Target: The Tiny Tyrant. Brilliant!

As always, artists are at the forefront of the latest Tiny Tyrant Total Fuck Up, brilliantly skewering Trump’s idiotic, uniformed, grossly mistaken decision to withdraw from the Climate Accord. Apparently, Trump asked “at what point do they start laughing at America”, being utterly oblivious to how people have viewed this lost country since his campaign and election. Ever the Fucking Idiot.

Marian Kamensky, America First. Click for full size.

You can see more of Marian’s shiny skewering here.

 

Vasco Gargalo, Little Man.

You can see more of Vasco’s work here.

Ose Koer.

You can see more of Ose’s work here.

David Rowe. Excusez Moi.

You can see more of David’s extremely sharp work here.

You can see more at Raw Story.

At Play.

I love doing peeled paint pieces. They are sheer fun. The hard part is waiting for it all to dry, so you can peel it. Acrylics, of course, are the medium of choice here. For paints, inks, and so on, which aren’t so peelable, you can use a fluid medium laid down first. The transparency is nice, and can be used on its own too. I prefer Liquitex, but most any would do. I did a peeled paint piece for Marcus, on a canvas with a heavily textured, black background.  Click for full size.

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The Remains.

After finishing Rose Hork, I scraped it all into the blender, and had a bit of fun. For what was basically syrup and rose bits, it dried remarkably well, and is quite stable. I did add a bit of food colouring, which never made it into the original. Oh, and on the Rose Hork post, I said I kept my hair out of the syrup. I was wrong.

© C. Ford.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Sharif Hamza.

Sharif Hamza.

London-born, New York-based image maker Sharif Hamza collaborated with make up artist Georgina Graham and video artist Tony Oursler to create the photography project “Purple. Oursler”.

You can see and read more at iGNANT.

 

無料欲望/yoshi47 from GOOKUDA on Vimeo.

Mural for “Forest For the Trees” in Portland.

The art of Yoshi47 is a must see, vibrant, engaged, happily psychedelic, and mindful. You can see much more, and read more at Spoon & Tamago.

 

And last, but not least, TOIO!

Toio, at first glance, is stunningly simple: the core of the toy is just 2 white cubes with wheels. But don’t be fooled by their appearance. The tiny cubes pack a whole lot of tech. They respond to motion, are able to detect the exact location of the other, and can be programmed but also remote controlled.

It would seem that the possibilities for toio are endless, which is why the developers teamed up with various creatives and designers to come up with various craft sets that help kids explore what robots can do. You can create your own robotic beast and battle others, you can play board games with them and you can make obstacle courses for them to go through. Sony has even teamed up with Lego for this project, allowing kids to build Lego structures on top of their robots.

But one of the most attractive features is a craft set designed by the folks behind the lovable PythagoraSwitch TV segment. It’s a simple paper set that encourages kids to join the two white cubes using paper. The cubes then interact with each other and come alive, resulting in different movements.

Check out the videos to get a better sense of what toio can do. Sony has released a limited quantity of toio sets that start at 21,557 yen (about $200 USD) and go up to 33,415 (about $300 USD) depending on how many craft sets you want to add on.

Via Spoon & Tamago.

The Tiny Tyrant’s Hatred of Art.

CREDIT: Flickr/Knight Foundation.

Many people who live rural know just how vital art can be to keeping small towns alive. Art attracts people, creative communities attract people, and small towns get a permanent economic boost, along with younger people deciding to stay, or return, along with new people moving to the area. The NEA is vital to this effort, but if you go by the Regime, the NEA is one of those leftist, elite snobbery deals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump and his henchman Mulvaney cite rural people and towns as a reason to kill off funding the NEA, which simply highlights their ignorance and indifference. This is yet another way the Tiny Tyrant is making sure to screw over all those rural voters and communities.

…Now Fergus Falls can boast that it attracts artists to the area, as well as other people drawn to the quality of life an artsy town can create. “Artists can play a huge role in making communities more attractive to live,” said Michele Anderson, rural program director for Springboard and one of the three staff members who moved to Fergus Falls for the job. “People that maybe thought of their art more as a hobby [are] realizing, ‘Oh, this is something that can make my community a more livable place, it can help inform our future.’”

The sense of pride in the town has been contagious, Anderson says. In recent years clothing shops, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, and even a brewery have opened up downtown.

