I love that the Walker Museum chose to hang this exhibit showcasing items from their collection in the Paris salon style.
Sometimes, exhibits that are re-visits to the permanent collection can be seem boring and like the museum just wanted to save money by not bringing in something, but simply their style of installation makes this one much more appealing.
A portrayal of a Paris salon…
by Francois Heim Charles X Distributing Awards at the Salon of 1824 at Louvre, 1827
For some people, this may be a bit much, but for me, it is like a result of this ideal world where you have so many books and so much art that they simply have to overlap because you don’t have enough room for all your treasures.
William Waldron — what a sophisticated bedroom. I love the look of the architectural print hung over bookshelves.
By Nate Turner. I also love this room in general (not that I don’t love all of these in general, but anyway…)– love that it is a tiny dining room but packed with character and looks cozy (love bookshelves, and well, art for that matter in dining rooms), love the crispness of the black and white– the trim on the chairs and table skirt, the frames, etc. This dining room looks like the kind of dining room you’d definitely use all the time– for meals but also for working on projects, planning trips, etc.
Not sure who exactly this is by… all I put in the file name is “Donovan”?
And finally, Miles Redd’s living room, which I also love for so many reasons, but here, just a small tableau showing one of his many great styling ideas.
I seem to be going in themes this week… yesterday, “golden age,” and today, Americana. First L.L. Bean, and now this great exhibit…
Inspired by Robert Franks’ “The Americans” project from the 1950s, which I saw and thoroughly enjoyed at the Met in the fall, Brit Jacob Perlmutter set out to create his own version of a photographic journal of America as it is today.
He spent three months on the road, aiming to capture images that get beneath the surface of popular culture representations of the country, and these are the resulting photographs.
As he said, ‘I went to America with a set of images in my head and came back with another in my hand.’
Aren’t they amazing??
They really do read as being so honest, with a photojournalistic quality to them.
Unfortunately for those of us stateside, the exhibit will be in London. Hopefully it will come to the US at some point! If not, I’ve got my eye on the catalogue from the exhibit…
I just discovered the work of Morgan O’Hara, and I’m obsessed. She documents hand movements, what she calls “Live Transmissions,” of people engaged in activities like playing an instrument, cooking, lecturing, etc.
Above:
Movement of the hands of Chef’s assistant Jojo Sullamoff while peeling a cucumber Yatagan Kebab House, New York City 2 November 1995
I think it’s fascinating that her artistic process is often a documentation of someone else’s artistic process. Also, I guess one reason I am drawn to her work is my love of maps, as her process is essentially a mapping process.
Movement of the hands of pianist Martha Argerich while performing the first movement allegro con brio of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 Carnegie Hall, New York City 28 October 2001
Above: Movement of the hands of Conductor Riccardo Chailly while conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No 4. first movement Carnegie Hall, New York City 10 February 2000
It’s interesting when two people doing the same activity are compared– above and below, two conductors conducting two different pieces — are they different because of the piece of music, or because of their personal style of conducting?
Movement of the hands of Composer Pierre Boulez while conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky’s Petrouchka / Carnegie Hall, New York City 13 March 2000
Apparently, conducting and lecturing require similar hand movements…
Movement of the hands of Dr. S. J. Schmidt while lecturing Glarus, Switzerland 7 March 1999
Her working process– multiple pens in each hand.
THEN, I discovered her installations — blown up abstractions of the drawings. SO COOL.
Galleria O’artoteca Milano, Italia left Aki Takahashi on piano right: Quentin Crisp lecturing flat black acrylic on white wall
Macau Museum of Art Live Transmission: Kung Fu battle flat black acrylic on white wall black and vermillion calligraphy ink on rice paper
Aomori Contemporary Art Center Aomori, Japan flat black acrylic on white wall Left: Amiri Bakara reading his poetry Right: Ishioka Toyomi carving cedar
Aomori Contemporary Art Center Aomori, Japan wall drawing: hand movement of 3 Taiko drummers performing
Teatro Sociale di Bergamo, Italia
I don’t know what this one is of, but I like that she took it to sculpture too… I think if she continues to get less and less literal, these are going to keep getting more interesting.
I think if she keeps doing this, it could be really interesting to see comparisons of hand movements between cultures. Would lecturers in one country be more emphatic with their hands than another? Would musical styles require very different hand movements?
I love this blog I just found!! It’s called Urban Sketchers, and here is how it describes itself: “Urban Sketchers is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel. We aim to show the world, one drawing at a time.”
The two above are by a cab driver in Chicago. Born in Moscow, he has lived in Chicago since 1978 and has attended many art schools off and on, including Parsons, but he currently works as a cabbie.
By a British illustrator in Cuba – “18 February, 2007 — Houses on the Paseo del Prado. This was once the smartest street in Havana: on each side stand Spanish style buildings from the late 19th century, colourfully plastered and richly detailed. But they haven’t been touched since they were built. They are in tragic state of disrepair: plaster is falling off; windows are boarded up or just missing; sometimes entire walls that have fallen away. And then you realise that people are still living in them.”
