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Daily Candy Feed - Design Observer
- China Portfolio: From the Linked Hybrid to the Bug Dome
- The Language of Design Imperialism
- Camel Mobile Clinic Update
- Permanent Error
- Do You Copy? The Visuals of Ham Radio
- Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture
- Map Kibera
- Lunch with the Critics: The New Lincoln Center
- Jerry Della Femina, Mad Men, and the Cult of Advertising Personality
- Today, 07.23.10
Feb
18
Details, in art history, have always occupied a unique space. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched drawing after drawing of any specimen, real or imagined, until the details no longer held mystery, and its meaning was understood. Georges Braque, if you’ll permit me, appreciated the essence of the details, so that still lifes rendered in segments could only be distinguished by key elements–marks, lines, forms–placed strategically on canvas.
Both artists are examples of the details studied and magnified, enlarged and deconstructed in service to best representing the spirit or underpinnings of object or image, idea or beauty. However, many years throughout the history of art, particularly painting, has seen the details shrink to size, so as not to offer a larger perspective, but just smallness in itself. A kind of reductivism that has found its own charm in being so hyper-focused, on its own, is unintelligible. Deconstruction–what it is to represent details–has long since surpassed parts into elements; molecules even. It has gone straight for the atom, and for the longest time, it has been represented as a circle too.
Pointillism, pioneered by Georges Seurat, is probably one of the earlier examples of details coming into a fine point. Rendered in a multitude of dots in various colours, pointillist paintings really create an atmosphere of where an image appears. Another example, Roy Lichtenstein’s signature Benday dots, exaggerated the texture of newsprint so the invisible became visible and the aesthetic became superior instead of simple.
Exceptions to the deconstructing details in dots are really disguised as other processes in painting; primarily the grid. Without the grid, Jennifer Bartlett’s dots and circles would have no unifying element to her work. Neither would Chuck Close’s ovals, amygdaloids, and spirals. Cubism? Could not exist. Cubism is really the grid, in chaos.
In recent years however, the famed dot, has surfaced with sharp corners and crisp edges. A global technological environment may be responsible. Points have become pixels with opposite effect. Where dots described, pixels, blur. The big picture, is wholly nullified. Process is undetectable. Read more
Nov
13
Lacanic Room
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I first discovered artist Liza Lou in 1999, Grand Central Station,
Backyard, was a massive installation in Vanderbilt Hall. Lou, and a team of volunteers, had beaded a human-scale tableau of a yard with tiny, colourful glass beads. The result was an extraordinary artwork completed by hand.
The brilliance of Backyard grows out from the centred picnic scene, which unlike the rest of the installation, appeared to have been recently disturbed. Lou included many markers (signifiers) to indicate an outdoor get-together, unfulfilled. Objects successful in supporting the idea included crushed cans of Bud, salad servers at the ready for scooping salad, and a laundry basket filled with dishtowels. (The ultimate glorification; beaded rags!) Others, not so successful, were cobs of corn imitating cheap Pier 1 imports relics, and flowers that stood so tall and straight as embellished stand-ins of the plastic floral pinwheels people erect in their gardens.
Lou’s colourful Backyard concoction stresses the absence of things. It serves as an index to the missing human element the tableau permits, almost as a dare to the common accepted idea of nature: man’s intervention is beauty’s demise. It’s as though Lou’s version of the adage suggests a variant to be true: man’s intervention brings beauty to life. The irony of Lou’s utilization of a very tactile, man-made technique, only challenges the viewer further to consider this unpopular point of view. Read more
Oct
27
Under the Pink
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Former Canadian fashion designer, Sunny Choi, has moved onto the visual arts. Choi’s impressive fashion illustrations are on view at her Queen West gallery. The works are ethereal, romantic, layered, and full of narrative.
Working with oils on canvas, Choi’s brushstrokes around her female models feel like the running thread between her paintings, context coming out of focus, life taking on some activity–almost as thoughtful (and bold) chaos.
Choi’s portraits and profiles capture elusive expressions. There is an element of seduction and beauty behind the Cover Girls portrayed, without making them too pretty or relevant on the surface only.
Surrounded by the threads, wisps and spots of paint, the Girls take on a myth like quality. The female models come to life as believable-fictional characters. In some instances they are the nymph in the forest, among flitting butterflies, and in others, attending a very VIP cocktail party, aglow, creating metaphorical butterflies in their presence.
