Video Watch: Brainwash by Cillie Barnes

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Cillie Barnes performing at the Troubadour in W. Hollywood, CA on May 7, 2013. Photo by Raymond Lew.

LA based singer Cillie Barnes (aka Vanessa Long) released a video for her very catchy song, “Brainwash” late last month and I’ve been having a hard time getting it out of my head. You’ll definitely be seeing and hearing a lot more from her once her debut record comes out on Loma Vista/Republic Records later this year.

I caught her last week supporting British singer Tom Odell at the Troubadour and was instantly taken by her refreshing voice and relaxed stage presence. Backed by a guitarist and keyboardist she had no problem engaging the sold out crowd and even got us to sing-a-long for her final song.

She’ll be performing again on May 28th at a Red Bull Sound Select concert with DIIV at the Echo in Los Angeles so try and check her out if you’re in the area. Watch the video for “Brainwash” and follow her on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date on new shows and of course her debut release, “Happy Valley”.

Baguette-Me-Nots Tumblr: Dada Meets “Cyber” Street Art

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From re-blogging work by other artists to generating your own solo digital exhibition, the ability to collect and show art has never been so fast, affordable, and publicly personable, thanks to Tumblr. According to Brad Troemel, viewing art on this platform can help us “gain a greater art-informed appreciation for worthy cultural relics long deemed non-art.”

Take Tim Bierbaum and John Miller. Their online “Baguette-Me-Nots” Tumblr blog series  consistently pairs a vast array of comedians with baguettes in contemporary settings. While some might simply call this series a lowbrow photo fad parallel to “planking” or “breading cats,” others might compare it to something like Dada meets “cyber” street art– brilliantly funny, evoking nonsensical play, and showcased in an egalitarian manner: on a digital wall outside of the gallery system. After all, the word Dada might have been born from Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco’s constant usage of “da, da” meaning “yes, yes” in Romanian– a word comedians and improvisers know and love fondly. 

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Ashley Anderson’s Iterations Of Hollywood Icon Marilyn Monroe

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Initially inspired by an accidental discovery of Marilyn Monroe’s image embedded within the frames of Shinobi—a classic SEGA console game from 1987 Japan—Atlanta-based artist Ashley Anderson‘s multi-media exploration of the icon’s 8-bit image skims across the realm of painting, drawing, collage and animated gifs. The glitchy, pixelled-out nature of the images is indicative of Anderson’s 8-bit aesthetic, but this new body of work somehow begins to morph, to twist, and to move into something more obscure. Loaded with fragments of late 1980′s digital culture, some pieces only offer the faintest recollection of the image, requiring a bit more visual extraction to pull out the digitally reduced visage of Warhol’s Marilyn. As a whole, the investigation is an intriguing peek into the nature of digital reproduction and image appropriation.

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John Breed’s Hauntingly Beautiful Installations

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Something feels oddly luxurious about John Breed’s strange mixed media sculptures and installations. His work largely depicts a capitalistic culture of excess and its relationship with death, the most provocative of which includes the implementation of skeletons, animal and human. In “Goodbye Paradise“, Breed portrays a silver-plated Edenic scene of human and animal skeletons, speaking to the nature of renewal that is perpetually haunted by our eventual decay. His work breathes new life into these skeletons and other found objects by coating them resin,silver, or gold, giving them an effect of purity and newness. Threaded throughout his work is the idea of monetary value and how the value of something fluctuates within a newer, shinier context. Perhaps the work that best encompasses our excessive capitalistic culture is “In God We Trust,” an installation comprised of silver-plated pig skeletons labeled with the names Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and citi bank. Breed lives and works in The Netherlands.

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Beth Galton’s Photographs Of Cut Soup, Doughnuts, Coffee And More

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Beth Galton‘s series Cut Food is a side of food photography rarely seen – the inside.  Galton is a prolific photographer specializing in food.  While she works primarily in advertising and commercial photography, Cut Food is one of several conceptual projects from Galton.  The series captures common foods, though some not so commonly sliced in half.  Canned soups and a cup of coffee seem to rest perfectly in half of a container.  In order to catch some of these Galton replaced the liquids in the foods with a gelatin.

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Kate Bingaman-Burt Wants To Draw Your Mixtapes

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Proliferations of mixtape-themed things exist in the art & design world, having hit a high point in the mid-2000′s—where images of “vintage” cassette tapes covered everything from pillow cases to USB drives. What got lost somewhere in there was the sentiment that was originally attached to the archaic plastic medium, the sense of pride that comes from crafting (and usually gifting) someone with a perfect, personal selection of songs. Portland-based illustrator Kate Bingaman-Burt has embarked on a long-running series of mixtape drawings, where she picks up long-since discarded cassettes and makes a quick, humorous sketch…and she’s taken submissions for the project for a while now. As a series, the fresh, expressive drawings reveal an intriguing cross-section of personalities, musical tastes and long-lost good intentions.

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Made With Color Presents: Britton Tolliver’s Deconstructed Grid Paintings

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Britton Tolliver painting

Britton Tolliver painting

Britton Tolliver painting

This week we’re bringing you another talented artist as part of our partnership with premiere website building platform Made With Color. Each week we bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers working today who are using Made With Color to create clean and sleek websites. Made With Color sites aren’t just easy on the eyes but feature powerful yet simple backend which allows anyone to create a professional site with just a few clicks.This week we are excited to share the layered paintings of Los Angeles based painter Britton Tolliver.

Where does abstraction and geometry meet? In what field do they cease to be independent systems and gel into one hybrid – something new altogether? Britton Tolliver’s idiosyncratic paintings are deeply rooted in this intersection. Neither solely abstract nor geometric, his paintings really entertain another idea, which is difficult to pin down. It is in the amalgamation of these different ideas and processes that Tolliver’s paintings find their own identity, somewhere in the middle of both.

See more of Britton’s works after the jump or in person on may 22nd at LAND’s group show “Painting In Place” in Los Angeles and in a three person show at Samuel Freeman Gallery in June.

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Anya Gallaccio’s 10,000 Dying Roses

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Anya Gallaccio‘s installation Red on Green may leave elicit a different reaction depending on when you catch the show.  Gallaccio plucked the heads of 10,000 roses and arranged them into large neat rectangle.  At first the installation may resemble a grand romantic gesture.  However, Gallaccio’s interest is piqued by what the installation becomes.  In a way Red on Green turns into a type of natural performance as the field of red shifts to brown.  She utilizes the loaded symbol of the rose as a starting point for investigating the natural processes of death and decay.

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