From rq, click for full size! Very nice work, I like the second in particular, it’s very reminiscent of Art Deco advertising.
© rq, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
From rq, click for full size! Very nice work, I like the second in particular, it’s very reminiscent of Art Deco advertising.
© rq, all rights reserved.
Men using Mexico City’s metro trains got a shock when they sat down on a seat featuring a lifelike penis.
Campaigners against sexual violence placed the seat, which is moulded in the shape of a male body – complete with genitals, on public transport in a drive designed to show men the difficulties women face every day.
A note on the floor in front of the seat read: “It’s uncomfortable to sit here, but that’s nothing compared to the sexual violence suffered by women on their commute.”
A video promoting the stunt has been watched some 800,000 times on YouTube and is part of a UN Women campaign, alongside the Mexico City government, to tackle the problem of sexual assault.
In it, men can be seen leaping straight back up after trying to sit in the seat. Bemused, confused and disgusted expressions are seen on passengers’ faces as they catch sight of the moulding.
Mexico City moved in 2000 to make the first three carriages of metro trains women-only all day because of a surge in complaints about harassment, but it appears the problem remains.
This is a great idea, because it drives home the problem of harassment in a very real way, not only with the seat, but as you can see later in the video, the camera screens at the station were focusing in on men’s arses, much to their consternation and alarm. As a woman, it’s quite easy to laugh about the reaction of the men, because we spend whole lifetimes putting up with such shit, and it is always a difficult task to get the depth of the problem through to men. Here’s hoping this campaign does get more men to understand.
Holly Kearl, founder of the Stop Street Harassment campaign in the US, told the BBC: “Too often initiatives around women’s safety focus on what women should or should not do, so it is refreshing to see a creative campaign aimed at men.”
On YouTube, the reaction was not universally positive.
One angry male commenter condemned the video as “misandrist” and said it accused an “entire gender” over the actions of an “idiotic and uneducated percentage”.
A woman wrote under the video: “These misandrist campaigns make me angry. To other women I say, ‘Don’t you have sons, fathers or partners? Do you agree with generalising and demonising the male sex in this way?’”
As there has been little done to diminish centuries worth of generalising and demonising women, I’d say when that sort of shit stops, we can stop targeting those who commit the highest levels of harassment. Why is is alright to continue on with the “don’t do this! don’t do that!” garbage women and girls get from day one? Why is it not alright to target harassers and rapists? Those campaigns actually work. And the standard disclaimer: No, not all men harass, assault, or rape. All men do know other men who do those things. All men know other men who are sexist assholes, who tell very nasty jokes about women, who complain constantly about how evil women are, so it’s okay to do this or that, and so on. And the probability is very high that most men don’t tackle all those other men about that sort of stuff. Until men stand up to other men, we won’t get far.
Full story here.
Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility. In celebration, and in the spirit of always learning, visit Jes Fan, and their work. Hyperallergic has a good look at Fan’s current body of work, No Clearance in the Niche, exhibiting at the Museum of Arts & Design, NYC, through April 30th.
Jes Fan, “Stranded between one act and another” (2016), polished resin, hair (all images courtesy of Museum of Arts & Design, unless noted).
If gender is learned and performed, as scholars like Judith Butler have argued, then can it also be reinforced at a biological, molecular level? Jes Fan’s No Clearance in the Niche poses this question by exploring how our bodies are already engineered, and the ways we can take control of engineering them better to serve our own needs and desires.
The exhibition stems from Fan’s experiences transitioning between genders and also between continents. As Fan explained to me before the opening, “I started thinking, how pervasive is the patriarchy in organizing power structures, and even bio-politically? Birth control pills are a cocktail of progestogens and estrogen. What are the feminizing effect on bodies who take birth control pills? Why are the bodies of uterus-owners policed more rigorously than others?” Fan’s work falls in line with much of the current discourse about the ways that drug use and administration are influenced by cultural, racial, and gender biases. Decisions about who has access to drugs and how they are packaged remains in the hands of a white capitalist patriarchy, and many marginalized people are forced to find ways to navigate these exclusionary policies.
Jes Fan, “Testo-candle” (2016), Depo-testosterone, lye, water, silicone base.
all photos courtesy parnassus.
Located roughly an hour north from central Tokyo is a fairly nondescript government building: Itakura Town Hall in Gifu prefecture. The building houses a small gallery that counts among its collections various obscure pottery work and paintings as well as a glass-enclosed sculpture of a Buddhist deity made from roughly 20,000 beetles in numerous varieties. If you have any form of entomophobia or insectophobia I suggest you don’t read on.
