The wonderful world of Hermès collided with the spectacular, creative vision of the director and artist Robert Wilson in New York. Working together to present a surreal, off-kilter realm centered around Hermès’ home collections, the performance-driven installation, entitled ‘Here Elsewhere,’ was a captivating articulation of the label’s values.
Upon entering a prismatic, mirrored archway, guests found themselves in an abstracted home environment, adorned with Hermès furniture, flatware, home accessories and jewelry that a cast of Wilson’s performers delicately interacted with.
In the next circular room, an actress, decked out in a silver number that looked fit for the New York City Ballet stage, stood on a podium as the Hermès objects rotated around her on a 360 degree video screen to the sounds of a dramatic Philip Glass score. She was followed by another actress in a sparkling red gown, who repeated a series of dancerly movements on the podium.
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Swarovski’s Kristallwelten flagship store in Vienna, Iris van Herpen was invited to take over the space with five experimental art installations. For one of the works, model and artist Lekeliene Stange was 3D-scanned and modeled to create a larger-than-life woman’s head.
Kristallwelten is one of three Swarovski stores in Austria in operation with the aim of fusing art and lifestyle to ‘transform Swarovski crystal into a living experience.’ Van Herpen’s work for the company went straight to this point: Biomorphism – the body of installations created for the store – was the designer’s ode to the performance of femininity.
As Global Curator for Nike’s Flyknit Collective, Neville Wakefield invited six architects, designers and artists from around the world to create pavilions responding to local communities in New York, Shanghai, London, Milan, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo inspired by the Nike Flyknit technology and its core benefits.
For the shoe’s debut in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, who is known for his inhabitable immersive woven fabric structures, built a 40-by-12-meter crocheted walkway that communicated what the Flyknit shoe was about: lightness, performance, sustainability, and adaptive architecture.
American artist Jenny Sabin’s ‘myThread Pavilion’ in Manhattan, with its harder outside construction and softer, organic inner material, was composed of adaptive knitted, solar active, reflective photoluminescent threads and a steel cable net holding hundreds of aluminum rings.
"The focus on experience, curation and culture has proved popular with young consumers and are a vital cultural currency that communicates sophistication to their peers."
‘Rain Room’ – a field of perpetually falling water that participants can explore while remaining dry – can be seen as an amplified representation of our environment. In this immersive environment, human presence prevents the rain from falling, creating a unique atmosphere and exploring how human relationships to each other and to nature are increasingly mediated through technology.
Upon entering the installation, visitors are simultaneously exposed to and protected from the water falling all around. Although the sound and smell of the rain are intense, its touch remains absent, leaving visitors dry within a continual downpour as they navigate the space. In ‘Rain Room,’ a seemingly intuitive relationship develops between visitor and artwork, human and machine.
‘Rain Room’ is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has been exhibited under the museum’s historic Art and Technology initiative. It has also been shown at London’s Barbican (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); and Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015/2018). An edition of ‘Rain Room’ has become the first permanently installed artwork at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018), and is housed in its own building.
“It is not just a playful experience. There are serious questions behind it referencing environmental pressures, climate change and technology.”
DRIFT transformed 90 billboard screens in Times Square into a surreal and sci-fi landscape with their artwork titled ‘Drifters,’ during the month of December. Connecting people to nature through technology to create moments of unity and reflection. Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition.
Marcelis transformed an annular Spanish villa into a large-scale installation for luxury watch label, A. Lange & Söhne. Titled ‘24 Hours,’ the piece utilized the circular building and an abundance of natural light to create a luminous and reflective timepiece.
Designed by Belgian architects Kersten Geers and David van Severen of Office KGDVS, the villa is part of Solo Houses, an architectural endeavor in the mountainous region of Matarraña, Spain consisting of 15 buildings to date, each designed by an emerging international architect. Geers and van Severen’s concrete and glass building was designed with environmental harmony in mind, emphasizing the natural surroundings.
The 45-meter diameter of the hollow circular building provided the perfect space for Marcelis’s timepiece, created to celebrate the release of A. Lange & Söhne’s Datograph Up/Down ‘Lumen,’ in collaboration with Openhouse Magazine. ‘24 Hours’ draws together light, color and form in an explorative sundial that works by way of a cleverly placed obelisk. Situated at the center of the courtyard, the colored mirrored glass obelisk tells the time by casting varying gradients of yellow and blue onto the soil throughout the day.
“These simple gestures of reflection, shadow, refraction, fusion – it’s all made possible simply because of the existence of light."
