May 8th, 2012
by


Something is different lately. The Earth has shifted its axis and now everything seems to have moved to the right by a couple of inches. A dark wind blows. The birds aren’t flying south like nature normally commands them to, and you can tell the animals know something we don’t. These are Strange Daze, Beautiful/Decay’s revelation of the phenomenal and paranormal minds of artists. In a world-surreal, where every night holds a full moon, strange has become an adjective that plagues and ponders our daily existence.


Seek creative passage through the barren void in the company of this book’s featured artists, as we first find Olaf Hajek, a painter whose work holds séance to colorful spectre. Encounter Shamus Clisset, who plays host to a glimpse into his work and its otherworldly humor-macabre. Become self-aware of a hole in your head as splashes of psychedelic work by Fredrik Åkum drip onto your synthetic brain. Witness the chemical rainbow that glows around the work of Timo Vaittinen, pulsating its life and character. Uncover Hew Locke’s sculpture and its ability to pierce through joint and marrow, straight into one’s fifth eye. Examine Jeremy Dower’s visceral work, which will haunt you like a howling spirit through the realms of both the flesh and digital until finally Neil Krug, whose photography will leave you coma-bound in a visual fever.


In line with apocalyptic forebodings, celestial encounters, and unexplained experiences, Strange Daze presents an astonishing collection of artwork that is documented proof of many famous speculated phenomena. Never one to disappoint Beautiful/Decay Strange Daze is filled to the brim with works that will shake the foundations of human culture forever if released to the masses.


Also Featuring: Christine Gray, Michael Willis, Raymond Lemstra, LNY, Kira Leigh, Todd Ryan White, Jeanti, Justin Williams, Robby Day, Andrea Wan, Henry Gunderson, Berto Legendary H, Nicholas Kennedy Sitton, Ben Beshaw, and Brendan Flanagan.

Get your hands on one of the 1,500 hand numbered limited edition copies of Beautiful/Decay Strange Daze Books by clicking the links below!


Only 99 copies  Book:8 will be available on the B/D Shop. Get your copy before we sell out!

 

 

Share
May 8th, 2012
by

 

Have you ever walked into a gallery or museum and wondered “How did they ever install that giant sculpture or painting?” Well  WRAPIT-TAPEIT-WALKIT-PLACEIT comes to the rescue with a collection of amazing behind the scenes shots of gallery assistants and museum installers moving, assembling, and dissembling all your favorite works of art. Go through their deep archives or submit your own behind the scenes images and share what it takes to make art magic happen. (via)

Read more »

May 8th, 2012
by

Mark Hunter Brown is a truly dynamic individual.  I have known Brown for the better part of a decade, and I am relatively positive that I will never meet another person quite like him.  With each day functioning more like the next chapter in a bizarre novel, his zest for life is infectious.  Luckily, Brown is also an amazing artist, and has managed to document his interests and experiences through countless drawings and paintings.  Though he gains inspiration from his travels, the work is not limited to the places and people he has actually interacted with.  Brown is also heavily influenced by the written historical accounts of different cultures and people, but the work is not about visually representing his source material.  Instead, he chooses to focus on the importance of the moments recorded history has chosen to ignore.  There is this dead zone in between the great scenes of history that also warrants consideration, and Brown is keenly aware of this.  When asked why he is drawn to this type of situation Brown replied, “because life doesn’t look like a Delacroix painting – it’s just people walking around and eating sandwiches. These moments seem more real to me…they’re equally compelling.”

While these scenes are not infrequent in his work, Brown’s practice is not limited to this type of subject matter. There is far less literal material in Brown’s oeuvre, and his vivid imagination becomes readily apparent when looking at paintings of huge figurative fortresses or anthropomorphized coo-coo clocks snorting bones off of a table.  When viewed in context these paintings start to function as some sort of bizarre allegory, but their meaning is never explicitly stated.  There is such a rich diversity in the distinctive worlds that Brown creates, and no piece is less detailed than the last.  Whether he is teaching at Columbia, backpacking through Morocco, or boar hunting with monks in the Italian countryside – the need to process the world into visually compelling images has remained consistent within Brown’s life.  Lucky for us, his mind seems to function like an endless supply of Google image search results that I have no desire to stop looking at any time soon.

Read more »

May 7th, 2012
by

Barnaby Barford is a British artist who works primarily with ceramics to create unique narrative pieces. He works with both mass-market and antique found porcelain figurines, cutting up and exchanging elements or adding to them and repainting them, to create sculptures which are often sinister and sardonic but invariably humorous. With irony, he draws a portrait of our contemporary lives.

