The Female Landscape

Must continue with French lessons ...

Photos by Matthew Gauchet, with clothing by Marie Labarelle, from a performance of The Female Landscape by dancer Marie Barbottin, with Adèle Blanchin on the didgeridoo.

Film of some of the performances are available.

Maggie Taylor + Enjoy the Weekend!

Some fascinating fairy tale images from digital artist/photographer Maggie Taylor. Check out her images for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from Modernbook Editions.

My bestfriends from fourth grade are in town this weekend! Yay!

J. Morgan Puett, Part Two

I recently wondered about J. Morgan Puett, which led me to Mildred's Lane - her home and the name and location of her latest project/collaboration/experiment/life-as-art/artist colony.

“What I’m really interested in is the future and what it looks like,” she said, and “in inventing a future through history and material culture and art.”

Read the rest of Alastair Gordon's NYT article here. Be sure to see the rest of Phil Mansfield's beautiful images of JMP's home/life/home life/refrigerator as gallery space here.

Santos, if you visit Mildred Lane, will you swing by NY and visit Brooklyn?

Susan kae Grant

I just discovered Susan kae Grant's work. I love these haunting and moody scenes, a production straight from the artist's subconscious (from JR Compton for the Dallas Arts Revue):

To bring the imagery out of her subconscious into photographs, Grant slept at a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center sleep center, where each time she reached REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, indicating the onset of dreams, she'd be awakened and asked questions about the imagery she was experiencing. The gallery has an impressive photo showing the artist plugged into all the high tech electrodes.

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Oh, and not that she reads this, but -- Happy Birthday, Mommy!

Maira Kalman at The Met

I was thrilled to find Maira Kalman in the latest issue of Departures Magazine. Apologies for the non-blogging - inspiration has been elusive lately. But I can never resist my hat-idol, Maira - especially as she paints her way throught the different wings of the Met.

Inspiration for Play

I've been working on a few projects when I am able (late at night, crack of dawn). I know, I've promised to post some pictures of some completed projects. But not yet. In the meantime, take a look at some sources of inspiration:

English artist, Julie Arkell. Available at John Derian.

Jess Brown. Available at Twig.

Apolline a Paris. Available at Orfeo.

Herzenart.

J. Morgan Puett, Part One

Ever since I read this post on AT last year, I've been meaning to find out what's been going on with J. Morgan Puett. D, do you remember her shop in SoHo?

It was on Wooster. The shop was another world - filled with her memories of a childhood in the South and her clothing that struck a balance between beauty and practicality. Her pieces were always imbued with a sense of history and place, and very wearable. And for me, the memory of her shop is always inextricably tied to Kelly & Ping's pad thai, which was a few doors down. Sorry, JMP! I guess this is where my strong attachment to the South and my Asian roots intersected.

With a move to rural Pennsylvania with her family, she has been working on a variety of art projects. One project in particular caught my attention -- Cottage Industry:

In Charleston, SC, I have created a small business in a vernacular structure, in response to issues of commerce, history, and labor in the city. A new clothing collection is at the core of the project!

One of my favorite designers, in one of my favorite towns, doing what she does best. Isn't everything just beautiful? This particular project is from 2002. I wonder whether the collection is still available, and where?

UPDATE: Mildred's Lane.

Tuareg Jewelry at Sujaro...

Head of an Oba (Chief)

Above:

Origin: Benin, Nigeria Composition: lost wax caste bronze

This bronze head is thought to represent an early Oba or Chief. The Oba has reigned in Benin, Nigeria with his ancestors, since the 15th century. Since that time, bronze heads in the image of the Oba and other royal court officials have been caste using the lost-wax method and given as a tribute to the Oba and royal family. They were kept as possessions to demonstrate the prestige and power of the royal family. Historically, the head would be placed on a royal altar, and displayed as signs of the wealth of the Chief. The hole in the back of the head was originally intended to house an ivory tusk, which would protrude from the head and also be an object of prestige. The holes in the face are thought to be made to function to hold a veil of beads.




...or, how your friends show you more of the world. Last year, I met a new friend, K from Chicago, who attended a training seminar with me here in San Fran, for certification of a predominant software in our industry.

During the week here, she discovered a fantastic African gallery near our offices in the financial district. Sujaro.... purveyor of African Textiles and artwork. We spent nearly two hours downstairs in the cellar gallery, filled with totemic idols and feathered gods, wood and bead and stone and bronze and copper and paint, (C, much like our Southern Philippines, the statuary and beadwork and textiles from the different tribes and villages were so beautiful.) She told me that she and her brother went on a visit to Africa some time ago and brought back some wonderful artwork and statuary from their travels, a few pieces carried by hand rather than checked into the luggage cargo.

K pondered the jewelry case last and we learned about the Tuareg Tribe of Niger, West Africa. She left with 2 beautiful pieces of silver and onyx.

From the gallery website:

Traditionally the Tuaregs, including the Koumamas, were nomads living in the Sahara desert. Some of the family have now settled in Agadez in northern Niger. Agadez is an ancient town at the crossroads of the camel caravan trade routes.

Every piece of Koumama jewelry is handmade, and most pieces are variations on the traditional designs. Some jewelry is made by the ancient lost wax method. First a piece of jewelry is carved in wax. The figure is then encased in clay and fired. Next liquid silver is poured into the mold. After cooling the clay is broken off and the silver piece is cleaned, filed and engraved. Finally, carbon is rubbed into the silver to highlight the engraving and the jewelry gets its final polishing. Other jewelry is made by first pouring molten silver into a small trough to form a bar. The bar is then repeatedly heated, pounded and shaped.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

When writing about purchasing a dollhouse for her goddaughter, D mentioned The Overlook Hotel, which, I swear, is the reason my mind came up with Frances Lee Glessner and Corinne May Botz. I am neither morose nor morbid by nature.