For the 2019 opening of Ian Schrager’s new Edition hotel in New York’s iconic Times Square, Sila Sveta took over one of the largest and most technically-advanced LED displays in the world with site-specific artwork that augmented architecture with environment.
Covering the building’s facade along its perimeter, the studio created the illusion of a glass box brimming with abstractions of bright hues on the massive 18,000 square foot screen. The content coated the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue for several months, repeating on a loop eight times per hour for Times Square’s 330,000 unique daily visitors and establishing a new visual dialogue with the city.
Media coverage included The New York Times, Document Journal, and Whitewall.
Exploring the relationship between man, nature, and technology, ‘Franchise Freedom’ is a performative artwork in which an autonomously flying swarm of hundreds of drones questions the human concept of freedom and social construct.
Based on a biological algorithm from over 10 years of research into starlings’ flight behavior, the artwork stretches boundaries between nature and technology and generates an impactful social connection, inviting the observer to view a poetic side of technical innovation and connect back with nature.
To create the drama necessary to make its new High Jewelry come to life, the venerable French house Van Cleef & Arpels commissioned Robert Wilson to build an installation around the collection, creating a dreamlike travel through a timeless interpretation of Noah’s Ark.
Using light and space to simulate the experience of a ship at sea, that story translated into an alternately soothing and unsettling multisensory experience. On first entering the eerily lighted space, guests were jolted by thunderclaps and flashing lights; inside, they were lulled by projected ocean waves lapping the perimeter, the meditative strains of Arvo Pärt, drawing them toward the black jewelry cases.
‘Noah’s Ark’ traveled to Shanghai, Seoul, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris.
For its Seattle pop-up, landscape designer Lily Kwong partnered with cult beauty brand, Glossier, on the design, production and installation of a landscape inspired by the area’s natural topography.
The bright space was filled with plant-covered mounds of varying sizes highlighted by splashes of pink and purple wildflowers in peak season. Live moss, Mexican feather grass and flowering shrubs were among the array of species used to adorn the hills, which were constructed using wooden ribs and wire mesh. Many of the plants were indigenous to the region, and all of the vegetation was locally sourced.
The botanical installation paid homage to the remarkable mountain ranges and rolling meadows of Washington, including Mount Ranier. The landscape was repurposed as part of a charitable regifting initiative following the end of the pop-up.
DRIFT’s immersive installation, Shylight, was featured for the first time on the West Coast as part of Summit’s annual flagship event, which brings together an international group of 2500 entrepreneurs, academics, athletes, artists, astronauts, authors, chefs, engineers, explorers, philanthropists, spiritual leaders, and scientists for a series of talks, immersive art installations, culinary experiences, and performances.
Held in downtown Los Angeles, DRIFT’s monumental work awed Summit LA19 guests with elements of humankind, nature, and technology.
“I’ve become really interested in how artists use their practice as a way to understand and imagine the future. From reinterpretations of technology and motion like DRIFT's blooming kinetic flower Shylight, all evoke a simultaneous sense of beauty and darkness, and this year I was particularly drawn to that blurry line in between.”
Rapper Drake and hip-hop trio Migos kicked off their North American concert tour, ‘Aubrey & The Three Migos,’ in support of Drake’s new album, ‘Scorpion,’ which had over one billion plays in the week after its release.
Sila Sveta developed the visual stage design at the invitation of American director Willo Perron, who is known for his work with Kanye West, Rihanna, Jay-Z, The Weeknd, and others. It was at once a light box and a gargantuan projector on which images of mermaids circling around Drake like sharks were shown and molten lava morphed into a rippling, sun-dappled pool. Its ever-shifting designs became a visual feast for the duration of the show.
Drake’s Spring 2019 European tour, “Assassination Vacation,” utilized the same stage design.
Kanye West’s first opera, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ at the Hollywood Bowl, starred Sheck Wes in the title role of the Old Testament Bible story about the king of Babylon. Beecroft directed the elaborately staged performance featuring a cast of hundreds – operatic singers, a choir in matching robes standing on an elevated horseshoe-shaped structure, and hordes of robed performers lining the aisles of the Hollywood Bowl.
West has previously said that he sees himself as a kind of Nebuchadnezzar for the 21st century. While the majority of the music from ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ was new and original, familiar music from West’s catalog was peppered into the operatic and choral performances featuring the Sunday Service collective, Peter Collins, and Infinity’s Song.
