Rise of the Genderqueer Model

Gabriella Peñuela.

Gabriella Peñuela.

…those who identify as genderqueer say their moment appears to be finally coming. And perhaps no other industry is putting genderqueer into focus as much as the fashion business, with models such as Dove becoming increasingly common on the runways of fashion capitals and the pages of glossy magazines.

“Fashion reflects the culture that it’s part of, it’s one of its most important jobs,” says Wayne Sterling, a fashion industry trend spotter who is co-founder of Models.com and mentor to Dove. “I’m not going to be naïve and say we’ve woken up in a wonderful new era of tolerance and understanding. But there are 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds who are processing the experience and saying, ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of. The issue is not with me, the issue is with society and its limitations.’”

“The genderless phenomenon has been building up its reach for quite a while now,” says Angelo Flaccavento, a fashion critic and contributor to The Business of Fashion, in an email. “Think of the cult-like growth of a brand like Rick Owens, which has been at the forefront of the phenomenon, or the rise of Jonathan Anderson. Both these designers generated followers, admirers and copycats.”

“Their number is sufficiently big to make 2015 the year of the genderless,” he adds.

Genderqueer models can play an important role in this cultural shift, says Jo B. Paoletti, associate professor in American Studies at the University of Maryland, where she specializes in fashion and gender. “Civil rights are won when they have a human face. For the general public to see that sex is non-binary, and that sexuality and gender occupy a continuum (and may shift over a person’s lifetime), they need to understand it on a personal, not theoretical level.”

Full Article Here. They get bonus points for explaining the difference between gender identity and gender expression.

Cool Stuff Friday

Punk Portraits in Pink, by Scott Scheidly, are simply fabulous. Many of them made me laugh in delight. I’m only going to include two here, be sure to go see the rest.

While most people find PINK funny, “I have been told to kill myself because of the Spock piece (you know how Trekkies are), the Russians said that there are people coming to get me for my Putin pieces, and one lady lost her mind in a gallery over the Pope John Paul piece.

Whhhyyyyyy? I *love* Emo Spock. Nimoy would have loved Emo Spock, it would have made him laugh. I’d buy it in a second if it weren’t sold. And Care Bear Putin? Adorable. Reagan keeps making me laugh. Only time he’s ever done that.

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Reagan Hates Me

Emo Spock

Emo Spock

Via Creators Project.

Toshiba 1400 FL Typewriter, 1940

Toshiba 1400 FL Typewriter, 1940

Today every tweet is archived, every Facebook selfie stashed and cached, every arts/tech/culture blog mirrored, and the idea of the permanence of data is taken for granted. But things like physical objects aren’t permanent. They break down, melt, or are tossed in the trash, and could potentially disappear from public consciousness forever, leaving behind but a foggy memory. Thngs, a digital database for the preservation of physical objects, wants to change that. Billing itself as “A place for everything,” this new system allows users to interact with objects old and new, whether they be a bust of Emperor Vitellius from the 1800s, or the Spice Girls-branded Polaroid Spice Cam from 1997.

Thngs co-founder Dima Dewinn comes from a background in social design and architecture, but quickly became interested in the preservation of physical items. Calling in from Moscow, Dewinn explains, “We were learning for a long time about the philosophy of the preservation of an entity. About all the things that we are surrounding ourselves with. All the things that we adore, we don’t know much about them because there’s no such thing as a Wikipedia of things.” So Dewinn set out “to make a tool that would preserve and structurize data of the material world. And we wanted to make it sexy.”

It’s an interestin’ place, have a look around. You can add to it, too.

Photographic Delusions

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Vik Muniz is an innovative artist who creates imagery within a nexus of diverse media. Working with a dizzying array of unconventional materials—including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, and junk—Muniz painstakingly builds tableaux before recording them with his camera. From a distance, the subject of each resulting photograph is discernible; up close, the work reveals a complex and surprising matrix through which it was assembled. That revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist.

Muniz’s work often quotes iconic images from popular culture and art history, drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying easy classification and mischievously engaging a viewer’s process of perception. His more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to explore issues of scale and to unveil both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye.

