Sunday 10 May 2009

Matt Bryans



http://www.katemacgarry.com/mattbryans_large.php?18

Monday 4 May 2009

Rachel Wright


Rachel Wright is an American artist who got her Fine Art degree in 1991.

Her work looks like it draws upon early anatomical drawing and New Age crap. The result is beautiful diagrams of the body transferred onto silk dresses by means of appliqueing fabric in the shapes of organs and circulatory systems. They're over lapped and the textures are interesting and the line formality lends to the pieces a great deal.

Some of the dresses look like Pagan diagrams of the body and others look like cut-aways of the dress and skin to reveal the insides. Others look like maps and theories.

'String of Pearls' refers to the spinal column

Pnuema is a dress with lungs on it:

Pneuma (πνεύμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath," and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul."
(good old wikipedia there.)






Saturday 2 May 2009

desert island

damn it. what I have tapped into IS very American. Well the published stuff is. There are still minute details to be observed here, I'm sure. It's just infuriating how the US sometimes seems like the entire world. When i hear of anything extraordinary or a huge phenomena, it's barely touching relevance with the context I'm pressed into. In a way i feel like the reporter that arrives after every protest is moved on, after all the bodies have been removed from the scene.

Oh boo hoo.

still, this semi-affiliation is interesting. Maybe it's horrible to be in the thick of it all.

http://loo.me/2008/05/15/generation-me/

The books are eating me alive.

I want to define

one's ability to marvel non-retrospectively at how those around them function in the dysfunctional cultural climate they live in.

Maybe it's a new strand of cynicism


I'm getting too deep into Generation X. and also Fight Club theories.

This in itself is fascinating...that this kind of thinking can be observed and learned from novels. Ouch!

There need to be a new breed of intelligence defined too.

It's like...sub-pop culture. = It's popular. It's ideologies perhaps aren't.
Or they are elaborated to the point where it doesn't seem very cool anymore. Just pessimistic.


-Where people learn their ideals and ethics codes solely from books and music and media. As opposed to life. Really REAL life.
"We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars -- but we won't. And we're learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed-off."


Fight Club.

I was just writing a cue card for my presentation and Generation X reminded me of this.

I'm a little bit worried about getting too caught up in this. Because it is a very American out break. Or is it? maybe it's a world wide epidemic.

Andrea Dezos

"my sister was a rubber accident." The latter image includes a blue condom surrounded by beaded spermatozoa with wriggling metallic-thread tails.Such homey and intimate details recall Philip Larkin's pithy lament: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad"
R.C. Baker
--The Village Voice


"folk wisdom - conjours the dark heart of Transylvanian womanhood'




http://a.parsons.edu/~dezsoa/index.html




Dezos is a Romanian artist. Her work most relevant to mine is the embroidery.

Each piece from 'Lessons From My Mother' starts 'My Mother Claimed That' and follows with more often than not, a scare mongering, highly speculative, suspicious - superstitious belief.

I can just imagine the artist's mother as a stoic old woman with little sense of humour and a penchant for sharing 'too much information'. She delivers this in an off handed manner as though the recipient is supposed to learn a lesson rather than be embarrassed. Although secretly she would find this a little amusing. Maybe privately smiling at her daughter's look of horror. Sometimes she would let a small laugh somewhere between glee and a chest infection and slap her hand on the heavy oak table.

do they even have oak trees in Romania?

More to the point. Rachel found me this artist as the stitching and regular imagery of bodies reminded her of the recent work i've been doing. There is a clear juxtaposition however, as Dezos' work lends from traditional embroidery samplers -

http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/cms/wp-content/gallery/belongings/people/williams/images/embroidery.jpg

like this, where as i feel mine looks more like New Age hippie bullshit. However I am most conscious of this due to previously being told that I'm vegetarian because i have dreadlocks/look a bit New Age hippie bullshitty.

MORE to the point. The quality of the stiching is interesting. Mine is machine embroidered because i avoid anything that has to be hand sewn like the plague. In some ways i hope that sewing can be seen as more of a drawing tool than constantly refering to the historical context of women sewing women sewing women sewing which i am sick of. If i ever show my work anywhere, i think to avoid this 'so why do you sew and what contexts do you think this lends to your work?' question i will shoot a water gun at anyone who asks me. There will be pre warning though. I don't want to super soak someone and seem rude. On the other hand, if it is a hot day then people might ask me this question more and more. I'd better fill it with ketchup.

This is starting to sound more like a blog than a research file.