This new incarnation of Claude Debussy’s only opera, staged on the 100th anniversary of his death by Opera Vlaanderen and Royal Ballet Flanders, presented a new concept in abstract staging from an all-star creative team. Based on the 1892 play by Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas at Mélisande describes how innocence is able to transform into a dramatic – and deathly – love triangle.
Lending an epic element to a minimal stage concept, Marco Brambilla used original NASA footage manipulated from real photography taken by the Hubble Telescope as brushstrokes to emphasize the opera’s rhythm in a series of eclipses that travel deeper and deeper, inspired by the classic, psychedelic ‘stargate’ sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Having worked with NASA on a commission in 2015, Brambilla had access to a vast library of high-resolution imagery, with which he was able to render familiar shapes and objects as mesmeric, terrifying, and artful, adding dimension and advancing the narrative.
Fashion designer Iris van Herpen served as Costume Designer for this breathtaking operatic production. A former ballet dancer herself, van Herpen has also created costumes for the Paris Opera and the New York City Ballet, collaborating with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied and the Sasha Waltz dance company in Berlin.
Arguably the season’s most anticipated New York Fashion Week show, lighting designer John Torres was called up to imagine a set of light atmospheres for the Yeezy Season 3 presentation and ‘The Life of Pablo’ album reveal at New York’s legendary Madison Square Garden.
With 20,000 people in attendance, the star-studded event featured 1,200 models and extras, special guests including including Travis Scott, Vic Mensa and Virgil Abloh, and a performance by renowned contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft, all masterfully illuminated.
For his 10th anniversary with Givenchy, creative director Riccardo Tisci partnered with lighting designer, John Torres, and performance artist and art world celebrity, Marina Abramović, on a tour de force on the Hudson River – the House’s first show in New York.
Abramovic’s installation, which spanned the length of a New York City pier, included a diverse assortment of surreal happenings including, but not limited to, women climbing ladders, llamas, grand pianos, Serbian folk singers, cellists, and violinists, which were interspersed throughout the space.
With guests arriving more an hour before the show began, there was plenty of time to take in the beautifully lit installations high up on plinths as artists performed in delicate vignettes against the changing backdrop of the setting sun.
The performance VB62 in the Church of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo recalls the tradition of late baroque Sicilian sculpture, transforming the simple use of stucco into a refined and fashionable art form. In the apse of the church, Beecroft arranged a group of female nudes – women entirely covered in white body paint with their hair pinned up and painted – and plaster casts, in a radial formation. The nude models recalled the Renaissance notions of nobility, austerity and dignity. The plaster casts, which were polished smooth to give the effect of marble, allude to the long tradition of funerary sculptures.
During the performance the women, initially motionless, start to make slight movements in absolute silence, as if waking slowly from a deep sleep, or indeed, from the dead. They stay seated, motionless, or stand, moving through the space and redistributing themselves following the simple rules fixed by the artist in every performance. Their glance is lost and empty as if it belongs to another reality.
At the beginning of the performance the group is formal and homogeneous, but gradually the women deconstruct the composition. With their movements the body paint cracks and flakes, revealing their living flesh, and they become carnal and alive, while the sculptures remain rigid, cold and inanimate. VB62 raises questions about notions of the real and the unreal, maintaining an unbridgeable gap between the figures and the public.
Underwritten by Lexus in celebration of its RC F performance coupe, which was reportedly the product of a carte blanche given to Lexus designers and engineers, fashion designer Gareth Pugh transformed New York City’s Pier 36 into a multi-chamber installation space with live ‘tableau vivant’ fashion performances in which he unveiled his seasonal collection in New York for the first time.
Known for garments described as wearable sculptures, Pugh created a series of large-scale film installations and live performance pieces with a singular and compelling vision, featuring a live immersive fashion experience harnessing design, performance and technology.
Since 2008, FENDI has supported limited edition creativity and design through its partnership with Design Miami/. To mark the 10-year anniversary of this partnership, the luxury Maison partnered with Marcelis to present ‘The Shapes of Water,’ a project by dedicated to rediscover water as a design tool, whose delicate beauty the designer has magnified by realizing ten fountains inspired by ten of the most iconic symbols of the historical Roman house.
Further celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ‘Peekaboo’ bag, FENDI gave Marcelis carte blanche to reinterpret the iconic style, transforming it from a white canvas version into a design masterpiece. Marcelis chose to freeze the design within a resin block, preserving a hint of functionality within this new sculptural object by only encapsulating the lower volume of the bag. The translucent resin colour exaggerated the three-dimensionality of the shape frozen within.