“Metro Hunting”
Above and below, sketches by illustrator and animator Ami Plasse, who documents NYC subway riders.
Barcelona
I realized at about age 7 while at the Matisse Museum in Nice that I love sketching while travelling. It trains your eye to notice detail, and in the same way that you remember things better just by stopping to take a picture of them, sketching seems to create a permanent imprint of a scene onto your brain.
So, needless to say, I think this blog of other people’s travel and life sketches is awesome… you get a peak not only into places you’ve never been, but also into the way that each sketcher sees and thinks, and I love seeing all the different sketching styles.
I first saw Subhankar Banerjee’s photographs at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Chelsea back in 2007, and these images have been stuck in my head ever since.
While at first they may seem like maybe they could fit simply into a nature-photography niche suitable for calendars, they are are soo much more. First, you should know looking at these images that these are huge. Around 6ft x 6ft. You truly feel like you are with him in the helicopter looking down over vast, magnificent swaths of land.
Caribou on Sand
Originally trained as a physicist and computer engineer in India, he later got into conservation, activism, and photography. He set out to aerially photograph the Alaskan arctic in all seasons, and he found himself caught in the middle of the Bush-era Alaskan oil-drilling debate and while his photos can be merely taken at their aesthetic face value, they do not shy away from making a statement about Alaska.
Caribou Tracks on Tundra
While the Right was pushing for drilling saying that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was frozen wasteland anyway, Banerjee’s photographs showed, in a way that was at once breathtaking but not sentimental, that this was untrue.
His photos display the rich ecological life of the area, and the titles and accompanying literature provide gripping information, but his literal distance from his subject, allowed, as an Art in America essay noted, a sort of studied “topographical aloofness” that keeps the photos from becoming affected.
Caribou Tracks on Wetland III
As in the photo above, his photos often show only the tracks of the animals moving through this space, merely “a documentation of documentation, a living history,” but that is enough to make the viewer acutely aware of the life happening on and across these lands.
Snow Geese I
Finally, formally, they are engaging for their composition and scale. As soon as you walked into the gallery, you could appreciate them aesthetically from afar, but then when you got closer and saw the titles and noticed the tiny animals or tracks, they became so much more intersting. With many of them, until you got up close, you could easily believe you are looking at a large chromatic abstract painting.
This quality of his work directs you to consider that it is necessary to take a closer look at not only at his art, but also at the world around us. We may initially think of the Alaskan arctic and picture a vast, boring tundra, but he shows us that there is much to be seen.
Subhankar Banerjee’s website here. Art in America essay on Sundaram Tagore website.
Artist Sarah Illenberger is a freelance 3-D illustrator, meaning, she creates 3-D designs to illustrate things for magazine editorials.
There are no descriptions or captions on her website of what each design is, so I’m not entirely sure what these were for, but I’m assuming that she created these little faux notion kits as imaginary versions of what each of these designer’s notion kit would look like if they had them.
The incredible thing is, she really captures the essence of these
fashion houses in these tiny made up kits!
Jil Sander
The details say it all– what the kit itself is made of and how it functions (snaps, rolls up, etc), how fancy or simple it is, how much stuff is in it, how organized or ad-hoc it is, and then the colors and textures of the actual bits inside.
Chanel
The more I look at these the more I’m amazed at how she captured and distilled the look
I went through a major Basquiat obsession in about ninth grade, to the point that I actually burned out on him, but I just watched the trailer for this upcoming documentary on him, and I can’t wait to see it! …I guess it’s been long enough.
Also, if you haven’t seen this Basquiat movie, you definitely should, despite the mixed critical response and slightly skewed portrayal of the artist. It’s still good.
I don’t think he ever actually talked about de Kooning or Bacon being influences, and maybe they weren’t direct influences, but there are definitely some similarities in both their treatment of the human form and handling of paint, at least in the case of de Kooning.
Interesting to know that he was also heavily influenced by a copy of Gray’s Anatomy that was given to him when he was born, and that that spurred his interest in mixing images of anatomy and text.
Rebecca Ward’s installations made of tape and vinyl adhesive
I guess this is the type of work you can’t really fly by the seat of your pants on, but I hadn’t really imagined how much preparation and calculations would go into it until I saw some of her process drawings…
Finally, her current installation at the Kate Spade Tokyo store…
And lastly, a lot is reminding me of Sol LeWitt these days (sometimes you don’t realize how brilliant someone or something is until later, when you realize how many things remind of them, like The Great Gatsby… it just keeps coming up forever in life, but you don’t know that in 10th grade when you read it for the first time), but doesn’t Ward’s work remind you of some of this stuff? …
Loving this random act of creativity.
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Each...
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Rebecca Ward’s installations made of tape and vinyl adhesive
