Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: gold

During the first decades of the Space Age, NASA required a worldwide network of ground stations to communicate with satellites and human-operated spacecraft. The Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system, a constellation of three spacecraft placed into geosynchronous orbit beginning in 1983, was designed to replace this expensive, far-flung system. Positioned equidistant in orbit, they provide nearly continuous contact with spacecraft in low Earth orbit-an especially crucial capability for ensuring the safety of Space Shuttle crews. A TDRS transmits both voice and data communications. Under optimum conditions, it can transfer in a second the equivalent of a 20-volume encyclopedia. This artifact is a high-fidelity model built by Design Models, Inc., under the direction of TRW, which manufactured the first several TDRS spacecraft. TRW donated the model in 1986.

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a museum of world culture and natural history based in Toronto, Ontario. It is one of the largest museums in North America, attracting over one million visitors every year. This exhibit entitled "Carnival – From Emancipation to Celebration" presented a selection of costumes from Brian Mac Farlane’s creations for the Trinidad Carnival from 2010 to 2012. Mac Farlane is a major Carnival artist from Trinidad and Tobago, whose designs and installations have dazzled and inspired people all over the world. Mac Farlane’s last three seasons were inspired by an historical reflection on traditional Carnival characters and their ability to embody broader social and political issues. In the 18th century, enslaved Africans were banned from Christian festivities of the French and British colonists. They held their own celebrations in barrack yards and, after the 1834 abolition of slavery was fully implemented in the Caribbean in 1838, the freed Africans together with people of Asian origin took their Carnival to the street. This costume reinterprets the traditional character of the dragon, the fire beast that creates havoc and destruction. Dancing in the streets, this character captivates and frightens the audience with its spectacular appearance and dynamic dance. The exhibition also commemorated John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (as Ontario was known then). Simcoe abolished slavery in Upper Canada in 1793 – some 40 years before it was done away with elsewhere within the British Empire.

Delta Land Development president Bruce Langereis gave artist Al McWilliams a rare directive regarding passersby when he commissioned a public sculpture to stand beside his firm’s $100-million Cielo Tower at Hastings and Bute Street. "I asked him to generate the looks folk would give if a couple was having sex there," Langereis told the Vancouver Sun newspaper. McWilliams responded with two 1.6-metre-diameter golden spheres mounted atop a five-metre plinth that some may take to be the world’s biggest licorice allsort or a stack of monster ice-cream sandwiches. From the artist's statement: "The ambition was to place an autonomous work into the chaos of downtown, with its traffic lights, signage, newspaper boxes, street lamps and traffic, that could sit independently from all of that – an anomalous and allusive object that would create its own context and exist on its own terms amidst the downtown swirl and still belong, while strongly suggesting otherness. In other words to be both part of yet separate from the surrounding architectural reality. The references are many yet suggest nothing to anchor the sculpture into a specific interpretation. The black and white bands of stone may recall 12th century Italian church architecture. The gold leafed spheres with the projecting necks are suggestive of the retorts of the medieval alchemists whose putative ambition was to transmute lead into gold. The gold forms also suggest the popular symbols of the male and female. In addition the tower or column elevates the gold objects and, by making them inaccessible, enhances their mystery. Resting lightly on the column in spite of their considerable mass, the scale and precarious position of the spheres imply the possibility of arrival from some unknown place and time to briefly alight before moving on – a suggestion of a mind or consciousness, of the anthropomorphic? Or the kinetic potential of a bird that briefly alights on a rooftop before flying on. The placing of real gold – which one usually finds in the sanctity of the church, in museums, or bank vaults – into the public realm is a means of acknowledging that there can be riches for public pleasure, treasure above ground for the eye to see and the spirit to ponder; a recognition that public art is, in every sense, an honouring of and a gifting to the community."

The Majestic Theatre opened on February 16, 1903 with a performance of the jolly musical comedy, The Storks. Eben Dyer Jordan commissioned architect John Galen Howard to design The Majestic, who was one of only 400 American architects trained at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris in the late 1800s. Howard attended MIT before moving to Paris so his design of the Majestic combines plain old Yankee ingenuity with the classical perfection, Rococo decoration, functional quality, and pure visual fun taught at the Beaux Arts School. He used the newly invented electric light bulb to proclaim the theater’s grandeur by accenting the tall columns, soaring arches, and stained glass of the facade. The pattern was repeated in the lobby and auditorium – 4,500 light bulbs in all. The École des Beaux-Arts lead a resurgence of the highly decorative forms such as Rococo, blending them with Classical forms and accents referring to current popular styles. The Majestic therefore has a unique fusion of Classical form and art nouveau, with a touch of the Rococo influence. Since every piece of decorative plaster is gilded and the scheme has more decorative plaster than other forms (and hence an almost overwhelming amount of bright gold leaf ) the Majestic was called "The House of Gold."

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