The customized Peekaboo bags customized by Marcelis and four other international artists debuted at the FENDI boutique in the Miami Design District, displayed on special podiums in hues of yellow designed by Marcelis herself.
"It is through clean and soft lines and the use of ethereal materials such as polished resin and water in contrast with the historical travertine stone, and warm colors reminiscent of the Roman skies, that the fountains of Sabine Marcelis represent the perfect fusion between the historical, creative and aesthetic legacy of FENDI and its courage to provoke."
Fusing personal experiences with a spontaneous sense of composition, Coco Capitán’s signature hand-written prose, poems and aphorisms reflect a culturally pertinent tone, defined by its oscillation between irony and sincerity, naïveté and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt.
Catching the eye of creative director Alessandro Michele while Capitán was still in art school, Gucci featured a selection of her otherworldly musings on a limited-edition collection of apparel and accessories, which organically grew into a multi-faceted collaboration between the emerging artist and the globally recognizable luxury brand.
Taking the synergistic collaboration one step further, Capitán’s handwritten prose was celebrated with the unveiling of Gucci’s flagship store façade in Miami’s Design District, as well as text-based murals on Gucci Art Walls in Miami’s Wynwood district, on New York’s Lafayette Street, and in the Corso Garibaldi district of Milan.
The Lady Dior bag was first introduced in 1995, immediately after Princess Diana premiered the fashion classic, making it an instant icon. As part of the ‘Lady Dior As Seen By’ project, artists Jack Pierson and Friedrich Kunath and photographer Matthew Porter re-designed the fashion house’s classic bag, recognized by its intricate leather stitching and distinctive metal charms, with their own creative inspiration.
Jack Pierson’s Lady Dior bag was inspired by the dreamlike art-deco sketches he drafted in Paris with whirlpool doodles and bright-orange details on the handles and custom charms; Friedrich Kunath’s rendition featured a warm impasto painting of a couple in an intimate exchange at sunset with a playful cloud charm and glossy rainbow handles, and Matthew Porter utilized his series of ‘flying car’ montages, featuring shrunken models of cars, to create an effect of mid-air suspension along with a red car key ring.
Dom Pérignon collaborated with Iris van Herpen on an avant-garde limited-edition champagne box and 3D-printed sculpture as part of its ‘Power of Creation’ project. Van Herpen’s gift packs drew inspiration from concepts of metamorphosis and the length of time involved in making the champagne. Each box was signed by the designer and bore a sprawling, crystal-like green graphic set on a black backdrop.
The partnership also saw van Herpen design the Cocoonase – a 3D-printed sculpture with space for a champagne bottle. Both concepts were commissioned to celebrate the first release of Dom Pérignon Vintage 2004 drawing to a close and to mark the introduction of the second, called the P2-2004.
To accompany van Herpen’s work, photographer Daniel Sannwald directed a minute-long video that saw a ghost-like Anja Rubik emerge from an evolving green mist, harking back to the notion of metamorphosis. Previous ‘Power of Creation’ collaborators have included Jeff Koons, Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Newson and David Lynch.
Los Angeles–based visual artist Darel Carey’s work includes dimensional line drawings and immersive installations using his signature medium: tape. During the 2019 Frieze Art Fair, Equinox commissioned Carey to create an immersive tape installation at its High Line club in New York City.
Over a period of eight days, Carey fabricated an expansive geometric design on the club’s interior windows and collaborated with Equinox on corresponding limited-edition yoga mats, which were available for purchase at The Shop with proceeds donated to charity.
American artist and designer, Greg Lauren, collaborated with Moncler on a collection of 200 unique and limited-edition clothing pieces that crossed over into the field of artistic expression. Simply entitled “Collide,” the collection linked the Italian brand with the highly experimental world of the designer, who is known for his incredible eye for detail.
The collaborative range featured Lauren’s signature juxtaposition of textures through the combination of old and new. Men’s, women’s and unisex pieces focusing on iconic designs from the brand’s heritage were dismantled, intersected and recomposed using Lauren’s signature striking distressed fabrics, such as vintage US military tents and duffle bags, antique hemp, antique Japanese Boro and antique African indigo.
Produced by Desert Biennial, a not-for-profit charitable organization, ‘Desert X’ was conceived as a recurring international contemporary art exhibition that activates desert locations through site-specific installations by acclaimed international artists.
Its guiding purpose and principles include presenting public exhibitions of art that respond meaningfully to the conditions of the desert locations, the environment, and indigenous communities – promoting cultural exchange and education programs that foster dialogue and understanding among cultures and communities about shared artistic, historical, and societal issues. ‘Desert X’ includes site-specific work by 18 artists selected by CXA artist and curator, Neville Wakefield, as Artistic Director.
