Tonight I’m going to check out Come Up To My Room, an alternative design show at the Gladstone Hotel here in Toronto. One of the artists this year is one of my fave photographers of all time (and S+C interview subject), the kick ass Liz Wolfe.
Even if you’re not in Toronto, the Come Up To My Room blog is stellar and features new work all year long.
I’ve gushed about my love for the work of Dutch conceptual artist Levi van Veluw before. He’s one of my favourites; he thinks outside the box and is fearless in his examination of the human face as a sculptural canvas.
His new work expands his exploration of the mingling of the physical and non-physical on the most extremely personal of mediums: van Veluw’s own face. With “Natural Transfers” he shifts from covering how own face with materials pulled from the Earth (straw, stone) to a material from the human body: hair. Fluid and serpentine, the hair, though growing from the crown of the head, becomes a mask, almost an invasion. Hair that wishes it could become skin.
With “Light” he moves the image into an entirely new entity all together. Trading tangible, physical entities for the geometric possibilities of light-emitting foil, photographed in blackness, as it glows and takes form across the invisible blackness of his now unseen face. As van Veluw explains on his site: “Light becomes form and it stands free from any ‘original’ subject. It is this ‘invisibility’ of the production processes that creates the freedom in this image.”
In addition to the new photgraphs, Van Veluw will also be showing a new sculpture, “Monere”, at Art Rotterdam from February 5 to 8.
Directed by Partizan’s Ace Norton, this new vid for The Virgins’ “Teen Lovers” is like a really stylish Sex Ed. video, if Sex Ed. actually educated you about having sex in the real world.
For some reason, this is made significantly more kick ass by the fact that they’re not actually still during the “stills”, just standing as frozen as they can. They way you catch glimpses of their eyes darting around is so randomly perfect for the tone of the vid. It kills me.
Via Motionographer
I’ve been following Eoghan Kidney since I found his amazing short “Here & There.” Kidney’s got serious skills, and he expands them into a hand-drawn animation feel with this deadly new vid for Fight Like Apes‘ “Tie Me Up In Jackets.” One of the most beautiful things in the world is that nascent moment where colour touches paper and then expands itself. This vid captures that little chroma-explosion beautifully.
This is killer. Created by Kent Hansen and Andreas Pedersen, D-Pad Hero is an NES emulation game that plays Guitar Hero on an old-skool Nintendo. This is the 8-bit shit right here. It’s so beyond rad I almost don’t want to talk about it anymore for fear that it’s actually a dream and I’m about to wake up.
There are only 4 songs right now (donate to the creators and you could get to pick a song to go into version 2.0) but they’re the perfect four songs: “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, “Harder Better Faster Stronger” (the original Daft Punk version – not the Kanye), “The Way You Make Me Feel”, and “The Swing Of Things.” It’s so bang on it almost makes me laugh out loud. My body doesn’t know what else to do with all its pent up geek joy and Mega Man nostalgia.
My fave is the Daft Punk (below), but Slash does a pretty good job, too:
You can check out vids of Pedersen playing all the songs here. If you’re really into, then sign the online petition for Ninteno Wii to produce the game.
This just goes to show how important visual identity is to any form of media, and how much it can enhance the total experience. I stumbled onto this poster for a Chicago-based band called Chandeliers over at The Post Family. I was like a robot – I didn’t even hesitate for a second and I was clicking to hear more. Just because the poster is so damn hot. I want to dive right in there…
Luckily, the Chandeliers are kick ass (I’m especially into “Mango Tree”…) but their design work is so royally killer that I fell right in love. Part of record/tee-shirt/design/all-around awesome collective Obey Your Brain, Chandeliers’ brand energy is like visual Skittles; it’s filled with raucous colour, laser lights, rainbow fonts, acid trips, and night skies. Even their mySpace quickly phases through the colour wheel. I dug around and wasn’t able to find any design credits (it could be the band members themselves) so if anyone knows who’s behind all this goodness, please clue me in because whoever it is they deserve some massive shout out.
Check out the design work for their first two albums and some of their concert posters. They’re glowy, sleek, and feel like the future:
But we’re just getting started. On their Blogspot (these guys have a lot of sites…) I also found links for some of the video art used in their shows, directed by TJ Hellmuth:
PandaPanther is one of my fave animation design shops in the entire world. Their contribution to Advanced Beauty was unbelievable. Time and again, their character work is unmatched, giving an inner-life and personality to each creation that connects you to the work in a deep, emotional way. It’s an amazing example of the power of animation and motion to feel intrinsically real even though the characters are created from imagination.
With the typical PandaPanther blend of sublime and whacky, their latest spot is part of Onitsuka Tiger’s 60th anniversary campaign.”The Zodiac Race” brings to life, with some hints of classic Animé style, the Japanese legend of a race that animals ran to win spots on the zodiac. It also ties into a hand-made diorama of an Onitsuka Tiger shoe that will be travelling the world as part of the campaign.
The spot is vibrant, quirky, and moves with an electric video game pace:
Watch the making of vid:
Via Motionographer
New York-based photographer Alison Brady creates images that are mysterious and sometimes overtly violent. Her mostly female subjects look like victims of the beauty ideal, but whether they’ve sacrificed themselves at the altar of pop culture’s idolization of feminine perfection or if they’ve been been attacked through the result of their own vanity is unclear.
In one shot a plain white hood, pulled on medieval execution style, wraps around a woman, with only smeared red lipstick to denote her face. Others are strangled, alien tentacle-like, by their own manes of silky hair. Her beauty having turned on her, like a parasite. This theme, of the body’s rebellion, is a constant she talked about in an interview at Nymphoto:
“What I find most disturbing is the subtle distortion of something I can relate to, or something that is closest to me. Often just simple daily routines can bring about a variety of ideas. One day while riding the subway, there was this large ad for the removal of varicose veins. That unnerved feeling that one gets when the familiar (something as familiar as your own body –your legs) turns alien and frightening.”
In other shots women stand unmoving, pillowcases tied around their heads, and do nothing. Her photographs all have a totally unnerving context of stillness: there was violence, there is about to be violence, but each time we are in the eye of the storm. The effects and impact are obvious, but help isn’t yet on the way… or perhaps never will be.
Like Hitchcock, Brady understands that the greatest fear lies in the subtle unseen. That the human imagination, given a hint, will conjure storylines far more disturbing than any picture can capture. In many of her images we only see the legs, dangling, prostrate, filthy. The upper half, the face, the expression, is hidden: in sand, in the ceiling, in the refrigerator. What has happened or how they’ve come to lie there is unknown to us. That visual curiosity, that we’re seeing the conclusion but never the beginning, is the most disturbingly eerie half-knowledge of all.
If you like these shots, then you should check out the body mutation work of Lucyandbart and the many teenage girls of Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Via Life Lounge
A lamp, a camera, and a vintage Scrabble board is all it took for director and animator Yann Deval to create this angsty stop motion vid for Pornophonic Orchestra’s “Dimanche après-midi” (…that’s Sunday Afternoon).
Via Feed
Swiss artist and computer wiz Michael Flückiger combines installation, text art, and computer program design to create interactive text/projection works. I really dig these.
First is “Pandora’s Box.” There was a moment at the beginning where all I could think of was Kubrick’s iconic line “My God… It’s full of stars!” I’m pretty sure it’s saying something about the myth of Pandora. If anyone out there can read German, I would love to know what it says….
Equally cool is “Typographic Spiderweb.”
Via NOTCOT