This major mid-career retrospective canvasses more than twenty-five years of Muniz’s work to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, reminding us of the power of art to surprise, delight, and transform our perceptions of the world.

The exhibit will be showing through August 21st, 2016. If you’re in Atlanta, take a look.

Vik Muniz was also the driving force of the documentary Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land), 2010. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

100 Year Old Anti-War Graffiti to Be Saved

The cells of Richmond Castle, which have over 5,000 drawings on them, will now be preserved by English Heritage. Credit: English Heritage


The cells of Richmond Castle, which have over 5,000 drawings on them, will now be preserved by English Heritage.
Credit: English Heritage

Richmond Castle has been standing since shortly after William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066.

Throughout its long history, the fortress in North Yorkshire has held a lot of prisoners. Surprisingly, it was still being used for this purpose as recently as 100 years ago, during World War I.

Conscientious objectors — people who refused to take part in the war on moral or religious grounds — were held in the castle’s tiny cells.

And while they were there, they scratched messages of protest and pictures into its walls. A kind of World War I graffiti.

Since then, the castle walls have been crumbling away, threatening to erase those historical marks.

But now the structure is going to be saved, thanks to a grant of half a million dollars just approved to preserve the site.

[…]

The identities of many of the graffiti artists remain unknown, but according to Leyland, some of the drawings were made by a group who came to be known as the “Richmond Sixteen.”

Imprisoned in the castle for refusing to take part in the war effort, the group was then forcibly sent to France to carry out non-combat roles on the front.

When they continued to resist, they were sentenced to death by firing squad. But “in a dramatic scene, their sentences were reduced to 10 years of hard labor,” said Leyland.

“But they were willing to go all the way and face the ultimate deterrent. They would rather be killed than kill.”

Bert Brocklesby, one of the so-called Richmond Sixteen, drew this delicate sketch of his fiancée, Annie Wainwright. Credit: English Heritage

Bert Brocklesby, one of the so-called Richmond Sixteen, drew this delicate sketch of his fiancée, Annie Wainwright. Credit: English Heritage

Full Story Here.

The Rich Forks

#RichForks (The Beginning of an exhibition touring our unequal world)

#RichForks (The Beginning of an exhibition touring our unequal world)

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Endless high quality food and drink, silver service and luxury hotel rooms adorn the daily routines of the idle rich these days more than ever. It’s no surprise that this occurs when only 62 people own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people on this planet. Luxury items including 5/6 star hotel food and wine is always at the finger tips of the extremely wealthy. And they don’t lift a finger when it comes to washing the silverware, setting the tables or cooking the exorbitantly priced food. Thousands of hotel workers (waiters, chefs, stewards/dishwashers, laundry workers) bend over backwards, working ridiculous hours to bring food and wine to the mouths of the world’s extremely wealthy. And many of these workers can barely afford housing, let alone food on a daily basis. But this daily routine of the world’s obscenely rich – having access to free, high quality cuisine while attending corporate functions,  is hidden from many of us.

What if artefacts from this political/cultural activity of the wealthy class were taken from under their noses and displayed to the public? This exhibition is a result of that exact task. Taking something back. Re-appropriating a tiny piece of the vast amount of wealth stolen from us (recall the trillions of public money used to bailout the banks post GFC?). So, this is an exhibition for the people, by people. It’s a small gesture, but symbolically and perhaps artistically, it can mean the world.

Luxury dinner forks have been collected over a 15 year period, complete with the saliva and food stains of their users, and will be displayed in public/community spaces.

This exhibition at Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Gabriel Gallery will be the first in a series of #RichFork exhibitions touring the world in the years to come. It is no accident that the venues chosen for this touring series are venues ostensibly run by local communities, labour groups and/or publicly funded spaces.

There is more about Van T. Rudd’s current work here.

And with this post, I’ll be leaving you for the day, I have to go into town to see my neurologist. Have fun, and don’t burn the blog down while I’m gone. Stealing forks is okay.