In all, Choi’s works are a celebration of the female form, colour, and painting–the sections where Choi allows the paint to “be the paint,” framing areas where Choi controls the paint to create form. The very places where clothing melds into the environment and the environment melds into clothing. More than Choi’s world (depicted and lived). More like Choi’s infinite creative sensibility.
This December will mark Choi’s one-year anniversary in the art world. Judging from the works made, and the new collections she is dreaming up, I’d say that Choi has had a pretty good year. May she have many more. Congrats.
IMAGE | Sunny Choi | Cover Girls | 36″ x 48″ | Lacey in Mauve
Oct
10
f-Stop
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One week remains to see the spectacular, Florian Böhm show, Wait for Walk, at the Cohen Amador Gallery, New York! You know what that means? It’s time to go, go, GO!
Wait for Walk contains photographs of people, stopped at crosswalks, in
The images touch upon many visual and idiosyncratic characteristics. Each photo acts as a composite of two orders contained within. One, the way the pedestrians have arranged themselves at the corner of the crosswalk. Two, the way the crosswalk divides the pedestrians with the viewer–who observes Böhm’s works from the “other side.” (The side where the pedestrians’ intend to cross over to.) In this way, the photos provide a four-dimensional perspective, with the cityscape set as the background, the pedestrians as the middle-ground, the viewer’s spatial relation to the work as the foreground, and the pedestrians’ notification to advance as the element of time. Read more
Aug
21
Divided, we Sit.
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Last week I was going through one of my scrap books for a bit of inspiration when I noticed towards the end of the book, a postcard, wedged between two pages where the book had remained blank. The postcard was a portrait of John Bentley Mays by Gertrude Kearns; an invitation to her solo show, United States of Being (the John Bentley Mays portraits) at Lehmann Leskiw Fine Art,
Jul
10
The Dipping Friends
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At the rate I’m going at, I’m tempted to start a new category for the blog titled “Hating Myself for Missing Good Art Exhibits.” Inevitably however, all that will do is make me feel really awful for not attending shows, and then wretched for admitting it.
Jun
6
Life’s a Beach and Then You Spy
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Impasto. Light. Colour. When combined, these elements add dimension and depth to a work of art, to painting. The brush stroke provides the pacing in which the work was made. The light provides the life force the image beholds; a sliver for a glimmer, bathed for dazzling. Colour provides the weight or intensity of the emotion depicted, including the artist’s own in creation.
May
29
YSL in MTL
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My first encounter with Yves Saint Laurent was in high school. A boy I had a tremendous crush on would wear Jazz to class. (See, even back then I was chasing for a bit of heaven.)
Although the boy never returned my affection (he seemed to know it was a crush more than I did at the time) I just couldn’t help but be hooked. My feelings were just too intense. I just couldn’t stop. Thus began my love affair with all things Yves and YSL.
YSL, to me, is like the left wing of all the traditional fashion houses. To explain. Dior, Chanel, Prada, Armani are like the top-tier of fashion. Their time-honoured, bread-and-butter items–such as bags, flats, skirts and suits respectively–are fairly conservative. Nothing risky about them, but fabulous items no less.
Next to the traditional standbys are McQueen, Gautier, Cavalli, and Westwood; totally fun pieces, courageous, imaginative but a bit too extravagant. I don’t want to say impractical, but perhaps more catwalk than sidewalk. (Although why everyday isn’t an Alexander McQueen day is beyond me.)
And thereafter we can probably have two camps, but I’ll generalize for simplicity’s sake. The more subdued (and incredibly sophisticated) designers like threeAsFour,
In this “fashion matrix” (which seems to be the way my mind operates), where does YSL fit? It doesn’t. It’s simply off the grid. Read more
May
6
The “Couturing” of Comics
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It appears that comics and fashion are institutionalizing a trend of sorts in their reacquainted art-meets-avant-garde dominion.
In the art world, touring exhibitions (in
Threadless might be the proponent of the fashionomix (Fashion + comix + economics! Oh yeah! I’m copyrighting that!) explosion, of Batmobiles on our backs, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is taking the trend (Bloff!) to a whole new level. Read more
Apr
13
Ever since the Murakami show opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the press has repeatedly extracted an aspect of the artist I just don’t understand. Namely, that Murakami is “the Japanese Warhol.” 1
What?
Whether blogs are referring to The New York Times comparison, or The Times quoting director and curator heavyweights at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and more (and the cyclone of oddity taking shape) makes me wonder how the comparison became an accepted truth, and even, undisputed fact.
In an article for