Recent Projects, mobiles in the news, and other interesting things.
In Glam Life Magazine
Our mobile, Ganymede was featured in Glam Life Spain, along with some other interesting art.
Our awesome laser cutter
We get asked about our laser cutter pretty often. We thought it would be fun to show it off. Check out a video of it cutting this acrylic material. This is tinted acrylic that is masked with paper on both sided to prevent scratches. The laser goes through it beautifully, with no discolored edges or melting. It does the same with metal, wood, and other materials.
And here's the mobile we made with those very parts:
Outdoor mobiles
We've recently completed a couple of outdoor mobiles. One, 10 feet tall and 12 feet across, supported by a large red stabile, now resides in El Paso, Texas. The owner is a renowned art collector, and owns two original Calder mobiles. One had a slight twist in one of the linkages, and he allowed me to gently return it to its proper position. What an honor!
Another, a rainbow version of our "Ganymede" mobile with custom stainless steel support hoop now lives near the coast in L.A.
MODmobiles in the Wall Street Journal
In this weekend's Wall Street Journal there's an article about hanging mobile art and how it's more than just baby mobiles. Our mobile, "Red Bouquet", was featured and shown in the article.
Our mobiles in the media
We've made mobiles for TV shows, movies, and magazine photo shoots. We made mobiles for the TV show Damages, for the movie Little Fockers, and a photoshoot for Coastal Living magazine. But the media project that we have found most fun was providing the mobiles for the independent film Wes and Ella.
From IMDB: The randomness in your life is never the randomness you think. Wes, a mobile artist, randomly discovers Ella during a pivotal moment in her life. After an introspective road trip, Ella comes to discover a few things about herself which might give her the strength to make some changes and find out who Wes really is. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1793296/
It was a lot of fun working with the team that made this film. It's a great story and the cinematography is beautiful. There are mobiles throughout the film, but my favorite scene is one where Wes is shown making mobiles. I personally coached the actor, Scoot Mcnairy, on how to make loops and attach shapes so that his actions would pass as experienced mobile making. He did a great job.
Close-up study of an outdoor Calder mobile
Corporate site evaluations and mobile installations take us to some great locations all over the world. While in Washington D.C. I was able to see lots of Alexander Calder mobiles both within the Smithsonian and outside in the D.C. mall. As a long time student and admirer of Calder, I take every chance I can to take a close look at his work. You can see the overall mobile structure in any image from a book or the internet, but I like to check out the closer details like his hardware and linkages. Though many of his methods are similar to my own, I'm sometimes surprised by something different. In this outdoor mobile sculpture, the mobile parts connect to the stabile base using a shaft and nesting cylinder. It's a brilliant way to allow the main rod of the mobile to swing around, but not in a wild or dangerous way. It was a breezy day and I hung around for a while, watching a very smooth and gentle mobile motion. Delightful for this engineer turned artist, to see a simple mechanism so elegantly implemented
