Luxury retailer showcases exclusive video installations from Nick Cave, Rob Pruitt, Studio Job, Ebony G. Patterson, We Are Prism, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone of Comedy Central’s ‘South Park.’
Luxury specialty retailer Barneys New York has launched its 2016 holiday Love Peace Joy Project, teaming with celebrated artists to create inventive windows interpreting Love, Peace, Joy themes for the holidays.
The artists, who represent a wide range of styles and ideals, include visual and performance artist Nick Cave, contemporary artist Rob Pruitt, artist collective Studio Job, mixed media artist Ebony G. Patterson, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone of Comedy Central’s South Park.
Evocative of the positive spirit found in Love, Peace and Joy, each artist interprets these themes in a unique and compelling manner. The windows encompass the core aesthetic of each respective artist as the base, but then add another level of innovation that is unique to the Barneys New York partnership, entertaining the viewers with a dynamic viewpoint on Love, Peace and Joy.
This marks the fourth year that global visual and audio technology company Christie has collaborated on the Barneys New York holiday window displays, helping to actualize the creative concepts and bring the windows to life with advanced visual technology.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone of Comedy Central’s South Park designed a visual homage to the iconic show in celebration of its 20th Anniversary season. Using a composition created by Stone and Parker exclusively for this project, three-dimensional versions of Stan, Cartman, Kyle, Kenny, and some of the other iconic characters, talk amongs themselves while eagerly gazing through a mini holiday window display within the Barneys New York window. These unique and rare three-dimensional forms are brought to life using 3D projection mapping by Christie, which animates their faces and allows them to engage with one another within the window.
“Because I’m such a fan of holiday windows, partnering with Barneys immediately made sense to me. I knew I wanted to do something that had different layers and depth to it,” described Parker. “In the show, the jokes come first, but making a window is like creating a work of art. I’m really excited that this is something from South Park that I can actually show my daughter.”
The window created by Nick Cave contains two main sculptures, each comprised of a second skin designed to conceal race, gender, and class, forcing the viewer to engage without judgment. On the right, an elaborate one-of-a-kind Soundsuit, one of Cave’s signature sculptural works, is comprised of eight individual and elaborate objects. On the left, a second form sits elevated in lotus pose behind one of Cave’s integrated headpieces, acting as both a collective funnel and filter for the energies, experiences and opportunities of the outside world. This headpiece is comprised of multi-colored wire mesh and bugle beads, and slowly rotates clockwise within the window, while the figure itself is entirely hand covered in buttons. An LED curtain hangs behind the walls to create kinetic light patterns, further aiding the other-worldly look of this window.
Renowned contemporary artist Rob Pruitt gives Madison Avenue pedestrians a tongue-in-cheek look into the Love themed bedroom of a cardboard monster couple in his third partnership with the brand. Using classic motifs for which the artist is known -- including gradient paintings, pandas, and cardboard monsters -- Pruitt’s voice adds a level of wit and humor to this private family moment in the northern Madison Avenue window. An homage to the iconic Love scene in From Here to Eternity plays on a loop on the chrome TV at the foot of the couple’s mechanical bed. The backdrop of the couple’s bedroom features a kinetic LED degrede wall, which shifts gradient through the full spectrum, while Hokusai-style waves move using old school theatrics, representative of Pruitt’s use of simple materials to make fine art.
Focusing on Love as their theme, Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel of Studio Job took inspiration from the iconic 1970s TV show The Love Boat, creating an extravagant seven-foot boat comprised of dozens of hand-crafted parts. Each of the parts are a piece of art in themselves, but they come together to form a tour de force in the Barneys New York window. Partnering with We Are Prism, Elliot Kealoha Blanchard’s award-winning design and animation studio, James Bond-style silhouettes of people kissing -- alternating between two men, a man and woman, and two women -- are projected onto the boat to highlight Love. Drawing from ideas of Dadaism and Surrealism, Studio Job and Barneys New York encompassed kinetic claws pinching, arms rowing, keys turning, and gears moving all in unison. Additionally, viewers can identify a rabbit, neon rainbow, lips, fish, and more throughout the rest of the boat, all hand-painted in a joyful rainbow of colors. Five bronze pieces of fine art from the Studio Job Gallery will be available for sale in the Barneys New York Madison Avenue flagship, including a Steve McQueen Porsche, a diamond, a nose, a spoon door knocker, and a stamp-shaped mirror.
In addition to the window, Studio Job also designed Barneys New York Love Peace Joy Project signature graphic that is used throughout the holiday project. Drawing from the motifs of the overall campaign, Studio Job created a pattern comprised of peace signs, smiling lips, rainbows, doves, roses, and sunshine in a myriad of bright colors. This graphic will be used in all Barneys New York flagship locations for windows, in-store visual displays, holiday product, and hangtags on Barneys New York shopping bags.
Jamaican-born Ebony G. Patterson is known for her use of bright, highly-adorned, mixed media installations that reflect on marginalized people in the current culture. In her Love-themed collaboration with Barneys New York, Patterson highlights the idea that “to love someone, you have to be able to see them. To give compassion, one has to give acknowledgement.” Patterson and Barneys New York captured videos of 15 native Jamaican adults and children, reciting the phrase, “See me.” Christie used advanced projection solutions, media servers and technical expertise to 3D projection map the videos onto mannequins in the window, illuminating the faces when they are speaking, and reverting back to a pattern that camouflage the mannequins against the background when they are quiet, representing how people blend into the background when they are not being heard. This is the first time that Barneys New York has used projection mapping to animate faces, and each mannequin’s body is ornamented with original hand-made outfits of patterned, jeweled-encrusted fabrics designed by Patterson and made by Chris Pablo.
For its southern downtown window, Barneys New York partnered with Elliot Kealoha Blanchard’s award-winning design and animation studio We Are Prism to create a custom video representing Love, Peace, and Joy. Bright kaleidoscopic colors, animations and abstract video footage were incorporated to create a visual style piece representative of the joyful holiday season using Barneys New York’s signature whimsical tone. The video is displayed on two 80-inch screens playing the film on a staggered loop, accompanied by an original track by Brooklyn-based video and audio artist Honnda.
“We’ve been interested in working with analog effects for quite some time. Analog, unlike the digital animation tools that we typically use, is a process that rewards experimentation and improvisation. You’ll never get exactly the same look twice,” Kealoha Blanchard said. “At the same time, we made a conscious decision not to simply go for a throwback look. Instead, we used CG and traditional animation as a visual seed for our analog work and ended up with a cool visual hybrid that blends digital and analog elements.”
Source: Barneys New York