Obviously, the artist's actual mother may not have been this person. But even so, the persona feels resonant (if not a little stereotypical..) of Eastern European ethics and morals. I like the handed down with a little fear-on-the-side feel. The 'fear of God' kind of fear. If you replace 'God' with the worry of not getting married and producing lots of offspring for you mother and you life failing because of this. Disappointment, shame etc. But maybe the scaring that comes with the information, echoes the fears of the one passing it.

The formality of the work holds interesting qualities. These look like the sort of thing old Romanian women might hang in their houses. But these ones are slightly warped. Almost making fun of, but also tributing them.

as if the artist as a young girl believed her mother until she grew up, went west and saw her sheltered life for what it was. At first she felt deprived and tricked, but after a while she saw her mother's actions as protecting.






Friday 1 May 2009

The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair

WHY?

This is to be ingested with a tone of irony. The soupy looking lyrics about faking suicide are as dry as the crunch of iceburg lettuce leaves. This music is good for you. Nutritiously good. Suspiciously good.


The Vowels Pt.2

i'm not a ladies man, i'm a landmine
filming my own fake death
under an '88 cavalier i go
but-but-but-but nothing but the rear bumper's blown
but i's born for this flight,
united 955 on the fifth of july
back the s over y
i join the dark side
in a thin disguise
on consumer grade video at night


faking suicide for applause
in the food courts of malls
and cursing racing horses on tiered steps
playing the wall at singles bingo
all-time gringo
did anyone hear me cry there
through a toilet stall divider
i swear i care, raw


i am an example of a calculated birth
two a star chart for clowns, im not

under robin eggs in a nest, you hit a manila
envelope with one last little robin's egg in it

a hollow bullet yet spent
subject to dismissal
i wish all my pitfalls
could be called my miscalls

cherie-a cherie-e cherie-i cherie-o cherie-u




http://www.last.fm/music/Why%3F/_/The+Vowels+Pt.+2


And if you don't believe me listen to Alopecia.

Generation X




stinking of aftershave with headphones in and head down.


i can't help but think that the point is being missed. Can you see this? aftershave - what is it for? headphones - what do they mean?

is it a contradiction that is born from the need to buy things?

you could see it as aftershave - musk and headphones - yellow and black poisonous caterpillars in your ears. leave me alone.

we are missing the point and it's glorious!

people create...new juxtapositions. and they would be fabulous and fascinating if it wasn't for the epidemic of this misinforming.

Ross Sinclair


www.rosssinclair.co.uk

Ross Sinclair: The work is full of accusation and (i loath to say) 'attitude' ...i would be better off saying Hostility, Venom, Vitriol....etc. That sort of area. It's all about politics, culture and how you can shout about these things. There is a feeling of protest. but there is also a feeling that he is on his own in realising the things he feels so strongly about? that was a weak sentence. I mean that The work almost feels like an unorthodox teaching method, rather than a display of work. It feels like demonstration. But the element of preaching is not really there...because he doesn't show us his face.






"Taking his cue from traditional Seventies’ performance and its links to political activism Ross Sinclair began to reference the side of youthculture which we nowadays encounter in the GATT riots, colourful and energetic but underlined with pertinent anger against the powerlessness of the individual.



In celebration and critique Sinclair comments on his indebtedness to performance art by exposing the tattoo REAL LIFE emblazoned on his bare back. By not revealing his face as identifier but instead turning his vulnerable back to the audience Ross Sinclair has introduced a current variation of self-portraiture. He denies himself to the audience whilst offering his trust in a gesture. Continuous photographic and video documentation of this gesture from 1994 to this day in changing contexts attest to the validation of this work as the longest symbolic performance appropriated to contemporary art production."



-http://www.theagencygallery.co.uk/SinclairGeography.html

Wednesday, 29 April 2009


Lucy Orta may be the link between ' The Human Pods' and 'Bull Shit Guru and Generation X.'

This is quite an exciting revelation. The architecture of The Human Pods is within her work but then the...need for resiliance and defence against our own culture is very interesting. the wearable tents she made were for the homeless. They are waterproof and ...livable? I'm not that sure how easy it would be to function daily in one. but then the homeless are a dysfunctional by product of society...with comparitviely dysfunctional lives anyway.

Well maybe not a byproduct in entirity. but they spin off of society at some rate. and the world will always have the homeless probably. and society can probably be blamed for most cases. Yes.


that's my justifation done.







putting things into boxes and connecting them with strings of relation

This is for my 'Research File'. A mandatory compilation of research. Including artists, books, music and the like.

And Yes, I am going to cheat and copy and paste some writing i have in other blogs and add to it. Because it's relevant.