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NEW ZEALAND///WTF?!///TONY OURSLER’S SKULLS IN THE TREES…

March 24th, 2008

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Tony Oursler’s skull in the woods video projection in New Zealand…

For a while now, we’ve been following the rumors regarding one of our favorite artists, TONY OURSLER, and his mysterious & next level video projections in the countryside of New Zealand at the commission of one of the country’s richest men and now MEN’S VOGUE has an in-depth story on the grandiose & awe-inspiring project. HAVE A LOOK:

DARKNESS VISIBLE
In Kaukapakapa, New Zealand, a New York artist takes on the biggest, darkest project of his career—as well as a larger-than-life patron hell-bent on building himself the most outlandish private art playground on earth.
By DAN HALPERN

There was a 100-foot-tall nude woman, her white shoulders like clouds, rolling around on the hill to our right. Below, on the mudflats coming up to the harbor’s banks, huge eyes and mouths popped out of the wet ground, growling and chirping. To the left, on the trees, a gigantic skull twisted and changed, now human, now simian, now some terrible distortion of a head, a tour of death and birth and evolution all at once.

The American artist Tony Oursler, who was responsible for all this—video projected onto the landscape—was watching over his creation one evening last November from the deck of the Kaukapakapa country house of Alan Gibbs—at 68, one of the wealthiest men in New Zealand and one of its leading art patrons. The house itself, overlooking Kaipara Harbour, an hour or so north of Auckland, is a modest enough affair for someone reported to be worth over $450 million, even if little else here is particularly unassuming. A sample fun weekend activity at the Farm: sit inside the caged ball at the top of the world’s largest Tesla coil while several million volts of electricity spin around you before they burst into 40-foot-long lightning bolts. “It’ll knock your socks off,” Gibbs told me a month later, his voice resonating like a pistol shot over the phone. “We’ve all been inside the damn thing: It’s scary as CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING…

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POSTED BY J O'Shea/Editor

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