wrongdistance.com

Pretty fantastic flyer created for something called ETI by Cecile Boche.  Link

Basketball Court in Plantation Ruin

Tangents are a strange thing… For no apparent reason the pool in the post below reminded me of Matt Root (whose work looks nothing like that). Some hunting through my bookmarks and I found his site again. Unfortunately it hasnt been updated in awhile and google yields little results. I think he had something up at Richard Heller last year. Come back Matt… Link

PS I hereby declare the painting above brilliant

Nice new work from Guillaume Ninove posted to his blog, Repeat After Me, which he runs with Jonathan Prêteux + Benoit Lemoine. That second one is really nice…

Design minded peoples will already be familiar w/ the uber talented Kate Moross… Just came across this poster she did for a Chromatics show. It simple… nothing fancy, but it just kinda works well.

Link (via Balla Dorra)

Wildlife Analysis #2

Green, Pink, Blue

La Debauche #2

Birthday Party #1

Some very nice photography and a life well lived by Livia Patta (via Haluca)

Find the practical need in photo #3 Pete…

Arizona State University (via I’m not the Scatman)

‘“Art” has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like’ says Peter Schjeldahl in a review of the Eliasson show over at MOMA. His definition is, I believe, intended to be a somewhat dismissive take on the trivial, haphazard, and perhaps, disposable nature of lots of contemporary art. These words could easily greet you at the door at vvork.com.

Occasionally I’ll post imaginary art posts here… The notion of these is that I wish the items I’m posting about could be divorced of any practical needs and just function as art.

Duchamp pretty much obliterated the need to divorce function from art a long time ago but that’s a bit of a different tangent.

In any case, in my more cynical moments I think Petey’s definition of art these days is pretty much spot on. In other moments I think it kind of misses the obvious: that art is often just people trying to make sense of their lives and conveying ideas or specific experiences to others. It’s as if he’s saying the human experience is not a practical need.

Don’t get me wrong… I still think it’s a really useful definition.

Over the weekend the family went to the MOMA and my favorite find was a great video piece by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau. When I entered the room the video was already half way in which was actually for the best because it took a little while to figure out just what was going on. A high crane shot showed what looked like green balls or giant peas slowly unfurling while some gentle currents appeared in the corner of the screen. After looking for awhile my kids and I observed “a mermaid” on top of the unfurling peas.

As it turns out the peas are actually several hundred water melons, the mermaid is a nude Sigalit Landau, and the body of water is the dead sea. It’s a really wonderful piece and my two pre-school aged kids really enjoyed it.

I reluctantly post a close up picture above and a brief video excerpt of a close-up of the piece below… I am reluctant as it does such a poor job of conveying the overall feeling of disorientation, oddness and the basic all-around wonderfulness of the piece.

There was another smaller piece which was also interesting shows the Landua hoola-hooping nude with barbed wire. You can see a brief video excerpt of that right here.

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I am very much enjoying the High Places. It feels very Williamsburg but there are some really nice hooks in there. My hat’s off to them.

High Places - Shared Islands

Also throwing up an oldie but goodie for good measure by a long forgotten downtown ny band named Snatch. Recorded in the early 80s but sounding oh so contemporary.

Snatch - Joey

Link (via Tai Anderson)

Vlad Nanca blogs, makes art, has a serious car fetish, and also takes some nice photos. That top image is really great. Link

Vlad also has a blog all about Bucharest (supposedly “the city we all love to hate”) and along similar lines there’s a blog called Post-Industrial which also chronicles the strange vaguely-deco-meets-soviet-bloc architecture of urban Romania and tons of crumbling industrial facades.

Sublime lettering by Paris based Phillipe Apeloig. Link (via N0wak)

Not much info to share on this guy… In addition to making quite beautiful paintings he also teaches visual arts at BYU. I prefer his more abstract work to his figurative stuff. Link and Link (via Cory Arcangel)

Kinda liking this typography by Berlin based Nepomuk / Sven Neitzel. There are some other nice things to be found in this design collective’s portfolio including the ever likable quick brown dog. Link

Brain Pool

Jan Vormann’s work seems to be tapping into the zeitgeist as far as a few aesthetic leitmotifs I’ve been seeing in a lot of art online as of late: park benches / public seating as muse and invader style embedding of colorful objects (in this case what looks like lego) in otherwise grey streetscapes. I like the bench above which looks a bit like a fruit bowl and for me evokes the somewhat hostile and absurd anti-sit / antisleep designs popular for public seating in this neck of the woods (though I am fairly certain this was nowhere on the artist’s mind). It’s kind of a brilliant passive-aggressive approach to public spaces.

