April 26th, 2012
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Manifest Destiny! is a temporary rustic cabin occupying on of the last remaining unclaimed spaces in downtown San Francisco. Positioned above and between well established city buildings the tiny cabin can be seen affixed to the side of the Hotel des Arts, floating above the restaurant Le Central like an anomalous outgrowth of the contemporary streetscape.

Created by Jenny Chapman and Mark Reigelman, Manifest Destiny  is a commentary/critique on the unwavering perseverance of San Francisco’s early settlers.  During the mid 19th century, as the eastern United States became over-crowded and expensive, the West offered limitless possibilities for those willing and able to make the journey.  The drive to seek new possibilities and establish a better life at any cost is the conceptual motivation for this project. See more photos of this piece and some installation shots after the jump.

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April 25th, 2012

 


Jack Ramunni is a graduating senior at the Columbus College of Art and Design, a school with a sclerotic curriculum geared toward producing graphic designers for local corporations, a place where “fine art” tends to begin and end at object-based art-making for commercial galleries. Ramunni, using this restrictive background as a catalyst, instigated an array of projects aimed at redefining what contemporary art is and what we should expect it to do.

Ramunni and Nikki Skrinak have coined the term “Social Heat” to describe the intent of his artwork. Social Heat is:

“…the spontaneous transfer of energy from one body, group of individuals, or larger social system to another due to a multiplicity of connections and modes of communication.”

Ramunni uses a variety of methods to achieve this goal. In Sweater Shoppe, he reworked the logic of the market system by co-founding a trade-based pop-up “store” replete with its own currency; with Late Lunch Live, a weekly USTREAM cooking show, Ramunni turned the banal activity of making lunch into free community entertainment; in EX-PDF Library, he exchanged lithographed bookmarks for PDF files from the public, which he printed out and made available in a public library; in Benches Gallery, Ramunni created a portable gallery for showcasing artwork in public spaces, excising commercial concerns from the gallery experience.

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April 25th, 2012
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In the fall of 2009 artist Michael Anthony Simon left Chicago behind, and moved to the countryside of Korea.  He wanted to experience a new place and culture that would hopefully inform a fresh body of work that could exist beyond the constraints of the western art world.  In the spring of 2011, contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei was arrested on falsified charges of tax evasion by a notoriously conservative Chinese government.  The claims were suspect to say the least, and many silent protests were organized throughout the world by major museums and institutions calling for his release.  These silent protests became a louder gesture than anything anyone could have audibly said.  This act of defiant solidarity became a source of motivation for Simon in the year to come.  Realizing that by attempting to silence something you make it’s presence that much more apparent he commenced on a series entitled “The Silence Paintings”.  Analyzing the design and significance of the word ‘silence’ in different languages lead him to the creation of an intuitive process that would allow for compositions to develop naturally, but with purpose and intention.

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April 24th, 2012

CF, offspring of Fort Thunder, and Providence-based artist/musician has consistently created some of the best comics in the underground genre. His work in undeniably his own, and although it is often duplicated, his work remains distinguished from the rest. The delicacy and humor of his masterwork, POWR MASTRS (1,2,3), puts him easily in my top 10 for contemporary comic artists. He blogs and twits, he is a Picturebox regular, and he performs under the moniker Kites while he blasts out sonic booms. He is a gem.

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April 23rd, 2012

We can like status updates on facebook… we can favorite tweets on twitter… we can give videos a “thumbs-up” on youtube… but why can’t we cry? As the first part of an intensive study into the role of crying in a networked culture, the I cried button is an experiment conducted by Dee Kim & Bistin Chen. Using Google Chrome, you can install the button as a plug-in in youtube and press it when you cry while or after watching something from youtube. The button functions similar to the ‘like’ button, because it quantifies and saves your input, but instead of rating the material with a set of shiny stars, your emotions are gauged by tear drops…  Read more »

April 17th, 2012
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Minneapolis designer/illustrator Phil Jones has one quirky sense of humor. Whether it’s creating sunglasses out of Oreo cookies, creating miniature memorials to squished bugs, or making hilarious posters that are installed on electric poles Phil ads a dash of comic relief a tad of why didn’t I think of that, and a dose of the absurd.

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April 13th, 2012
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Chad Kouri always dreamed of being a designer, and he took the first major step towards making that dream a reality with a freelance gig at the age of sixteen.  Ten years later, he has become what some refer to as a cultural engineer.  A founding member of the Chicago-based art and design incubator, The Post Family, previous Art Director of Proximity Magazine and recognition as one of Chicago’s Newcity Breakout Artists of 2010 are only a few of his numerous accomplishments.  Kouri has been involved with more than thirty different projects over the last two years, and shows no signs of slowing down.  For many, there is still a huge chasm between the worlds of design and fine arts, but this distinction is of no interest to Chad Kouri.  Un-phased, he continues to breakdown the walls attempting to separate the two industries.  A recent collaboration with artists Stephen Eichhorn and Cody Hudson at the Patty and Rusty Rueff Gallery marks his first foray into exhibiting at an institutional level, but with an upcoming solo show at the Rochester Museum of Fine Art slated for the winter of 2012 it will obviously not be his last.  Kouri describes his practice as having, “equal interests in conceptual art, consumer culture, typography, design, jazz and the gray areas between these fields, my body of work is more a collection of various ongoing projects, thoughts and experiments tied together by a strong sense of composition, concise documentation and an overall vibe of optimism than a seamless display of a style or genre.”  I am excited to watch this process evolve, and I wish him good luck for the future – but somehow I don’t think he’ll need it.

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April 12th, 2012
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Pixels and Polaroids is a series of images created by Jherin Miller that combines pseudo-Polaroid photography and retro 80s era video game graphics. The concept behind Pixels and Polaroids was to blend these two elements into one world where pixelated characters live through the eye of a Polaroid camera. Miller’s goal was to combine retro film photography and retro digital graphics into one interesting world, where you get to view this world and it’s inhabitants through these this hybrid of new and old. (via oriental)

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