“We’ve done exactly what an investor would want to see: taken the [NEA] money and leveraged it into private investment,” Zabel said. “As a return on investment, that small amount of public dollars has really meant a lot of leverage and visibility and a lot of investment into that community.”

A common misconception about the NEA is that it funds elite art in wealthier coastal cities and towns. That’s the kind of reasoning offered up by the Trump administration, which has released two budget documents that would completely shut the NEA down starting in 2018.

[…]

About 40 percent of NEA projects are in high-poverty neighborhoods, while 14 percent of NEA grants are for projects that at least partially impact rural areas. Another quarter of state agency grants are awarded to rural places, many of which disperse NEA money.

That funding helps bring huge economic benefits to those communities. The arts and culture sector nationally contributes $729.6 billion to the country’s economy, composing 4.2 percent of GDP. That share that has grown by about 35 percent since 1998. The sector employs 4.8 million people.

[…]

It certainly has been for Lanesboro, Minnesota, a town of about 750 people. The $50,000 NEA grant that Lanesboro Arts received allowed the organization to finish raising the money it needed to renovate a historic theater into an arts residency and performance space, hiring local contractors, electricians, plumbers, and other construction workers in the process. The community was also able to leverage the money to hire consultants who put in place guidelines for its historic downtown, which businesses then used to redo their storefronts, investing even more money in the area. More than $2.5 million has now been invested in downtown Lanesboro.

“The results of getting an NEA grant had a lot of ripple effects, not just for our organization but for the community,” said John Davis, executive director of Lanesboro Arts. “Getting one small grant really allowed us to have this upward momentum of success.”

Those projects in turn have put Lanesboro on the map. “The funding from the NEA… really helped solidify Lanesboro as a strong arts community,” he said. The same year it got the funding it was named one of the top 10 small-town art places in the country, while the next year it received the 2014 Bush Prize for Community Innovation. That’s vital for the town to continue to flourish; it’s specifically trying to convince artists and their families to move to Lanesboro.

“How do you sustain small towns, how do you attract new business, how do you attract families to move?” Davis asked. “These are all byproducts of NEA funding… It adds water to the seeds to make a stronger community.”

There’s much more here. Arts of all types are absolutely vital to all humans, and to all human endeavors. Whether it’s visual arts, textiles, television, food, music, or any other type of art, it’s something we all crave. Arts allow for more positive socialness among people, and sparks a chain of creativity. Where there is art, there is thought and communication. Art is the very best of us. Art helps to educate us, to lift us up. We cannot bear the loss of arts, because if we sanction this, we sanction the loss of humanity as well.

Every Penis Tells A Story.

‘Once somebody has bared their body, they are much more likely to bare their soul. You get a much better interview after the picture.’ Photograph: Laura Dodsworth.

This is a truly absorbing project from Laura Dodsworth, author and photographer of Manhood: The Bare Reality. It’s not the photos of all the penises which fascinate; most people have seen more than one, it’s the people attached to said penises, and their stories about the various tangles of manhood and the ever elusive sense of masculinity. I found myself sitting down with a cuppa to read all the stories at the Guardian, and I will buy the book.

Warning: NSFW.  Have a care peeking below the fold, there are penises lurking.

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Rose Hork.

It had to be done. Explanation here. Click for full size, bits of the process after the finished piece photo. I think I may have actually managed to keep my hair out of the syrup. :D I did this on a white trifold, and when it came time to photograph it, I carried it outside, which is why it ended up with the pretty sky-ish background. Media: Karo Lite Syrup, roses (flower, stem, leaf, thorn), water.

Rose Hork, C. Ford.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Spite Your Face.

CN: misogyny, violence, rape. Have a care before continuing.

Rachel Maclean:

13 May – 26 November 2017
Chiesa di Santa Caterina, Fondamenta Santa Caterina, 30121, Cannaregio
Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 6pm, free entry (also open Monday 15 May)

Rachel Maclean is representing Scotland at the 57th International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, with major new film commission Spite Your Face – a modern-day, dark Venetian fairytale presented as a large-scale portrait projection at the altar of a deconsecrated church.

Rachel Maclean, Spite Your Face, 2017, digital video (still). Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Alchemy Film & Arts in partnership with Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh on behalf of Scotland + Venice.

