heidelberg Project are still spreading. Although the weathered soft toys of Animal House may look a bit creepy, it’s a welcome alternative to decaying houses affected by vandalism and arson. The urban art installations of the Heidelberg Project are a thought-provoking sight for all ages to inspire the local community and educate people on how lives can be vastly improved through creativity.
9. ‘Art House': Rachel Whiteread’s Inverted Victorian Home
(Images: Matthew Caldwell, cc-nc-sa-3.0; Philip Grisewood)
193 Grove Road in Tower Hamlets, survived the first V1 flying bomb to hit London in World War Two – an attack which damaged several other houses and a nearby railway bridge. With its immediately adjoining neighbours, it was the last of its terrace to be demolished in 1993 to extend Mile End Park. However, number 193’s most notable achievement was to be the first of its kind to have left a ghost. Before demolition, Rachel Whiteread oversaw the painstaking task of creating new foundations and covering all the internal surfaces of the basement and upper-two storeys (but not the roof space) of 193 with concrete. Whiteread’s cast ‘House’ was enforced with steel mesh and stood as a memorial when the original Victorian walls were gone. After a fleeting afterlife, this intriguing example of urban art was also demolished.
10. Guardians of Time: Mysterious Sculptures by Manfred Kielnhofer
(Images: Manfred Kielnhofer via kielnhofer.at/press)
Manfred Kielnhofer began creating Time Guardians in 2006. Since then they have featured in several festivals celebrating light but sometimes they just pop up unexpectedly in a park, a mine or a castle. ‘KILI’ Kielnhofer is an Austrian sculpture, painter and photographer. He has experience in metal and woodwork, as well as being a mechanical engineer so his ideas are often practical and inventive. The appearance of the Time Guardians, however, may be more than an experimentation with sculpture in the human form. As urban art pieces, their presence may remind onlookers of apocalyptic figures, commanders of time, watching over particular moments in our short human history.
Keep Reading – 10 Incredible Artworks that were Lost for Decades
The post 10 Clever Examples of Urban & Recycled Art appeared first on Urban Ghosts.