The sculpture was made almost 40 years ago in 1978 by a man named Yoneji Inamura, who was in his 50s at the time. We recently learned that Inamura had passed away earlier this year in January at the age of 98, which is what prodded us to look into his work.
Although Inamura created several sculptures out of beetles, he spent 6 years in the 1970s constructing this one, which has become his masterpiece and the largest sculpture he ever made. When it was done he donated it to the city.
The sculpture, made from rhinoceros beetles, winged jewel beetles, drone beetles, longhorn beetles and other types of local beetles, depicts the senju kannon bosatsu (1000-armed bodhisattva), a popular Buddhist deity in Japan.
You can see and read more at Spoon & Tamago.
Jade suit, unearthed from Tomb 2, Dayun Mountain, Xuyi, Jiangsu (2nd century BCE) (photo © Nanjing Museum).
Exceedingly wealthy, the royalty of the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) lived indulgently, and these aristocrats were determined to enjoy their accustomed luxuries in the afterlife as well. While their strong affinity for the extravagant is largely unrecorded in historical texts, modern archaeology has immensely helped to shed light on these lifestyles from 2,000 years ago. Since 2009, archaeologists have uncovered thousands of telling treasures buried in royal tombs that date to the Jiangdu kingdom. They found not only exquisite mortuary objects and finely crafted domestic wares but also artifacts that speak to the body’s needs and desires — including a number of ancient sex toys.
You can see and read more at Hyperallergic.
And last, an animal so Disneyfied it makes Disney animals look woefully inadequate:
You can see more of a Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrel here.
Oh, the work of Nemo Gould is so many things. Wonderful. Awesome. Imaginative. Out of the Box. Fun. Every good thing. His outlook relates very much to mine, and I love that, but it’s hard to see how anyone wouldn’t take joy in his work. Also, he has a thing for tentacled beings, what’s not to love? He even did work for the Monterey Aquarium!
Nemo Gould.
The Megalodon is Gould’s latest work, a 16-foot-long salvaged fuel tank from an F-94 bomber plane’s wing. The shark has working propellors for fins, and a tail that glides back and forth ominously. A cutaway on the side reveals various boiler and control rooms, each with their own delicately installed moving parts. It’s packed full of tiny human figures and whimsical creatures alike, all in mid-task as they operate their predatory underwater vessel.
The project took Gould a little over two years to finish. “I’d wanted to make a cutaway vessel for years, and had been putting objects aside for that purpose,” he explains. “I know it sounds backwards, but the tank was the last missing piece.” He found it at an aircraft salvage business, and from there he was able to assemble the final sculpture.
Gould says his process is a lot like solving a puzzle. “I maintain an extensive collection of things that I feel strongly about one way or another,” he says. “The challenge is to find which of the million potential relationships between these things could lead to the best art.” More so than his skills as an artist, machinist, fabricator, woodworker, et al., Gould says that “maintaining a vast, organized library of seemingly random objects is the real trick.”
Megalodon 2016 (extended) from Nemo Gould on Vimeo.
Just two more, and it’s killing me to not post all of them, and there are so many, so you’ll have to go visit!
Nemo Gould.
Cycloptopus is a fearsome hybrid of two of my favorite monsters, one real, one mythical. This creature is particularly dangerous because of its irritability. You’d be irritable too if you were powered by an open flame and your body was made of wood.
Materials:
Radio cabinets, rocking chairs, fake fireplace, decorative clock elements, cabinet knobs, wall paper, chair parts, lamp parts, wheel hub, motors, LEDs.
Nemo Gould.
I have been fascinated by the Giant Squid for quite some time. A real life, terrifying mystery of the deep.
I have posted a step-by-step essay of this piece with lots of process photos over at Instructables.com
Materials:
Street light covers, belt wheels, railing sections, brass fireplace hardware, candle sticks, drawer pulls, chandelier parts, wood planks, vanity mirror frame, timing motor, gear motor, LEDs, lawn sprinkler, pop rivets.
There are videos for most all the wondrous creations, showing them in their full glory and movement! Fair warning, you’ll be lost in Nemo’s world for a long time, but that is in no way a bad thing!
Oh, and don’t miss Octovarius! * Nemo Gould, Kinetic Sculpture from Found Materials. Go visit!
Via Make.
From rq, who says: A piece of large format art I ran across on the way to visit a friend. The name (from the back of the piece) seems to be “Laika Come Home”, which is also the title of a Gorillaz remix album by Spacemonkeyz – artist unknown. At first I thought its gaze might be significant, but the Russian embassy is too far out the right of the frame, where I tried to capture that. So who knows, probably just a tribute to the album. :) Still, a surprise!
