Welcome to Top 10 The Valborgsmässoafton edition.
So what does that mean? well Valborgsmässoafton is a Swedish holiday where you burn old stuff on a huge bonfire while consume a ridiculous amount of hard liquor.
This usual leads to memory loss, and as i got a pretty good Top 10 list for this week I just want to remind my fellow swedes to come back once you are sober again, to see the same old Top 10 for the first time again. How awesome is that!
(Same goes for my queens-day celebrating friends as well in Holland)
Enjoy, and enjoy again.
cheers.
/ Mr J
Friday, April 30, 2010
1. M.I.A, Born Free
Thursday, April 29, 2010
2. Jamie Vasta
Jamie on Jamie:
One thing I never make any bones about is being a lady and loving girly things such as glitter. I am unabashedly a huge fan of the sparkly flakes. Something else I make no bones about on this blog is my sheer enthusiasm when an artist takes something (like a medium) and turns that mother out in a way that you just don't see very often. That is the stuff that moves me, that gets me out of bed in the morning. Jamie Vasta is one such artist. Painting with glitter, Jamie approaches the medium that is normally relegated to the arts and crafts bungalow in a classic and refined manner, turning the medium into a beautiful and mature palatte. I got to spend some time in her studio yesterday, where she shared with me her latest group of paintings all inspired by Caravaggio paintings. Plus I got to meet a special little lady named Mini Wolf. Take a look
See more work by Jamie HERE
3. Up There
Here is the final documentary. We're very excited to bring these painters' story down to sidewalk level, for everyone to see.
Concept: Mother NY;
Production Co: Mekanism;
Director/DP/Editor: Malcolm Murray;
Music by The Album Leaf;
Painters: Colossal Media/Sky High Murals/Bob Middleton;
Presented by Stella Artois
4. Thomas Doyle
Thomas on his work:My work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past—whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.
The pieces’ radically reduced scales evoke feelings of omnipotence—as well as the visceral sensation of unbidden memory recall. Hovering above the glass, the viewer approaches these worlds as an all-seeing eye, looking down upon landscapes that dwarf and threaten the figures within.
Conversely, the private intensity of moments rendered in such a small scale draws the viewer in, allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or dollhouse. Though surrounded by chaos, hazard, and longing, the figures’ faces betray little emotion, inviting viewers to lose themselves in these crucibles—and in the jumble of feelings and memories they elicit.
The glass itself contains and compresses the world within it, seeming to suspend time itself—with all its accompanying anguish, fear, and bliss. By sealing the works in this fashion, I hope to distill the debris of human experience down to single, fragile moments. Like blackboxes bobbing in the flotsam, these works wait for discovery, each an indelible record of human memory.
See more work by Thomas Here
5. Richard Mosse
After fifty summers, the wrecked aircraft’s ultra-modern form becomes a part of the primeval landscape. Its shattered carapace lies scorched by the sun and scoured by extreme winters. Redolent of science fiction, these Futurist antiques have been partially cannibalized, their unwanted buckled shell listing in the mountain gales. American and Japanese automobiles lie scattered in the dangerous wastes of central Iraq. Ephemeral relics, shot to a skein of rusting metal, tremble delicately in the abrasive dust storm. Like Saddam Hussein’s shattered hilltop palace, these are the follies of globalized forgetting.Around the time that Thoreau pegged the idea of wilderness as a cultural construct, the new technology of photography was gaining weight as a tool of Empire. This was the era of the photographic survey. Teams embarked with view cameras and mobile darkrooms to chart and document remote territories. Seemingly neutral in intent, the photographic survey was anything but. Surveyors often worked as part of a military unit, such as the British team who took part in the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867-68. This was in fact a rescue mission, but the corps of Royal Engineers produced 1,500 landscape photographs during the expedition. This was a valuable document of Abyssinia at that time, as well as being an apparatus of colonization and propaganda.
The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Mosse travelled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.
