Rob Jamieson’s portfolio is full of great work in every material imaginable from painting to video. There isn’t a lot of text on his work about his intentions so you’ll have to do the mental heavy lifting of connecting the dots between various projects but two of my favorites are his loose drawings and his goth suicide note video titled I Like You Now. Get Out of Here. Go Home. Watch the full video in all it’s gothic jock hating glory after the jump.
Tonalis Luminous (also known as tink-tinks) is a new breed of tonal flowers discovered by sound artist, Salvador Orara. Sensitive to light, each flower has it’s own sonic personality and mood which requires careful attention. Check out a video of the Tonalis Luminous in action after the jump.
It’s hard to categorize the work of Boo Ritson. Is it photography, sculpture, painting or even performance. Boo creates photographs of figures doing all sorts of things from sitting on a park bench to sunbathing. But what makes Boo’s work remarkable isn’t just the formal qualities but her involved process of covering her subjects with head to toe “masks” of paint by literally painting on their clothes, face, and all their features. The result is a resurfacing of sorts of the subjects exterior, completely reimagining who they are, how they dress, and what they look like.
Presented by the 2012 calendar printing company, Next Day Flyers. Check them out for calendars, stickers and greeting cards perfect for the holiday season.
We love DIY art and design here at B/D, so it goes without saying that home made Strange Cams certainly caught our eye. An ongoing project initiated by Los Angeles artists Aurelia Friedland and Michael Manalo, Stange Cams investigates the affordances of defamiliarized, modified, low technology instruments, and how those instruments can shift a user’s perspective (literally) on the community and environment around them. I love the sketchy approach the artists took in designing these new cameras – who would have thought a good ol’ roll of duck-tape, a can of spray paint, and some CVS brand disposable cameras would lead to a whole new genre of photography? Check out more of the resulting photographs, and some of the Strange Cams themselves after the jump.
Exploring the gestures and movements of calligraphy, nantes-based artist kaalam (aka julien breton) has created a body of work that uses hand-held light and long-exposure photographic techniques to capture the transient form within a real setting. often utilizing urban or historical sites as his three-dimensional canvas, the self-taught artist creates his own latin-based alphabet that heavily draws from traditional arabic and eastern calligraphy. arresting and provocative, the floating light forms are not mere superimposed subjects but display a direct engagement with the surroundings.
the capturing process, which can take as long as ten minutes, requires a choreographed movement which kaalam practices before hand in heavy repetition. different colours of ‘ink’ is achieved through pigmented gelatin which is applied directly onto the lamps. none of the photographs are retouched or edited, illustrating the laborious process in a single shot.
Michelle Devereux is a contributing artist for Austin multi-media label, Monofonus Press, a member of a female-centric video collective called Austin Video Bee, is a co-founder of an art-circuit tap troupe known as What’s Tappening?!, and plays drums in an apocalypse inspired chick band called Storm Shelter. When Michelle isn’t busy working on the many projects listed above she makes mind blowing, 80′s video arcade inspired drawings focusing on themes of innocent fantasy and finding beauty in the obvious and the embarrassing. Her drawings have to me one of my favorite new discoveries so I really hope that she makes more very very very soon!
The Infinity Burial Project founded by Jae Rhim Lee, proposes alternatives for the postmortem body that promote and facilitate an individual engagement with the process of decomposition. The Project features the development of a unique strain of mushroom that decomposes and remediates toxins in human tissue, the development of a decomposition ‘kit’, burial suits embedded with decomposition activators, and a membership society devoted to the promotion of death awareness and acceptance and the practice of decompiculture (the cultivation of decomposing organisms).
How does an artist contribute his own personal story in the face of prevailing historical narratives? In this film, Rashid Johnson discusses the fluid nature of black identity in America and its escapist tendencies, from the Afrocentric politics of Marcus Garvey to the cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra. Johnson’s invented secret society—”The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club”—is a framework through which the artist humorously upends, through repetition and juxtaposition, conventional expectations of historical influence and legacy. Inspired by a story by the artist Lawrence Weiner in which one character says to another that “a table is something to put something on,” Johnson creates sculptures of shelf-like structures from materials such as black wax, mirror, tile, and branded wood. Each structure is filled with culturally resonant objects—such as Miles Davis and Ramsey Lewis jazz records, books by comedians Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby, and treatises by scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Debra J. Dickerson—as well as the artist’s own photographs and hand-made objects. Watch the full documentary after the jump.
