Holy Canoli!

Haha! LOVE this crochet stuff by Nicole Gastonguay!

Paula Scher: Recent Paintings

Paula Scher, NYC Transit, 108 in x 60.5 in, acrylic on canvas, 2007.

Paula Scher, NYC Transit (detail).

Okay so I know I ripped on Paula for her HP templates, but I do love her paintings.

Did I mention I like maps?

From the Pentagram website: "An exhibition of new paintings by Paula Scher opens this Thursday, 8 November at the Maya Stendhal Gallery at 545 West 20th Street in New York City. Featured is work from her ongoing Maps series including the paintings India, Tsunami, Manhattan at Night, NYC Transit, Middle East and Paris. An exhibition catalogue has been published. The show remains on view through 26 January."

Mari Santos

Mari Santos is an amazing artist/designer from Toronto with a flair for creating fashion out of cheap, ugly, mundane things like old tees for example. Her latest project, Urban Renewal does just that. God knows I love this kind of stuff. I've always felt that we pay way too much money to look cool when we could just have it for next to nothing.

Also, does anybody else think that asians are fucking cool? I mean, they're so much more hip than everyone else. Plus, they have better health and higher IQs...

Anyway, check out Urban Renewal and also check out Mari's homepage (because after clicking around I could go on and on about her other projects too) at http://wiredminds.ca/mari/

Chris Jordan: Intolerable Beauty

detail of Cans Seurat, 2007, 60x92"
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Chris Jordan is a photographer based in Seattle who's work has been influenced by photographers like Andreas Gursky. Jordan has definitely influenced my own work, as I was looking at him when I did my Darfur installation. All three of the series featured on his website are amazing, but he regrets that they are not nearly as impactful on the web as in person.

His earlier work is all photographed from existing found scenes- as is- pictured in his Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption. His newest work Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait (2006-2007) features digitally compiled photographs based on statistics of American (and world-wide) litter and consumption. He describes how he had one litter research organization send him 5,000 cigarettes which he dumped out on the floor, photographed, and digitally manipulated to create a massive image of the number of cigarettes discarded in one second all around the world.

I listened to a podcast interview with him and was intrigued to find out that his original interest was not consumerism, but color. He would find scenes like old paint cans in the dumpster in the back of an auto body shop and photograph them for the amazing color they produced. One particular image of a mass amount of trash he took and blew up spurred his interest in photographing things related to mass consumption. I think it's amazing how he could come from almost a strictly formal photographic curiosity, and end up doing something so heavily conscience driven.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Cartographismes

I love love love maps. They are so beautiful. When I visited the Vatican museum there was a whole corridor of maps which pretty much served as a waiting area until the crowd gets up to the really famous artwork. It quite possibly might have been the most interesting part of the museum for me.

I found this blog by of...artwork? maps? both? It's all in French so I can't read it but it doesn't matter because the images are so interesting. A few of these resemble Jackson Pollock paintings, but they are all pretty different. I believe they are all from the same artist, but I can't find an author on this blog.

Check it out: "Cartographismes"

Shadow Sculpture

by british artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster


Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], 1998




HE/SHE, 2003