Dan Tague is a New Orleans-based artist with a different sort of green thumb. Tague folds American banknotes in a sort of slapdash origami-style. Often his mini-money-sculptures look like inconspicuous, crumpled wads of cash. But if you look closer, you’ll see that Tague has creased the money in such a way to spell out messages—many of which have an anti-capitalist tone. You probably didn’t think that “We Need a Revolution” was written on the six dollars in your pocket. Well, look again.

 (Thanks, BOOOOOOOM!) 

Images courtesy of Dan Tague. 

Scott Weaver’s sculpture Rolling through the Bay is made up of 100,000 toothpicks; 3,000 work hours over 35 years; and an unwavering, buoyant love for the city of San Francisco. (Plus lots and lots of Elmer’s glue.)

The amazingly detailed kinetic sculpture, which stands 9 feet tall, 7 feet wide, and 30 inches deep, includes multiple ping-pong-ball paths that wind past San Francisco’s most beloved landmarks and neighborhoods—the Golden Gate Bridge, Ghirardelli Square, Lombard Street, Chinatown, Haight-Ashbury, The Castro, and more.

You have to see Rolling through the Bay in action to appreciate Weaver’s craftsmanship, as well as his quirky, enthusiastic joy in creating each inch. Watch a video of him giving a tour of the piece, below, or see it on display at The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco until June 19.

(Thanks, Curbly.)

Source: The Tinkering Studio  

Image courtesy of Fubiz. 

You know those metal figurines used to navigate the board in Monopoly? Now imagine those pieces, but smaller. And instead of being made of metal and mass-produced via mold, they’re hand-carved from an infinitely softer substance…on the tiny tip of a pencil. That is what artist and carpenter Dalton Ghetti has spent 25 years of his life creating. Green Diary picked up on Ghetti and his fascinating art, which he creates by working with various tools to carve miniature sculptures on the graphite tips of used pencils. Needless to say: It’s way more impressive than those uninspired hacks at Parker Brothers.     

Source: Green Diary  

Image by Samu73, licensed under Creative Commons.

Guy Laramée turned a set of dusty old encyclopedias into a gorgeous replica of Jordan’s Petra, one of the world’s best-known archaeological sites.

The excellent Magers & Quinn blog tipped me off to this stack-of-books-sized rendering of Petra, which Laramée sculpted using a set of sandblasted encyclopedias. The piece was featured in a recent book-art exhibit at Seattle’s Bellevue Arts Museum; you can see more of Laramée’s work here and here.

(I'm sure there's a joke to be made about looking up Petra inside the encyclopedia, but I don't think it merits non-parenthetical treatment.)

Source: Magers & Quinn blog 

Guy Laramée, Pétra (2007). Eroded encyclopedias, pigment, 12 x 11.25 x 8.5 in. Courtesy  Galerie Orange  and the artist.

The Czech Republic, in celebration of its new appointment as temporary head of the European Union, commissioned Czech artist David Cerny to spearhead a sculpture to commemorate the distinction. His assignment was to create a sculpture mosaic in collaboration with an artist from each country in the EU (27 in all).

However, he soon figured that such a project could not be completed on time and under budget. So he and his team, without telling the government agency that donated the funds, “decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes."

The result is Entropa, a mosaic of giant snap-together plastic parts, with each piece depicting the stereotypes of a particular country. Romania, for example, is shown to be a Dracula-themed amusement park, while France is draped with a banner reading “On Strike!"

Needless to say, the uproar has been considerable. Czech Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra has since apologized for the incident, but Cerny remains adamant that Europe simply needs to lighten up. According to the artist, the aim was to raise the question “What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. … We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.”

In the end, Cerny agreed to return the Czech government’s ₤300,000 grant for the project, but there’s little chance the sculpture will actually be removed from its display at the EU Council in Brussels

View more pictures of the work and read the official brochure, complete with the fake artists’ explanations.

(Thanks, BoingBoing.)

Image courtesy of centralasian, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s a brilliantly simple idea. Artist Christopher Locke purchased scissors that had been confiscated by airport security screeners, then bent and welded them into metallic sculptures of spiders. One of his more recent models is even articulated and poseable.

Some of the scissors were permitted by regulation but had been deemed a possible threat by Transportation Security Administration screeners, who have wide latitude to confiscate. If these scissors posed an ambiguous threat before, Locke clarified it. Peruse the portfolio on his website and, aside from the imposing arachnids, you’ll discover bug sculptures made from confiscated multi-tools and Swiss army knives.

In all, Locke’s sculptures put me in mind—as they may be intended to—of the period after the September 11 attacks, when the descriptor “low-tech, high-concept” was applied to the use of aircraft as missiles. By manipulating mere scissors into blade-wielding spiders, Locke has sculpted an emblem for our association of terror with the reshaping of everyday objects as extravagant weapons.

(Thanks, Reason.)

—Michael Rowe