May 25th, 2012
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Michael Jason Enriquez’s (an Advertising student at Art Center College of Design) Cholafied comes from the mind of an LA kid who grew up in the 90′s. It’s a throwback to Chola gangster style: Sharpied eyebrows, dark lipliner, and the fumes from a can of Aqua Net. It’s a product of LA where subcultures, celebrity obsession, street art, and stupidity are rolled up together like one of those bacon wrapped hot dogs sold on Hollywood Blvd.

Things can get jumbled up living in LA. It can be very glossy and image based. The many subcultures in the city are a reflection of wanting a sense of belonging in what some consider a very lonely city. This is a town where icons are manufactured. We have the Kardashians, American Idol, and Lindsay Lohan. We root for these people, we rally behind them, and then we beat them up to see if they can stand back up again, like jumping them into a gang.

Cholafied tries to capture as many different fandoms as possible on the site. Tumblr is perfect for this because people in the different fan bases reblog and ‘like’ the same things between each other. There is a group mentality that draws an odd parallel to gangs. So Cholafied labels a cultural icon a chola, gives them a chola look, and then jumps them into a gang of ridiculousness by posting them on the site.
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May 25th, 2012
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The best thing about the photographs of Jamie Trueblood is that although they appear to be staged they are in fact  documentary style photos of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, and most often weird events that take place each and every day across America. Trueblood has a natural ability to pinpoint moments of awkward beauty in the everyday and find secret narratives in the mundane occurrences that we all come across as we live our lives.

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May 24th, 2012
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London based artist Phil Toledano’s provocative “A New Kind Of Beauty” series examines the extreme lengths people go to alter, change, and morph their appearance through plastic surgery and other cosmetic alterations. Balancing on the verge of not looking human these individuals are pushing the limits of identity politics.

“I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves. Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make? Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity? Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?”

See Toledano’s work from June 2nd-July 7th at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.

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May 23rd, 2012
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London based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten’s three part project centering around teenage girls tells the surreal story of the transition of teenage girls into womanhood. Each shot captures the lives and feelings of young girls as they change from relative innocence to a heightened awareness of their future adult life. For all of the images Batten chose to street cast girls for her models. Deliberately avoiding the use of professional models. Julia states that the slight awkwardness of her untrained models emphasizes the freshness and naturalness evident in her images.

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May 23rd, 2012
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Gorgeous figurative photography for both personal and commercial projects from Paris based Dimitri Daniloff that manipulates, chops, and morphs the human body into every which way.

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May 22nd, 2012
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These works by Timothy Pakron may look like magnificently loose ink drawings but they are in fact photographs created using an unorthodox method of exposing film. Pakron’s process begins in the darkroom where he loosely hand paints on the photo developer onto the paper intentionally revealing specific desired areas of the face and neglecting others. The result is a magical image full of lucidity and unsettling strangeness that only hints at the reality of the photograph and challenges the viewer to question both the image and materials that they are confronted with.

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May 21st, 2012
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Dutch  design duo Raw Color toast the opening of Martin Creed’s grand overhaul of London’s Sketch restaurant with graphic still lifes dedicated to the restaurant’s new menu. The Turner Prize winning artist’s takeover saw him entirely revamp Sketch’s interiors, hanging his large-scale paintings along the walls and hand-picking each individual table, chair and piece of cutlery, as well as contributing in the kitchen. Sketch co-founder and Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire conceived two playfully named dishes dedicated to the conceptual artist––“Navet Martin Creed” and “Dundee Pinky”.

Raw Color concocted their Irving Penn-esque visions from each dish’s disassembled ingredients, including black olive jelly, squid ink and parmesan cream. “The cooking side of the project was harder to translate into our own visual language,” says Christoph Brach, one half of Raw Color with Daniera ter Haar. “But looking at Creed and his approach to projects, how he organizes things, stacking from big to small, we knew we could take the ingredients and do something similar with them.”

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May 21st, 2012

Watch a TEDTalk entitled “One Year of Turning the World Inside Out”,  in which Prolific French photographer/street artist JR, who made our  Top Ten Public Works of 2011 post, details a year’s worth of results from his TED-sponsored Inside Out Project. The Project enables large-scale printing and shipping of  photographs from participants all over the world. The prints are then applied toward public art projects of social, cultural, and aesthetic importance.

Make sure to visit the Project’s website, where you can find extensive coverage of the work so far, and info for those who’d like to get involved. Video after the jump.

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