Bonus points for the mirror work too. Link

Agence Euereka does it again…. I especially like the dog. Link

Great landscape work by (Swiss?) photgrapher Matthieu Gafsou Link (Via Conscientious)

Unemployed Afghan Electrical engineer creates cell phone activated burglar alarm. When an intruder is detected it calls his cellphone and he is able to speak to the burglar and hopefully persuade them to go away. If that doesnt work he can activate the gun to scare them away. NPR Story (via News Grist)

 Link

Note: this isnt really true. She just breeds angora rabbits.

NY Magazine has a great idea: they approached for architects to come up with a no holds barred design concept for a completely empty block on Canal Street downtown. The project is pure fantasy in that there are no real clients to satisfy and if there is a budget constraint, I’ve missed it. In any case,  Work AC, who will be doing this year’s installation at PS1 Warm Up, designed this stunner: an apartment building that’s also an urban farm. Rain water collects at the top and trickles down below. This looks like a Jacob Mcgraw painting doesnt it?

Ignoring the fact that this building would be brown, grey and unattractive from about October to May its still a nice idea. Link (via Pruned)

Day Driver

Handiwipe

Kind of random and pretty amazing images by Stuart Hawkins, an American living for many years in Nepal. Her work appears to be a an imagined intersection between third world tourist photography and… I don’t know, Fellini.Usually I really dislike big production staged photography. Jeff Wall does absolutely nothing for me. I like how Hawkins is able to introduce a degree of spontaneity in her work.

I lazily lift text from the press release… It’s late:

“In her latest photographic series, “Customs,” Hawkins again takes a look at the relationship between the foreigner and native, underscoring certain behaviors as they pertain to global capitalism and ethnicity. Stepping out from behind the camera, she becomes the idealized Westerner examined in her own work. As several Nepali people direct and shoot these photographic tableaux, passersby enter into the frame and contribute unscripted responses to Hawkins’ presence. The interaction of the different participants calls into question power dynamics between the First and Third World.”

Link and Link

Alchemical Research Drawing - The Volga / Russian Dance

Alchemical Drawing

Wernigerod Germany

In Alchemy, from which the top image is taken, Suzanne Treister transcribes the front pages of several news papers in the hopes of transforming them into “alchemical drawings”. Looking through her site she is very much into the theme of alchemy and there’s also a pretty intresting if imperceptible time travel project which involves the Kirov Theater and Kirov Battleships which launch missiles. Her Amiga drawings from the early 90s also suggest she was way ahead of the curve regarding the whole net art / computer art kinda thing. I’m sure there were others before her but the work still strikes me as a bit prescient of things to come. (via Phantasmaphile)

Quite randomly, the whole “let’s redo the newspaper” thing made me think of Kim Rugg whose work I saw last year at Pulse and really enjoyed. Rugg will rearrange a page of newsprint in alphabetical order, arrange images by gradient or simply remove unwanted words or letters from a page. A quick google and it turns out they are doing a show together at Pilington Osloff in Chelsea. Apparently someone else had the same thought. The web does an absolutely terrible job of conveying what these look like in real life where there’s much more texture and you can see all the cuts. They are really lovely objects.

Dont Mention the War

Guardian

For good measure and ever so vaguely related (or not) here’s a nice image by Brooklyn artist Nancy Lunsford who executes a really nice, traditional Appalachian quilt pattern out of newsprint and other assorted text. She has a show coming up soon at the Brooklyn Artists Gym. Link

Large Building with Courtyard 2005

Large Building with Courtyard 2006

Proposal for Pavillion

“Pablo Bronstein uses architecture as a means to engage with power: of history, monuments, and the built environment. Using pen and ink on paper, his acutely drafted drawings capture an archival romance of a grand age, a nostalgic longing for the imposing and imperial. Adopting the styles of various architects and movements, his elaborate designs become plausible inventions, both paying homage to and critiquing the emblems of civil engineering.”

…or so says his Saatchi gallery page. Here’s a link to his page over at Herald Street.

Clouds

Rainbow

I really like the concept here…  The execution I’m not really a fan of. Link (via Hello Object)

Widening Gyre

the joker press

country home 7

cabin essence

Easily one my favorite painters working today… LA based artist Kevin Appel - Link and Link

y cuando me aburro, garabateo

Link

Kinda strange and definitely original: a world built around an obsession with chair cushions and lots of gayness.  New York based Marcelo Krasilic’s blog (and his portfolio site) are definitely worth looking through but its most definitely NSFW. If you have any problems with gay  imagery this site is definitely not for you. Link (via experimental desires)