Click for full size!
© rq, all rights reserved.
Tiny bits of a couple of paintings I was about to send off. Turns out no one in Bismarck has a 26″ box. Sigh. So, at least another week!
© C. Ford.
I think the whole concept of dolls is a creepy one, so I appreciate artists who embrace the creepy when it comes to dolls. Whatever your feelings might be, the work of all the artists is exquisite. The Creators Project has a feature on 5 Russian doll artists, who are doing new and wondrous work, because there’s going to be an International Art Exhibition in Amsterdam, in April, Art and Dolls. I do note that the art of dolls still remains stubbornly female focused. I’d like to see artists challenge that narrative a bit more. Let’s look at the featured Russian artists’ work a bit:
Sisters Popovy.
Michael Zajkov.
Tatyana Trifonova.
Lidia Krasko.
Polina Myalovskaya.
You can read and see more at The Creators Project.
BEYOND the EDGE – NTM 006 from Teun van der Zalm on Vimeo.
In the second quarter of 2015, I began to research an new project; “What lies beyond the edge of the Observable Universe?”. I began an experiment to visualize this through our universal language: Mathematics. In this series I continue my search for new nebula forms, using particles controlled by physics and noise. They are fully designed to work in a 3d engine.
Directed and Designed by Teun van der Zalm
SEASONS of NORWAY – A Time-Lapse Adventure from Turbin Film on Vimeo.
The best kind of heartache, from a heart almost bursting in awe over the magnificence of our planet, and a reminder of just how much we need to be caretakers of our planet, not abusers.
“Art is the purest form of expression,” Kramer continues. “Each artist will have their own way of bringing a message to life, and that’s what I’m looking for: A wall of diversity, that represents [how] immigrants in the US do beautiful things every day. This wall should be a testimony of every single immigrant who feels they’d much rather have a country with freedom to express themselves than a symbol of divisiveness. […] Diversity is a beautiful thing and no one should get in the way of it.”
Right now The Most Beautiful Wall is accepting entries for its digital wall. Submit yours at [email protected]. Learn more about the project by visiting Maddy Kramer’s website, here.
The Most Beautiful Wall. Go and have a scroll (sideways!) of the beautiful art already up on the most beautiful wall.
Via The Creators Project.
The Creators Project has an interesting story about a textile artist, who embroiders portraits with her sewing machine, and likes to do this in rather out of the way places, so the sewing machine is powered by bicycle, often by the sitter!
I’ll admit to being conflicted here. I think it’s a grand idea, but I also get more than a hint of colonial arrogance, too. I’ll think on it some more.
That’s a tiny bit of a wooden altar, revealing the layers, types, and colours of paint used. Art restoration is a fascinating business, and there’s art under the art, in the science of restoration.
Stratigraphic studies is one of the standard examination methods that provides very precise information about the complexity of paint layers that make up a painting or decorative finish. It is the key method to assess the extent and condition of different painting layers. Stratigraphic studies can reveal the way the paint layers are applied and consequently, they tell us how the artist worked. Tiny samples of paint are taken from discrete and representative areas and mounted in clear resin. Such prepared samples are observed under a binocular microscope at high magnification between 50x and 200x depending on the thickness of the examined layer.Thorough observation of the various layers enables the conservator to determine the history of the object and whether interventions have occurred by inspecting layers of dirt, varnish and paint. Additionally the media analysis can be carried out on the cross-sections which provide important information about an artist’s technique, and helps to determine the most appropriate conservation treatments to use. A technique of staining of cross-sections can detect the presence of certain materials in the various painting layers such as lipids (suggesting an oil-containing medium), or proteins (signifying a gum-, casein- or animal glue-based medium).
The information revealed using the stratigraphic analysis can be recorded using microphotography and then compared with UV, IR and X-ray examination, consequently providing reliable information on the object’s history and artist’s technique.
Then there are the amazing microphotographs of wood. This is a bit of Norway Fir:
When identifying wood, it may only be necessary to determine if the wood is a hardwood or a softwood. In other cases, determining the individual species is necessary. Thin sections are prepared from small wood samples. Light microscopy is employed to distinguish anatomical characteristics of wood using features such as their cells and tissues visible only under high magnification. Technical literature and the collection of samples of numerous wood species are used during the identification.
Go have a wander over to visit Damian Lizun at Fine Art Conservation!