The competition, organized by Guta-Development, was attended by architectural bureaus, design studios, Internet portals and printed publications, as well as free artists, and its jury included Commissioner of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Joseph Backstein, gallery owner Vladimir Ovcharenko, artist Vladimir Dubossarsky, designer Stas Zhitsky, architects Nikolai Lyzlov, Vlad Savinkin and Vladimir Kuzmin. And although the main theme of the competition was the New Year tree, the participants had every right to interpret the attribute of the New Year holidays as they pleased.
According to the organizers of the competition, they were "interested in any manifestation of creativity: from the extraordinary design of conifers to witty and non-trivial transformations of traditional Christmas trees." That is why the only condition of the competition was formulated as follows: "The Christmas tree should be presented as an art object and contain an expressive conceptual idea."
Another wish of the organizers to the participants was the resistance of the art objects to any whims of the Moscow winter - the trees had to turn out not only spectacular, but also stand until January 14 "without prejudice to their appearance." The main criteria for evaluating the competition works were the innovativeness of the idea, the originality of the composition, the level of artistic and technical performance and the variety of materials used.
For his Flower of Life composition, Funkel used steel from which the tree trunk is made, and glass balls filled with liquid, reminiscent of traditional Christmas tree decorations. As conceived by the author, "the light spots that are formed from the glow of the Christmas tree, intersecting with each other, form a drawing, the graphics of which resemble the image of the" flower of life ".
Olga Arazheva used plastic for the Aero-Yolka project: her “tree” is a large-diameter illuminated corrugated pipe wrapped around a metal pole. As conceived by the author, this construction symbolizes "a spiral of an ascending air stream and creates a directed movement of the Earth's energy into outer space." This installation also has an important practical meaning: such a tree can serve as an original lamp both indoors and outdoors.
Elena Vinogradova and Marina Bakhireva created the “Christmas tree-book”, light and environmentally friendly, the “pages” of which are made of plywood and can be read by both children and adults - each of them will find interesting information for themselves on this tree. And Olesya Livanova and Timur Gritsan dedicated their installation to the symbol of the coming year - the dragon. They called their tree that way - "Christmas tree-Dragon", and its wriggling steel trunk really looks like both a mythological animal and a spruce at the same time.
Nastasya Bezrukova and Nikita Sysoev came up with a composition called "The Anatomy of a Christmas Miracle." This is an attempt to understand the secret of the charm and attractiveness of the New Year tree - it is made up of boxes and pencil cases of different shapes, each of which contains some kind of "secret" and is illuminated from the inside. “Having got rid of the shell, we have the opportunity to see the naked form (skeleton) and, by particles (boxes) materialized, Christmas motifs,” the authors themselves write in the annotations to their work.
I disassembled the image of the Christmas tree and Karolina Khatkevich into its components. In her opinion, the main thing in the New Year tree is illumination, so the Eco-Christmas tree invented by this artist is a rack of wooden shelves, shaped like a fir tree, each of which contains candles, lanterns, and all kinds of lamps.
And Larisa Talis and the Archduet company decided that the most important thing in the Christmas tree is the decorations, and it was the Christmas ball that they made the main character of their installation. A giant, glittering red ball is decorated with many tiny Christmas trees growing out of it as if from the globe.
One of the most memorable installations of the exhibition, perhaps, is the work of Daria Kalita and Diana Arslanova, which draws attention to the inadmissibility of mass felling of spruce trees before the New Year. Right on the asphalt, the artists depicted a silhouette of a spruce with chalk, and a road sign was installed nearby, as if saying that trees once grew here …
Opposed the mass destruction of conifers and the PR department of the organizing company - the installation "Sacrifice" is a spruce tree suspended "upside down", which is decorated with black mourning balls. The authors separately emphasize that during the creation of this art object "not a single spruce was harmed."
What does the coming 2012 promise us and will the problem of protection from natural disasters and man-made disasters really become the most urgent? The Mealhouse A&M bureau gives its answer to this question, having invented a Christmas tree in the form of … a bunker.
Well, the most romantic object of the show was undoubtedly the art project "Return" by DirectDesign, which makes us remember that the new year is a time of transition. In the sky over Red October, the authors hung several snow-white fir trees hovering on wings (some look like angelic ones, others more like dragons in their outlines). As conceived by the authors, these are “souls” of the felled New Year trees returning to the holiday soar. Their snow-white wings, frozen in a flap, emphasize the "crystal purity of the festive moment."
The exhibition of unusual Christmas trees will run on Red October until January 14. And the winners of the competition will be determined this week - December 23.
