This won't stay up long but I wanted some of my friends to see one of my more abstract GIFs "in the wild," so to speak. These have been showing up a lot lately. The word balloon "Cool moving thing" made my day.
July 2009
I Knew There Was a Catch
"Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."
The "apparently" was inserted due to the Times' squeamishness about making a direct statement. Books were deleted from people's Kindles. Everyone is noting the irony that the books were Animal Farm and 1984, which Amazon didn't have the e-rights to.
As a past recipient of censorship by Amazon, yrs truly can only imagine how the Red (Bush supporting) company will use the synchronization feature to mess with blogs people subscribe to on their Kindles.
Folks, there is a great reading device out there--it's called the general purpose computer. This whole fetish for dedicated hardware (iPods, etc.) is a bad way to go.
Staples
Opening July 24, Left Cube Gallery presents "Staples," an exhibition of artists who use an under-recognized fastener.
Kim Clockauer, Eric Treacher, Maureen Lane, Ben Tye Nollins, and Randy Marsteller all have worked with staples as both an adornment and a sculptural unit. This exhibition plays on multiple meanings of the word: a reflection of the office culture that is a "day job" reality for many artists (punning on the name of the pervasive office supplies franchise), a sense that minimalist art has become a new "staple" unconnected to the biological world, and the plain factual signifier of a small metal object that can be gathered, pounded, and folded into a new art.
Clockauer uses staples to affix small fabric swatches to the wall, pulling them this way and that in a kind of indecisive determination of form. Treacher looks back to the punk era of the '70s for ritual fashion cues, "scarifying" his body with staples punched into earlobes and elbows, then photo-documenting the results. Lane's deceptively seductive arrangements of ceramic kitchenware feature clusters of staples dissolving in sulfuric acid, creating strange crystalline patterns. Video artist Tye Nollins places thousands of staples on flatbed scanners as the raw material for his generative, morphing abstractions. Lastly, Marsteller presents meticulous photoreal paintings of staple packs and guns, treating them as enduring but ultimately empty Pop icons.
The exhibition opens 7 pm with a performance by Treacher. Left Cube is located at 617 W. 28th Street, NY.
Ryan McLaughlin
Tasty paintings, at least in jpeg form. The brush stroke recalls early George Condo by way of Karen Kilimnick. The idea of making thin objects thick is something New York painter Sally Ross has done very well. McLaughlin's wrinkle is to make everything thick but also blocky/geometric in a shallow, slightly surreal Cezanne-like space. As these are oil on linen on MDF and given collector nostalgia for the good old days of painting he will probably have a career.
(as seen on vvork)
Dream
I tried to rebuild one of the World Trade Center towers.* All the material to make an outer shell had been salvaged and was sitting in a large stack. A woman I know from the art world was in charge of the rebuilding; her father built the original and I kept hearing how stern, demanding, and scary he was. I started laying out the planks on the floor and cementing them together. They had to go down in a particular order and I removed quite a few planks from the stack before realizing I'd messed up the order. Somehow I had it in my mind that this was the floor covering and I was assembling the odd-sized rectangular planks like a jigsaw puzzle. My female acquaintance came in, saw what I had done and said, "This material is for the walls, not the floor, the floor will be polished black marble. My dad is going to be so mad, pull these up, hurry!" Fortunately the cement between planks hadn't completely dried, so I was able to pry up all the planks. I put them back on the stack, hoping no one would notice the order was messed up.
*This isn't as narcissistic as it sounds. I see the WTC construction site regularly from the subway that goes into the pit.