NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FIFTY ONE.
December08
If you live in Sydney, this Saturday night I have a series of screen prints on show at York Street PRESENTS, a group show being hosted by St Philip’s York Street Anglican. There’s a festive theme to the exhibition, and there’ll be free wine and live music, so if you aren’t already booked to the teeth with Christmas events you should totally swing by, from 5pm. Also, New Exhibition got to do the promo work for the exhibition, which was pretty alright by me! I’ll be posting pics from the show too for anyone who doesn’t make it…
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FIFTY.
December08
So, some pretty exciting news: the kids from Warner Music’s Cool Accidents blog selected my screen print as the winning entry in their recent Inspired competition. Thanks a tonne to those guys!
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FORTY FIVE.
June25
Daniel Kornrumpf (isn’t that a fantastic surname?) has been getting a tonne of notice online this week - his amazing stitched portraits have appeared on most of the blogs I frequent. So apologies if you’ve already seen these. But seriously. They are so good.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FORTY FOUR.
June25
Olympia Le-Tan, a French company specialising in unique handbags and minaudières (their current collection You Can’t Judge a Book By It’s Cover features clutches posing as literary classics), has teamed up with Spike Jonze (who seems to be prolific at the moment) and Simon Cahn to produce a stop motion short, created entirely out of felt. This behind-the-scenes teaser has me pretty excited.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FORTY THREE.
June14
Regular readers might remember this post on Olafur Eliasson. Earlier this year Eliasson completed work on the spectacular Your Rainbow, which is essentially a viewing platform, permanently installed above the ARos Museum of Art in Aarhus, Denmark. The circular walkway, located fifty stories high, allows the viewer to circumnavigate a corridor lined with panes of glass in every colour in the spectrum. Interestingly, the pace at which you move through the installation effects the way you perceive the colours: “If you maintain a quick pace, the colours remain vibrant. But if you pause in one colour zone, the hue around you grows pale while the colours in your peripheral vision, where the walkway curves, intensify. Colour intensities depend on your speed.” This beautiful, architectural work continues Eliasson’s infatuation with colour, and his dialogue between his art and his native land.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FORTY ONE.
June14
I’ve been in New York for the better part of a month now, so figured it was high time I started sharing some of the gems I’ve discovered in this AMAZING city.
First up, a huge highlight was visiting the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty installation at the Metropolitan Museum. The retrospective of McQueen’s short but hugely influential career is nothing short of spectacular, giving a real insight into McQueen’s creative process and the themes which resonate throughout his collections; life or death, lightness or darkness, predator and prey, man versus machine.
I went into this exhibition largely unaware of McQueen’s contribution to fashion over the last decade, but left immensely impacted by this artist who managed to consistently blend the macabre and the saccharine into something ether-worldly and, ultimately, shockingly beautiful. As Andrew Bolton, curator of the exhibition, refers to it, the idea of the sublime was fundamental to McQueen’s work.
I was particularly drawn to McQueen’s unique method of incorporating natural materials into his designs. The concept of the natural world asserting it’s power over humanity’s echoes throughout the breadth of his collections, especially prevalent in his final, posthumous, show which predicts a future in which “the ice cap would melt … the waters would rise and … life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. Humanity [would] go back to the place from whence it came.”
Personally, I was enamored by McQueen’s use of feathers (an aesthetic which continued to crop up), and in his SS07 collection his use of fresh flowers to create dresses that, as they withered, resonate in much the same way the Dutch masters’ still lifes do. There is a visceral quality to pieces like these.
McQueen managed to consistently theme his season’s contributions around a narrative. For me, the stand out dress of the exhibition hails from McQueen’s SS03 collection Irene, where “the collection told the story of a shipwreck at sea and the subsequent landfall in the Amazon, and it was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians.” The dress itself, simply known as ‘Oyster’ is best described by Sarah Burton, McQueen’s Creative Director: he wanted it to seem “almost like she drowned—and the top part of the dress is all fine boning and tulle, and the chiffon is all frayed and disheveled on the top. The skirt is made out of hundreds and hundreds of circles of organza. Then, with a pen, what Lee did was he drew organic lines. And then all these circles were cut, joined together, and then applied in these lines along the skirt. So you created this organic, oyster-like effect.” It apparently took a team of three people, working exclusively on this dress, several months to complete. Worth it? Undoubtedly.
I love that Alexander McQueen was never afraid to push the boundaries - whether with regard to a silhouette or his choice of raw materials, his career is marked by creativity and courage. The exhibition was an eye-opening experience, and if you’re in New York you should definitely make the effort to immerse yourself in McQueen’s world.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & THIRTY.
March04
You probably remember this post about Koralie & Supakitch, two uber talented French grafitti artists based in New York. This new quick video, again shot by Elroy, does a superb job of getting into their creative space. In other news, I want Supakitch’s haircut.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & TWENTY THREE.
October28
This mixed media wall installation by Supakitch + Koralie is so so so good.
Found via M&C Saatchi
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & EIGHT.
September19
What creative hasn’t felt misunderstood by his or her family? In their documentary How To Explain It To My Parents, Dutch collaborators Lernert Engleberts & Sander Plug (the guys behind that melting chocolate bunny short) let us play fly on the wall to a number of artists discussing their work with their olds.
NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FIVE.
September16
I’m so glad Leonie, Chris and I got our ayes into gee a couple of Fridays ago and headed down to the opening night of the exhibition of Kevin Tran’s new body of work Strobe at China Heights. Previously unfamiliar with Tran’s work, I was hugely impressed by his bold, geometric infused images of animal, mineral, vegetable… well not so much the vegetable, but you get the point.
Tran applied a combination of chalk pastel, acrylic, gouache, water colour, Indian ink and pencil onto plywood panels to create this series, which he indicates was birthed out of that particular energy and rhythm found within the crowds of people, places and memories that define the balmy nights of a hot Summer.
If you didn’t already get to it, the exhibition is unfortunately over. But keep an eye on Tran’s blog for future shows. This is definitely one kid to watch.
More images after the break.