In 2004, The Bellwether Gallery showed "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death":

... photographer Corinne May Botz explores a collection of eighteen crime scene models that were built in the 1940's and 50's by a progressive criminologist Frances Glessner Lee (1878 – 1962). The crime scene models, which were based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, were created to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Like a forensic detective herself, Botz meticulously re-traces Lee’s footsteps with her camera and lights. Her large-scale color photographs shrewdly frame the idiosyncratic and haunting details from these captivating murder scene dollhouses. Such noir fiction shuttles between the detective photography of Weegee and the dollhouse narrative photography by Laurie Simmons to explore the dark side of domestic life.

D writes: The photos here demonstrate how the dioramas of gruesome unexplained deaths draw you in, that the lighting and shadows, the colors and positions of the small bodies in a perfectly reproduced little room provide the viewer with an omnipresence. You are there as a witness to the crime, and seek clues around the devasted scene, trying to solve the mystery that is displayed by the artist. Even with dolls, and displayed in miniature, the giant You-the-Viewer shudders.

Knitting Circle

Some innovative designers from Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, currently at the Museum of Arts & Design through June 17th:

Erna van Sambeek: Floral Gown’, 2004 (cotton, textile glue, cotton backing)

Carson Fox : Hair Filigree #5, 2004 (wire, hair)

Hildur Bjarnadóttir: Doodling, 2005 (Tatting, cotton thread)

Dave Cole: Lead Teddy, 2006
(lead ribbon, hand knit over lead wool armature)

Highlights from the Masters of Bamboo: Japanese Baskets and Sculpture

Wave Wave by Yamagucki Ryuoun

Flower Basket - Billowing Waves by Kibe Seiho

Untitled

Bird by Monden Kogyuko

Flower Basket

Open Flower Basket by Maeda Chikuboosai II

Masters of Bamboo: Japanese Baskets and Sculpture in the Cotsen Collection is an exhibition that draws on the richness and breadth of the approximately nine hundred works Mr. Lloyd E. Cotsen generously donated to the museum in 2002.

The exhibition is organized around the network of master-disciple relationships through which makers of these baskets are interconnected. The exhibition features one artwork each by 76 bamboo artists representing most of the major lineages in the three key geographic regions—Western Japan, Eastern Japan, and Kyushu—over the past 150 years. Many of the artworks in the exhibition are on view publicly for the first time.

At the Asian Art Museum, Hambrecht Gallery in San Francisco: February 2–May 6, 2007

Mika Kato

If you are lucky enough to be in Tokyo on Saturday, January 20, be sure to catch the last day of Mika Kato's exhibition at The Tomio Koyama Gallery.

The gallery's press release promises a few new paintings, charcoals, and a doll. A doll!

I first encountered Mika Kato's work at 2004's Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Japanese Art. At once attractive and disturbing, Soda from 2000, is shown on the left.

Design at Work, Part One: Desk Monsters

Who could have thought that my inspiration could come from within a tiny interior little office with no windows that is smaller than my bathroom at home? I discovered a hidden competition among the corporate tech community members; those chubby geeks wearing prominent black frames on pallid faces, their garbage can overfilled with waxed wrappers from Quiznos, Dilbert cartoons scotch-taped to their white office doors...haven't you ever seen the movie Office Space?

Hear me out, all of you fashionistas and cooler-than-thou's...

You would think that corporate life stunts creative expression, but amid the mess atop corporate grey metal desktops (chinese stress balls, squishy rubber neon throw things, a plant half-dead 'neath the flourescent lights) I started to see Desk Monsters on people's desks. Not cheesy plastic stuff, not corny "Decision-Maker Dartboards", not Voodoo dolls with the boss' face superglued on the front, but real, REAL SCULPTURE?

One of my clients was on New Year's vacation, and asked me to come sit at his desk a couple days while he was away, to load a database onto the lawfirm's server. "Sure, go have fun." Then I saw his Desk Monster.

He likes classically styled Mexican paper-mache figures. This one I saw on his desk seemed to be a Meso-American god (maybe Mayan? Olmec?), about 10 or 11 inches tall, in brilliant reds, yellows, blues and whites, with lighting bolts crowning the head of a terrible countenance, so cool. I think it might have been Quetzalcoatl, a death god in the ancient Yucatan, he must've gotten it while on vacation.


His friend in the next office had a 3 foot long painted Iguana from South America, this one was made of clay, like this guy over here, brightly colored and hanging down unexpectedly from a corkboard.


In New York, a good friend of mine kept a 6 inch figure of a samurai and his begowned horse, he said it represented his "warrior spirit". (Yes, he's a chubby SQL programmer with 2 kids and wears glasses.) Can you imagine that my friend spent over $100 for his amazingly detailed little statue of an 18th century Japanese nobleman? We talked about it for an hour.

So, I got my own 2 pieces of sculpture for my desk, or maybe I will take them home and put them around the apartment. Both of these pieces are indiginous art from Bali. The artists come from small villages on the beautiful, mysterious tropical islands, where sculpture and wall art and textiles render a gorgeous spectrum of colors and layered designs reflecting the jungle and the sea. The Mermaid, the first piece, below, bears a cross at her neck and wears a sarong adorned with swirling kelp, carved from wood and painted with small tiny dots. The Princely Frog, the second doll, wears handloomed ikat cloth in blue and green, and his head and hands are lacquered wood, tattooed with a primordial jungle.

Maybe you should get a lovely sculpture because it reminds you where you are from. Maybe it's a momento of a great vacation you went on. Maybe it is your avatar. I just found it to be really fun and very unique and personal.

Update: I think I'm going to do a series of design at work....will keep you "Posted". (haha).