In Fragile Future, multidisciplinary artists DRIFT transform The Shed with sound, movement, and film. Their experiential installations play on our senses and help us imagine positive, alternative solutions to the problems our planet faces. DRIFT’s monumental exhibition and series of special experiences inspire a reconnection to our planet and its natural processes, as well as empathy towards nonliving objects.
Featuring a soundtrack created by ANOHNI, Fragile Future takes audiences on a journey through a series of interconnected installations, exploring the universal desire to seek out connection and the power to be found in relinquishing control when embracing change. Since their early careers, DRIFT’s founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta have addressed urgent environmental themes in their work in order to challenge their audiences to think differently about their connections to Earth. The exhibition’s installations—from multitudes of shimmering lights that traverse the gallery like glowing seeds caught in the wind to massive concrete blocks, or Drifters, that magically float on air—offer a hopeful atmosphere for imagining a different world.
On select dates, Drifters becomes a surreal immersive experience that spans The Shed’s four-story-high, 17,000-square-foot McCourt space. In this unique experience, a congregation of Drifters dances on the air in an ethereal atmosphere, in counterpoint to a soundtrack by ANOHNI.
Transforming a platform normally used for commerce into one for culture, Show Media collaborated with Art Production Fund on a citywide public art campaign featuring the work of painter Kehinde Wiley on the tops of 250 New York City taxi cabs.
The dynamics of the project were different at any given time – an exhibit constantly in flux, transforming with traffic patterns. Seen by over 5 million New Yorkers each day, Wiley’s artwork reached people of all ages, races, and backgrounds.
Known for his large scale portraits, the pieces selected for the project, ‘The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia’ (2008) and ‘Femme Piquee Par Un Serpent’ (2008) were scaled down, allowing for Wiley’s racially and politically charged juxtapositions to still be taken in as a whole on the comparatively small canvas.
Created as a tribute to Studio Drift’s fascination with nature’s grandeur and complexity, ‘Franchise Freedom’ invited viewers to see a poetic side of technical innovation and connect back with nature. A flying swarm of hundreds of drones, ‘Franchise Freedom’ exposed the tension between individual freedom and safety in numbers.
Never before had a natural phenomenon of this magnitude been recreated by autonomously flying drones. To make it happen, Studio Drift developed a special algorithm based on their observations of the flight patterns and behavior of starlings. The drones were then able to fly through the night sky as organic, autonomous beings.
In partnership with Faena, Future\Pace and BMW, ‘Franchise Freedom’ lit up the night sky above Art Basel Miami Beach and has since appeared in Amsterdam above the IJ, at Burning Man Festival and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
“Retail is suffering because it’s replaceable in a virtual world. Art galleries are not suffering; they’re growing because we offer an experience."
For the second installment of their 2019 video art program, Westfield and Art Production Fund displayed a dynamic excerpt from artist Marco Brambilla’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 3’ across the large-scale screens at Westfield World Trade Center in New York City and Westfield Century City in Los Angeles, measuring up to 4 stories tall.
‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 3’ moved the iconic Duchamp painting (Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2) into the dimension of time. The illusion of movement in the painting was explored as the figures which inhabit the digital canvas constantly reconfigure themselves to cascade down an unseen stairway. The figures, shapes and color palette are pure cubism, now expanded into three dimensions using state-of-the-art computer technology. ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2’ is a rare case where an artist drew from a “new” technology (Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic time-studies) as an inspiration for a painting. By taking the original Duchamp painting back into the technological realm and adding the dimension of time, Brambilla aimed to complete the circle and pay homage to the deconstructed image using a wholly contemporary visual language.
Using technology to reimagine and animate such an art historically significant work, Brambilla’s interpretation of the iconic painting afforded the public the opportunity to experience and contemplate ‘Nude Descending A Staircase’ like never before.
As part of the 2019 Venice Biennale’s DYSFUNCTIONAL, an immersive exhibit presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery in partnership with the Lombard Odier Group, Studio Drift’s ‘Fragile Future 3’ is a multidisciplinary light sculpture that sits at the intersection of nature and technology, combining both in a tender balance.
The three-dimensional bronze electrical circuits were connected to light-emitting dandelions, bolted together to form a power circuit overgrowing walls, floors and ceilings, forming modular sculptures and chandeliers.
