The art of Eve Sussman

Eve Sussman is conflating painting and video in a most extraordinary manner. Represented by Roebling Hall in Brooklyn, she's seems to be weaving narratives employing the richness of real time video with the lushness of oil painting. Her piece 89 Seconds at Alcazar, shot in high definition video tells the before and after story of Velázque's famous painting Las Meninas. Shown at the 2004 at the Whitney Biennial, the piece is being followed up by an opera, Raptus - a piece inspired by Jacques Louis David painting The Rape of the Sabine Women - which from what I've seen is seemingly just as brilliant. Eve Sussman's art is similar to Sam Taylor Wood's monumentally constructed photos, mostly I'm thinking mostly of her Five Revolutionary Seconds series but all her other photo and video work as well. I first saw Eve's work in Modern Painters and liked it but I'm more and more finding it better and better to look at and think about. Lovely.

Aubrey Reeves, online...

My really good friend Aubrey Reeves has a short and delightful video work online. I've been meaning to link this for a long time but the 30 seconds it takes for me to create a blog just seemed to always slip me by...

Hearts & flowers

You know how how people say "I like all kinds of music except for country"? Well, I'm not a huge country music fan, but I am a country music fan. There's a lot of soul in country music. There's also a lot of playfulness. Sometimes it's just laugh out loud funny. This song by Loretta Lynn with Conway Twitty exemplifies that playfulness. Both singers are both obviously adults but their back and forth banter is just, well, fun and child-like and it's a super pleasure to listen to...

Spiders & Snakes - Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty from their Greatest Hits

2006 Season: Cocaine Karaoke

The art of Olafur Eliasson

I was checking out these photos of the Venice Biennale and the photos of Olafur's Your Black Horizon show a composition that is wickedly simple. So I venture over to his website and find The Light Setup, linked above. Devilish.

There will be a short film about Olafur shown in Toronto. If you go, you'll also see a short about Chris Ofili. And if you're going, I'm going, holla.

2 blooms, 2 buds, a bun & a dozen eggs

The painting of Shinique Smith

I agree what Kehinde Wiley notes about Shinique Smith (she is "the bomb" *snicker!); and i'll be more direct in saying she should stick to painting for 2 reasons: for one, she's conflating writing, painting, high and low into one neat package and doing it quite elegantly. Secondly her forays into the third dimension just aren't as elegant.

A seriously beautiful font by SABE KST.

Posters...

Blanka has some amazing posters from the like of Experimental Jetset & Build. Worth a look because posters are fun. Experimental Jetset's identity work for the Stedelijk Museum is worth a look too: if not for its clarity then for its experimentation with simplicity.

Alison Jackson's Confusion

Alison Jackson is creating fantasies via constructed and deliberately fake photographs. In constructing these fakes she's playing on our society's collective fantasy. The constructions are untrue but they could be true, and therefore the threat of them not being false renders them quite interesting. One looks at her photos, mentally knows that they are false but still wonders if maybe they aren't... is that really the Queen watching 2 horse having sex?

Dan Flavin & Mozart

Dan Flavin is having a retrospective of his work in London at the Hayward Gallery and the little micro-site the gallery put together is beautiful. Check it out. I wish more web design was this simple to navigate, elegant to look at and overall effective... please.


Also it is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday today. Go cop a Mozart t-shirt.

Ghostface taming the seal

I don't know what's better than these pics. Best photos all year. It's young, this 2006, but these are the benchmark.

Sanaa and the new New Museum.

Sanaa are the architects of the new New Museum. Read more about them here.

First Impressions Count

Well, what do you know?

First impressions count on the web!

Canadian researchers have found out what everyone knew already: Look sharp and/or be charming. Always. Yes, even if you have a website.

DIRTY, HEADFONEHAUS & Slow Design

D*I*R*T*Y is an old website; I haven't been there in years, and they still haven't redesigned their blue sqaure layout. But they've been busy adding content and you know what? I think it's kind of ill they haven't redesigned in years. It's liking finding an old friend and being friends again but you've changed and aged and they're still the same and just as pretty.

HEADFONEHAUS is a blog run by Steven, a friend of my friend Matthew over at Unresort. I link up Steven and his mp3 blog partly because he has some excellent music posted and partly because he has a photo of a crocodile up on his blog. It takes a bold man to post a crocodile.

PS. Speaking of DIRTY and they're lack of a redesign all these years, I just noticed this interesting article about slow design by Michael Bierut designer at Pentagram and founder of the design blog Design Observer. Found over at TED Blog.

Give it a read and give me the gist in a haiku.

Pencils are the new Pixels

Phil is killing it, with his hand made typography experiments, over at Lake Relax.

Lampeluna

File Lampeluna under design so nice it makes go woo! And they're Polish to boot.

Rock Me

No Doubt - Rock Steady & Neil Diamond - Rock Me Gently

The two tracks above go together. They're from two very different genres (they're still both pop songs) from two very different generations (1960's vs 2001) - because both songs are essentially on the same topic - and both have this wonderfully amazing funk undertone. The guitar on the Diamond track gets in to a groove and listen for that cheesy synthesizer too. Similar sounds are apparent in the No Doubt track right from the 1st bar. Coincidence? For sure.

Faena Hotel & Universe

Philippe Starck went out and created a designer-iffic hotel in Argentina called Faena Hotel & Universe. Mostly I just wanted to post the above photo. That's hot.

"Staying in" is the new "going out"

Last week, walking along Bathurst I saw some posters for some sort of new theatre production (or something) and it was called "Staying in is the new going out" and I thought it was a fun and clever twist on the way things are supposed to be, how one is supposed to live and how we are supposed to entertain ourselves. Therefore it's interesting to me that I receive this newsletter from trendwatching.com and it's all about the growing trend of the elite middle class and their trend to living it up at home. The array of products available is really interesting, everything from a walk-in-wine-cellar & beer-on-tap to residential-elevators and most curiously private rooms.

It makes me think that some of us humans are living really rich. And we are. But that doesn't stop us from aging and here I digress.

I just turned 29 and I'm getting older, we all are, and I'm on the verge of being 30. I don't really think it's much of big deal. Our culture places a huge premium on youth and to get old is bit of taboo. I personally think it's kind of sad that getting old is this bad and nasty thing that is combated liposuction and chin tucks and multi-vitamins. As baby boomers age, we'll probably just being hearing about this anti-aging phenomena. I don't really know I'm trying to say right now, but I'll some it up like this: Be happy to have life, and a warm bed and remember your whole past and please, act your age.