Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Sensual Ugliness of Brendan Danielsson’s Portraits

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Brendan Danielsson‘s portraits are wonderfully ugly.  Though each piece incorporates the image of a sole person, there is plenty of conflict.  The pieces easily explore ideas of beauty and ugliness; they are at once sensual and repulsive.  While appearing almost alien each portrait is somehow still strangely familiar.  Danielsson is able to portray each ‘character’ as clearly part of a larger hidden narrative.

If you can’t pull your eyes away from Brendan Danielsson’s work, make sure to check out the Beautiful/Decay Book: 9.  The book features the paintings and drawings of Danielsson along with many other artists, designers, illustrators, and writers.

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Clinton De Menezes’ Mini-migration Installations

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People are on the move in the installations of Clinton De Menezes.  Large crowds of people seem to be trudging through a white field – a snowy plain or salt flat.  The exodus, though, plays out on the side of a wall.  The South African artist’s model migrations exhibit patience and attention to detail.  Each figure is hand painted before being placed and plastered to the wall.  De Menezes’ installations illustrate the personal and collective drama of human migration.  His work is clearly influence by the ever shifting and complex social landscape of the land of his birth.

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Taizo Yamamoto’s Drawings Of Homeless Shopping Carts

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Taizo Yamamoto‘s shopping carts are familiar images we’ve all seen before. Crammed into  alleyways or left abandoned in the streets, these shopping carts are part of the scenery of a city. Yamamoto uses graphite and colored pencils to illustrate the carts in great detail, highlighting their contents and the strange collections contained within. By choosing to exclude the people who use these carts, Yamamato is bringing all the focus to the carts themselves. There’s a sense of an anthropological study here, like these carts and the collections they contain are specimen meant to be studied.

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Peter Trevelyan’s Amazing Sculptures Created Out Of Pencil Lead

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Peter Trevelyan’s incredible geometric sculptures are a thing of wonder being created out of fragile pencil lead. Fused together carefully with glue these delicate sculptures come in a range of sizes that will boggle the mind.

Patient careful craftsmanship, the slow meticulous creation of form through the assemblage of repeated elements and an interest in the architecture of space are characteristics of Peter Trevelyan’s elegant, refined works, which speak to the world’s structures but also to fragility and ethereality – both practically and metaphorically.

Forged from in his interest in the history of mathematics Trevelyan’s pieces, large and tiny, transit possibilities from antiquity through utopian architecture to future focused nanotechnology.

Drawing and sculpture are entwined in Peter Trevelyan’s practice with both two and three-dimensional works ‘drawn’ in fine pencil lead or created with paper. An investigation of the role of drawing is at the heart of his work. As he has said:

“A drawing is a plan, a preliminary visualisation of something to be undertaken in the physical world. Drawing is an ancient technology, a system for postulating, organising and mapping information about the physical world and manipulating it in order to change or affect that world.” (via)

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Kaitlyn Jeffers: In The Moment, At The Moment

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Kaitlyn Jeffers is an independent graphic designer based in NYC.  She is a recent graduate of Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA in Graphic Design and English Literature minor. I thoroughly enjoy the experimental nature in her portfolio and her humor that she exhibits.  She has already dabbled in editorial illustration, book design, and has freelanced at Sesame Street Workshop!  Here is a portion of what Kaitlyn wrote to me about herself and her work that I particularly enjoyed:

“My ethnic makeup is 1/2 Irish-American 1/2 American Indian, which I incorporate into my work a lot.  Sometimes my work, specifically the collage pieces, functions as a vehicle for resolving some internal conflicts. Sometimes I create things just to work out ideas. Sometimes the sketches and rough process material is more visually engaging than the end result.”

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The Trance-Like Sounds Of Tamaryn

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Tamaryn performing on Friday Nov. 23, 2012 at the Echo in Los Angeles.

Just before 11:30pm, I walked into a darkened Echo to find a very packed house waiting for Tamaryn to take the stage. Within moments, the swirling guitar sound of Rex John Shelverton and the soft voice of Tamaryn had me in a trance. They of course played new songs from their recently released record, Tender New Signs out on Mexican Summer which sounded amazing live. The set was short, but sweet with nary a word uttered from Tamaryn except at the beginning when she asked to turn the lights up a bit on stage complaining it was too dark. Hmmmm, not very “shoegazey”, but hey if you can’t see…

Their North American tour just ended on Saturday with a show at the Independent in San Francisco, but you should definitely pick up a copy of their new record and check out the video for The Garden below directed by Miko Revereza. Beautiful music!

The Curious Color Weaved Lands And Human Studies Of Chris Fowler

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Chris Fowler‘s work is curious and complex with depth and brightly interwoven colors.  His portfolio demonstrates two primary focuses; people and surreal landscapes.  His  non-descriptive unusual lands are captivating to me purely by his color choices and how he adds zigzag courses, nooks, and abstract crevasses that lead only to the imagination.  I am a big fan of The Human Project he created of little long-limbed creatures finding there way into orbs, slightly reminding me of something you would see under a microscope.  Check out more of Mr. Fowler’s work after the jump.

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Michel Blazy’s Massive Installations Made Out Of Detergent Foam

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The installations of Michel Blazy grow, flow, and froth.  Like much of his work, Blazy’s latest installation, titled Bouquet Final, makes use of white foam.  Inside a French Medieval church, the foam tumbles from high scaffolding to the floor.  The pliable, moving, and ever changing foam contrasts with the sense of permanence in the centuries old cathedral.  Blazy alludes to a change and mortality by using materials such as foam, an unstable medium in perpetual transformation.  The foamy flow could also reference the earth and neglect for its environment.  The installation resembles uncontrollable detergent suds – a product that is at once used to clean our homes and also a poisonous pollutant to the earth and its waters.

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