The sculpture contains real dandelion seeds that were picked by hand and glued, seed by seed, to LED lights. This labor-intensive process, a clear statement against mass production and throwaway culture, is a critical yet utopian vision on the future of our planet, wherein two seemingly opposite evolutions have made a pact to survive.
Coco Capitán’s exhibit at the Seoul-based Daelim Museum, ‘Is It Tomorrow Yet?’ was curated as an immersive journey into a decade of the artist’s universe and featured over 150 works including photographs, paintings, writings, videos, and installations. The six-month exhibition was visited by a record-breaking number of art fanatics, teens, and photography lovers.
To celebrate the release of A Magazine Curated By Alessandro Michele, Gucci and A Magazine together launched a trilogy of photography exhibitions in Hong Kong, Beijing and Taipei to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong.
Petra Collins’s intimate family portraits photographed in Budapest took center stage in Hong Kong. Days later, Coco Capitán’s now iconic handwritings and snapshots of Rome and Florence were shown in Beijing. The final show transported an exhaustive portrait of Joshua Tree, California by Gia Coppola to Taipei.
In addition to their photographic work exhibited in a fine art context, a selection of objects and prints from the pages of A Magazine Curated By Alessandro Michele appeared together for the first time in a cabinet of curiosities selected by Editor-in-chief and exhibition curator, Dan Thawley. Each exhibition featured an immersive projection room, inviting visitors to enter into the pages of the magazine in a psychedelic audio-visual collage that brought Alessandro Michele’s universe to life.
Apollo XVIII was a multi-channel video installation created by Marco Brambilla Studio that interpreted man’s relationship to space exploration and presented an imagined mission to the moon; a mission born in the virtual age. For one month, Times Square was transformed into a virtual launchpad as Apollo XVIII played across dozens of electronic billboards from 11:57pm to midnight.
In collaboration with NASA, footage was filmed at Cape Canaveral, combined with Hubble imagery, rare material from the NASA archives and original computer-generated imagery to fabricate the fictitious mission. Combining iconic moments from past and present with the wholly synthetic, Apollo XVIII presented a new collective viewing experience, calling into question the nature of fact and fiction, reality versus perception and context.
Held over three days in April at a converted hangar in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, curator Neville Wakefield brought together a diverse panel of artists and trendsetters to speak candidly about their fearlessness, the thrill of invention, and the essence of bold connections as part of the Cartier Social Lab, a series of intimate conversations and events honoring the Cartier ethos and aesthetic.
The series of unforgettable talks allowed luminaries from different walks of life, including Alex Prager, Chaz Bear, Es Devlin, Leo Villareal, Larry Jackson, and David LaChapelle, to discuss their creative process, challenges and passions with Wakefield as the host and narrator.
As part of Samsung’s effort to reach young creatives in the US and Asia, Capitán was commissioned by Hypebeast to develop a branded content campaign and 360º activation showcasing the brand’s newest tech products.
Capitán’s collaboration with Samsung reimagined the conventional brand-artist partnership and in-store shopping experience, sourcing inspiration from the artist’s visit to New York and two-week residency in Japan to create a series of aspirational films following her on her exploration of the magnificent cities through an artist’s eyes with Samsung technology in hand.
Taking over Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Harajuku store, an 8-story cutting-edge retail environment in the heart of Tokyo’s most popular shopping neighborhood, Capitán designed an immersive installation that incorporated her customized handwritten prose, art films created with the new Galaxy Note10+, and sound design into a narrative circuit installation combining innovation, inspiration and additive technology.
The fully integrated campaigns came to life across digital, film, and social media channels alongside a cutting-edge immersive multimedia store experience, a series of in-store events featuring Capitán, and limited-edition merchandise, elevating the Samsung product through her masterful storytelling and reaching Hypebeast’s influential millennial audience of 9.4 million.
Alongside notable creators such as Takashi Murakami, M. Night Shyamalan, Dave Grohl, Shantell Martin and Billie Eilish, David LaChapelle took the stage at Adobe’s annual Creativity Conference, Adobe MAX, to share an inspirational Keynote talk with the 15,000 member audience about how he found his identity as a photographer and artist and to offer advice for aspiring creatives.
For decades, CXA+ART has worked with artists, brands, and world-renowned publishing houses specializing in luxury, art, fashion, and design, such as Taschen, Assouline, and Rizzoli, to realize monographs, museum catalogues, and brand heritage books.
Recent projects have included books from Iris van Herpen, Coco Capitán, and Robert Polidori, as well as numerous publications from prolific artists such as David LaChapelle, François Halard, and Robert Wilson
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