In Venice’s Chiesa di Santa Caterina, I am sitting in a pew, looking up to where the altar would normally be, watching the distinct yet unfamiliar movements of a gigantic nose being masturbated. A blue, gloved hand runs up and down its glittering gold length, and its owner, a cartoonish young perfume-purveying influencer named Pic, groans with pleasure. “I intended it to be shocking,” says Scottish artist Rachel Maclean, of her contribution to Scotland’s presence in Venice during the Biennale, a 35-minute, looping film with no beginning or end, that follows Pic on a morality tale that pits his conscience against his greed.

[…]

It would be hard not to see the political significance of the piece, in a world where outright lies appear to be de rigeur for anyone in the public eye. “I was disturbed by the ways in which lies had been used in the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign, in a lazy sense, to substantiate a political narrative or an idea,” Maclean says. “I started writing the script in December last year and it was a scary time…” One narrative that stands out from the film is the idea of a transformation of fortune, a rags-to-riches redemption (or riches-to-rags, depending on which order you watch the film in), that sees a destitute young boy wind up as shill for a perfume brand called “Untruth.” This creates a fake corporate illusion, in comparison to the magic “Truth” one given to him by his fairy godmother.

“I’ve always been interested in perfume because it seems absurd,” says Maclean. “Really, it’s just a bottle of smelly liquid but it’s packaged in this way that not only makes the object into something more valuable, but it also suggests that you spraying it onto yourself transforms you into something more powerful and alluring.” This idea of a transformative solution to society’s problems critiques these myths that we are told about social mobility: lean in, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, it’s the American Dream. “I was interested in the compassionless aspect of it. The narrative suggests, if you work hard enough and if you dream it, you can do it. It’s a convenient way to gloss over the lack of social mobility in our society,” adds Maclean.

Another uncomfortable moment comes right after the unforgettable nose-onanism, where Pic’s guardian angel joins him in the sexual act. Pic becomes enraged at a perceived insult and ends up brutally raping this maternal figure. It’s uncomfortable, in fact, almost unbearable to watch, even though it’s still, absurdly, carried out by the character’s nose, lengthened from all those lies. “I’ve been disturbed by the rise in visible misogyny,” Maclean says, when asked about this scene. “There’s a level of immunity to it—where we’re just not affected by it. I wanted the rape scene to feel palpably violent and difficult to watch, so that it’s able to break through the surface of that a little bit.”

Rachel Maclean, Spite Your Face, 2017, digital video (still). Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Alchemy Film & Arts in partnership with Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh on behalf of Scotland + Venice.

The Creators Project has the full story, and more photos. There’s also more at Scotland and Venice.  I have no doubt this is both and impressive and disturbing work; not one I would find easy to sit through, but I would like to see it all the same.

Oooh, Cry Some More, Boys.

Greg Rucka said Wonder Woman’s queer identity was important to the narrative. Photograph: Frank Cho/DC Comics.

Greg Rucka said Wonder Woman’s queer identity was important to the narrative. Photograph: Frank Cho/DC Comics.

Time to get drunk on tears once again. Some screenings of Wonder Woman have had a Women Only night, and all the dudes are upset.

“Wonder Woman” may be a feminist icon, but some male moviegoers aren’t happy about some scheduled women-only screenings of the film.
The controversy began when the famous Alamo Drafthouse cinema in Austin, Texas, announced it would be hosting a screening of the new movie, which stars Gal Gadot as the superhero.

“Apologies, gentlemen, but we’re embracing our girl power and saying ‘No Guys Allowed’ for one special night at the Alamo Ritz,” the announcement read. “And when we say ‘People Who Identify As Women Only,’ we mean it. Everyone working at this screening — venue staff, projectionist, and culinary team — will be female.”

That didn’t go over well with some men, judging by the comments on the theater’s Facebook page.
“Apparently ‘equality’ is only selective nowadays,” one person wrote. “How about a ‘men’s only’ showing of a movie or is that not how equality works?”

Why no, that is not how equality works, you crybaby of a cupcake.

The Alamo responded to many of the negative comments, pointing out that they have hosted screenings for select groups before, including veterans for military films, and that it’s about a celebration of the Wonder Woman character.

Hmmm, I’ll just bet there wasn’t any leaking of man tears over a veteran’s screening. So, cry some more, dudes, cry enough for us all to get drunk!

Full story at CNN, beware autoplay. Hat Tip to Saad.