nevermind the bricolage

Anonymous Calls From The Future

I really like the illustration work of Julien Pacaud, and thought that as we are embarking on a new year this one might be apropos. Lots of media outlets are focusing on the past year and or decade--looking back, but this image invites a different posture--eyes forward, scanning the horizon, leaning into what is to come.

In God's Pocket

Mona Superhero is a Portland based artist who creates these really cool 60s flavoured images entirely out of coloured duct tape.

Superheroes in History

Jakartan-based artist and photographer Agan Harahap has some great stuff on his site. Photography, paintings--very creative stuff. A series of photos inserting superheroes into vintage war and news images says something perhaps about our self-perception.

Immaculate Confection

Jason Feeny's very cool graphics dissect some of our most familiar robot/candy friends. His Gingerbread anatomy is perfect for the season, as is his deconstruction of the Gummi bear entitled, Immaculate Confection.

Building With The Bowies

While we are on a bit of an unplanned music jag, I offer up these charming little sketches, available for purchase as posters from Scott C. Whimsical interpretations of some of rock's nearest and dearest doing unlikely things.

Corita's Rules

Printmaker Sister Corita ran an art class at Immaculate College--rules for her students to live by. I love the last line.

Koons

 

Sorry about the blog silence. Had a week of technical glitches, nothing too tragic just time-consuming and by the time I turned around...you know how it is. Jeff Koons has some new paintings at the Gagosian in Beverly Hills, which I walk past almost every day so I thought I'd check them out. I must admit that I wasn't that impressed on first look, collage paintings that were a lot less complex that his Easyfun-Ethereal works from a couple of years back. You also have to factor in the many references in Koons' work stretching all the way back to Warhol which can weigh the work down a bit, but then you look a little closer. What I found remarkable is not the sum of the whole, but their parts. The paintings are large 9'x12' mostly, and feature naked models lying in landscapes, with a sketch of the female crotch in silver metallic paint over the pieces--it's very much a 'been there, done that' experience, until you move from the overall content and explore the execution. Koons is nothing if not obsessively committed to perfection. To walk up close to these paintings is to be blown away by the sheer amount of work that has gone into transforming what are, if Koons has continued his approach, computer generated collage images into massive painterly pieces. No wonder he works with teams of assistants, I am not sure these could be done by one person with such precision and detail. Koons seems as bored with the sexual in much the same way that Warhol was bored with everything. Some say that Koons, like Warhol, is painting about boredom's effects upon us, if that is the case he is hugely successful at conveying that message. The piece I liked most, was the one absent of a model, a single tree, but something about the flow and shape of the circles made it come alive in a way the others didn't, hmmm, you take jadedness about sex and erotica out of the equation and the painting gets interesting, he'd better be careful.

100 Mix Tapes For NYC

Simon Evans is a London based artist whose text-based works are collaged and assembled from materials including found paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings, colored pencil and white out. He creates diagrams, charts, maps, lexicons, diary entries and inventories,  that invite the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope. Everything I Have is a meditation on consumerism's influence, but my favourite might just be the mix-tapes for New York, there is something strangely sweet about it. I discovered him here and here.

Perspective

Myoung Ho Lee offers us trees in their natural surroundings and then messes with our perception by separating them from nature, placing huge white space like a canvas behind them--great effect.

 

I Don't Like Mondays

Ben Turnbull has an exhibit that should be seen if you live in London. It's called, I Don't Like Mondays, and features seven weapons carved into school desks. It's very provocative given the proliferation of school shootings, and of course the title references The Boomtown Rats song that captured one of those events from the late 70s. The exhibit is being held at Eleven Fine Art.

 

I found this via Paul Smith's fantastic blog.