19th Century Photo Studio Built in 1:12 Scale.

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Absolutely astonishing work by Ali Alamedy.

Turkey-based artist Ali Alamedy had been building miniature sets for seven years when he came across documentation of Charles Miner’s photography studio from the early 1900s. Inspired by the way sunlight was used to illuminate studio sets, Alamedy decided to build his own version in 1:12 scale. The project took him over nine months, using hundreds of feet of wood, and building more than 100 miniature objects designed specifically to fit the era.

Due to few images being available of photography studios at that time, Alamedy read extensively to figure out what tools, techniques, styles, and colors were used within the studios (all images were in black and white). One of the hardest challenges during the completion of the model was the camera, as each fold in the bellow in real life is just 3 cm. The final 1:12 scale camera has 124 2 mm folds that were all meticulously created by hand.

Via Colossal Art, where there are many more photos of Alamedy’s work.

Hair

Hair

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I can do some very odd things when I desperately need to play. No, I didn’t cut my hair, the current growth is longer. I came across an old ponytail I didn’t know I had – I thought they had all been donated.

© C. Ford.

Art Exhibition Reeks of Cultural Appropriation.

Courtesy Douglas Flanders and Associates An art exhibition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is causing a stir over the artist's use of Native American imagery.

Courtesy Douglas Flanders and Associates
An art exhibition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is causing a stir over the artist’s use of Native American imagery.

For over 200 years, non-Natives have appropriated Native American culture for their own intents and purposes. The sphere is wide when it comes to the misuse of Native American culture; appropriation can be seen in sports mascots, fashion and design, product logos; the list goes on and on. The problem with this current mainstream model is that it denies Indigenous people the right to represent their own lifeways and worldview.

The show “Scott Seekins, the New Eden” at the Douglas Flanders and Associates Art Gallery, is being touted as Seekins response to the “Great Sioux Uprising of 1862.” Seekins’s “body of work as an alternative to Minnesota’s tepid 2012 150-year remembrance,” as the gallery touts on its website, is problematic in its interpretation, as it reeks of Native appropriation, and lacks a Native voice.

Scott Seekins, a mainstay of the Minneapolis art scene, is best known for his eccentric dress and demeanor as opposed to the quality of his work. This particular collection of Seekins’s work imitates historic Plains style of drawing (erroneously referred to as ledger art), where he replicates scenes, moves the images around, and inserts himself in a sort of Forrest Gump manner. To be clear, Plains style drawings were a warrior’s record of bravery against the enemy, hunting scenes, courtship, and ceremonial life, these accounts were drawn in accountant ledgers and sketchbooks.

Seekins’s work is the quintessential example of cultural appropriation.

In Seekins’s painting, a clear replica of John Casper Wild’s “Watercolor Painting of Fort Snelling,” (1884), Seekins portrays himself guiding a non-Native woman holding a baby, in the background there are tipis and the fort on the bluff. In another drawing created in the historic Plains graphic style, a Native man has defeated an enemy Calvary, while Seekins, wearing his iconic suit, stands with his arms raised. By placing himself in these historical scenes he positions himself as a mediator and witness. By doing this he disregards the Native American narrative. Considering that this is one of the worst tragedies between the United States Government and American Indians, the U.S. Dakota War of 1862 and its aftermath has had a long lasting impact on the descendants of the Dakota that died. Many Dakota died at Fort Snelling and on the gallows in Mankato, their descendants carry the spirit of their Ancestors with them, they live among us, they are part of us, they are an important part of the Minnesota narrative.

You can read the rest of Joe D. Horse Capture’s article at ICTMN.

Woah.

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

 

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

 

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

Myths, Eiko Ojala.

Blown. Away. There’s much more of Ojala’s work at http://ploom.tv/ and Behance.

Estonian illustrator Eiko Ojalabrings a fantastic sense of depth and texture into his editorial illustrations by using carefully arranged layers of cut paper and shadows. The works are all assembled digitally, but the artist often incorporates his own photos to achieve the desired effect.

Via Colossal Art.