The Fall is comprised of work from Mosse’s first year of working with the two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts.
Born in Ireland, Richard Mosse earned his Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005 and his MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, The Barbican Centre and Art Chicago. His work has been featured on the front cover of Source, an established British photography magazine, as well as in Art Review, C International Photo Magazine and Lapiz. Mosse has been interviewed on National Public Radio and London’s Resonance FM. His work will be included in the upcoming Fotofest 2010 Biennial of Contemporary U.S. Photography, March 12 - April 25, 2010, Houston, TX.
See more work by Mosse HERE
6. Kasey McMahon
Kasey McMahon is a conceptual and multimedia artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her work is driven by her own curiosity regarding our distinctly individual interactions with technology, the world and each other. She is fascinated by the elegant complexity that exists within and between the natural and technological realms: both intricate and untamed in their own ways. Influenced as much by hardware stores and the monsters underneath her bed as by haute couture and fine art, Kasey believes imagination is a superpower we all possess and encourages the occasional sidestepping of grownup life to recall a child's eager fascination with the mundane.The effect of Kasey's work is humorous and frequently disarming, highlighting the chasms we often create between ourselves, our environments and our machines. Drawing attention to the reverberations created by manipulation of either nature or technology, her work often fuses the two together and imbues the resulting creations with a lighthearted otherworldliness. By exploring our philosophical and ethical relationship with technology, and the ways we weave computing into daily activities, Kasey hopes to emphasize individual responsibility in the molding of our own realities, virtual or otherwise, and to quietly call attention to our environmental impact and displacement from nature.
She has exhibited in many alternative venues and West Coast galleries, including the San Francisco Exploratorium, SIGGRAPH, TEDxUSC and the Los Angeles Brewery ArtWalk. Her work has been covered in a variety of print and online publications including Popular Science, Wired, CNET and AdBusters. Kasey is also cofounder of the art collective known as Psycho Girlfriend, which focuses on the pins and needles of high fashion as seen through the fisheye distortion of comfort and repurposed materials.
See more work by Kasey HERE
7. Antonio Gonzales Paucar
Antonio Gonzales Paucar <-- Born 1973 in Peru; Lives & works in Berlin. See more work by Antonio HERE
8. The making of Ephemicropolis
Artist peter root has sent designboom a look at his latest work ‘ephemicropolis’, a metropolis made completely from stacks of metal staples. the piece consists of over 100,000 staples that were assembled over a time period of 40 hours. the stacks were each broken into different sizes, designed to represents everything from small scale buildings to large skyscrapers. the largest stacks are about 12 cm high, while the some buildings consist of only a single staple. the whole installation takes up a floor space of about 6m x 3m. unlike root’s previous project potato landscape, ‘ephemicropolis’ won’t start to grow mould any time soon.
10. This spring at Coney Island
Coney Island is one of those places that has an outsized profile in the American imagination, but it's seemed to exist since the 1970s in twilight, halfway between a glorious past and an uncertain future. That's some of what photographer Joshua Brown saw on a visit last winter.
Now, prompted by yet another round of rumors that developers are readying the wrecking ball, Nick Carr's great "Scouting NY" blog has taken a long look at the beleaguered beach resort, including a tour through the magnificently derelict Bank of Coney Island. (Carr's a location scout, which explains why he seems to be all over the five boroughs; the bank pictures, though, come from another scout, whose identity Carr is keeping to himself.) Over at Kickstarter, meanwhile, filmmaker JL Arsonson is fundraising for a documentary called "Last Summer at Coney Island." He's down to a 96-minute cut and is rounding up donors to help him bring it home. (Full disclosure: I'm one of them.)
What do the three have in common? An affection for Coney Island as it's been -- down at the heels, sure, but authentic in itself, and a window into a kind of mass-market popular culture that our big cities are ever more willing to bulldoze. It seems like every spring brings fresh rumors of Coney Island's demise. It'd be a shame if this year they finally came true.
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