In Barford’s world a kitsch figure of a 19th century peasant boy becomes a 20th century teenage thug in a hoodie; cute little girls roast adorable lambs on a spit; a rosy cheeked boy beats and cracks humpty dumpty into hundreds of pieces. Through his unique works, Barford explores all aspects of our society. Following in the tradition of Hogarth, Chaucer, Dickens and Shakespeare; with a dark sense of English humor and satire, Barford’s work explores and celebrates the human condition.

Read more »

May 4th, 2012
by

Christina West’s sculptures  give her permission to stare. We are told not to stare because the act is rude. It might make someone else, the one upon which our gaze is fixed, feel uncomfortable. So we steal glimpses, don’t let our eyes linger too long, pretend not to see, and are encouraged to retreat within ourselves. But the moments when I am compelled to stare, are the moments when she feels most alive.  Other people are compelling subjects and objects of contemplation because we will never be in their heads as completely as we are in our own. Despite the fact that, fundamentally, people are essentially the same, this lack of direct access to interiority makes others a perpetual mystery. It cloaks every interaction in uncertainty and ambiguity. But it is exactly that mystery, uncertainty, and ambiguity that make the inquiry worth returning to. And it is such complexity of understanding that she strives to infuse into her large figurative installations.  West’s  sculptures do not provide answers or assertions, but embrace uncertainty through the provocation of more questions. The figures are permanently frozen mid-gesture in a moment that encourages the generation of ambiguous narratives. Stripped from the context of previous actions, the figures’ personalities, motives, intentions are malleable and unfixed in the viewers’ minds. Who they are is in a state of flux dependent on the stories viewers create.

Read more »

May 3rd, 2012
by

Kalamazoo, Michigan based artist Tom Howes’ drawings, collages, and sculptures subverts both the seriousness and banality of  memories, ideologies, observations, and the minutiae of everyday life. Whether it’s with minimal engagement or a more expressive approach, he attempts to level the playing field between expectation and reality by directing attention to the obvious. In doing so, we learn that the obvious often remains subjective.

Read more »

May 3rd, 2012
by

The exquisitely carved sculptures of Willy Verginer are carved with precision out of a single piece of wood. At times painted and/or covered in ornate floral patterns Verginer’s sculptures capture the human form in moments of silence, thought, and quite contemplation. (via)

Read more »

May 3rd, 2012
by

 

We first posted the work of Haroshi back in 2010 but we couldn’t resist giving you an update of this artists incredible sculptures created out of used skateboard decks. His creations are born through styles such as wooden mosaic, dots, and pixels; where each element, either cut out in different shapes or kept in their original form, are connected in different styles, and shaven into the form of the final art piece. Haroshi became infatuated with skateboarding in his early teens, and is still a passionate skater at present. He knows thoroughly all the parts of the skateboard deck, such as the shape, concave, truck, and wheels. He often feels attached to trucks with the shaft visible, goes around picking up and collecting broken skateboard parts, and feels reluctant to throw away crashed skateboards. It’s only natural that he began to make art pieces (i.e. recycling) by using skateboards. To Haroshi, his art pieces are equal to his skateboards, and that means they are his life itself. They’re his communication tool with both himself, and the outside world.

The most important style of Haroshi’s three-dimensional art piece is the wooden mosaic. In order to make a sculpture out of a thin skateboard deck, one must stack many layers. But skate decks are already processed products, and not flat like a piece of wood freshly cut out from a tree. Moreover, skateboards may seem like they’re all in the same shape, but actually, their structure varies according to the factory, brand, and popular skaters’ signature models. With his experience and almost crazy knowledge of skateboards, Haroshi is able to differentiate from thousands of used deck stocks, which deck fits with which when stacked. After the decks are chosen and stacked, they are cut, shaven, and polished with his favorite tools. By coincidence, this creative style of his is similar to the way traditional wooden Japanese Great Buddhas are built. 90% of Buddha statues in Japan are carved from wood, and built using the method of wooden mosaic; in order to save expense of materials, and also to minimize the weight of the statue. So this also goes hand in hand with Haroshi’s style of using skateboards as a means of recycling. Also, although one is not able to see from outside, there is a certain metal object that is buried inside his three-dimensional statue. The object is a broken skateboard part that was chosen from his collection of parts that became deteriorated and broke off from skateboards, or got damaged from a failed Big Make attempt. To Haroshi, to set this kind of metal part inside his art piece means to “give soul” to the statue. “Unkei,” a Japanese sculptor of Buddhas who was active in the 12th Century, whose works are most popular even today among the Japanese people; used to set a crystal ball called “Shin-Gachi-Rin (Heart Moon Circle)” in the position of the Buddha’s heart. This would become the soul of the statue. So the fact that Haroshi takes the same steps in his creation may be a natural reflection of his spirit and aesthetic as a Japanese.

Read more »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »