double happiness

Architect Didier Fiuza Faustino converted a billboard into swing set.

how I became 100 artists

Shea Hembrey wanted to put on an international art show of a hundred artists, but the more he thought about it the more figuring out how to pull that off seemed too complicated and difficult. So, he found an easier way.

He wrote bios and back stories for all 100 artists and created all the work himself.

Awesome.

sinking

 "Love, Love" by Julien Berthier is a stable and safe place to relax, created from a wrecked ship.

what's not to love?  Check out more images here.

Love Love from julien berthier on Vimeo.

left behind

 Maybe it's because "Hoarders" has me fantasizing about tearing the garage down rather than cleaning it out (yup, I'm still traumatized) but I can't stop looking at German photographer, Marcus Buck's images of architectural remains.  

They're so beautiful, the scars left behind when a building is torn down, the peeling paint in what used to be a living room, the ladder rungs going from the absent roof to the remaining one.

More here. 

Art Prize

Check out this really great piece by Mike Leonard about Art Prize on the Today Show.

My favorite part is when one of the artists says that the real prize is getting to show her work in a great venue and have it seen by so many people.

Well that, and the part around 1:05 in where they show Steven, Josh and Matthew's piece.  :)

neighbors

Beautiful, and kind of depressing, Bill Rankin's map of Chicago shows the racial and ethnic divides in the city. Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.



Eric Fischer was so struck by the image, he made maps of other cities the same way. Check the rest out here.

prize worthy

Steven, Josh and Matthew are headed to Grand Rapids to install their piece for ArtPrize this afternoon.

I am so excited to see it finished and in place at the park.  As they work on it inside it looks HUGE!

If you are in the area, go see it and vote!  Top prize is $250,000 (no typo) and if you vote for them and they win I will bake each and every one of you a cake.

trash to treasure

Sometimes the most beautiful thing in a studio is not the finished product.
Image from Heath Ceramics studio.  Isn't it wonderful?

so cute

sometimes I feel that being an artist is the most self indulgent thing in the world- especially these days. 
so, this cracks me up. 

from artist Banksy's show Barely Legal.  See more here. 

humor and heartbreak

About a month after Katrina hit New Orleans, photographer Richard Misrach began taking photographs of the devistated city.

There are no people in the photos, not a soul to be seen, but the graffiti they left behind is in every frame.

more information on the heart breaking and beautiful project here.

book available here.

slow burn

Michael Wesely makes long exposure images with a pin hole camera.  And when I say long exposure, I mean 18 months long!! 

He says he could do exposures for even longer, up to 40 years!  That'd be amazing. 

Aren't they beautiful?

more here. 

papered

I love these vessels made of recycled newspaper paper pulp by Debbie Wijskamp.

Beautiful, right?
via dezeen

genius

 Some awesome person has been stenciling compasses just outside subway stations all over New York.

Brilliant!

oh what a tangled web we weave

A bunch of geniuses took 117,000 feet of packing tape inside of the the Viennese stock exchange and made the coolest thing ever.

A giant spiderweb!



via gizmodo

facade

the Facade Printer is an amazing "software controlled inkjet printer that creates images on an architectural scale... it 'prints' images by shooting individual dots from a distanced position varying from 5 meters to 20 feet."

I think it's really cool but seeing it, I can't help but think of a tennis ball machine (I took a lot of tennis lessons as a kid.) and wishing that I'd thought of soaking some tennis balls in paint and shooting them at the tennis court walls. Obviously, it wouldn't be exact enough to make drawings, but it'd be a whole lot of fun!

Aren't the 'drawings' beautiful?

facadeprinter.org - Lobster from Facadeprinter on Vimeo.

more and via designboom.

Lucy, I'm home!

Ever wonder what a plan of Lucy and Ricky's apartment looked like?

Or the Flintstones house?

How about Wayne Manor (Batman's house)?

Well, Mark Bennett has reverse engineered plans for them, and many other homes from classic tv shows.

Public art

The documentary, We Live in Public tells the story of Josh Harris who founded Pseudo.com, the first internet tv site, in the late 90's.

After much success, he moved on to conducting controversial human experiments about how this new media and technology would change how people live and behave. For one experiment, he put 100 artists in a human terrarium and had webcams film every move they made.

For another, he lived in a loft under 24 hour surveillance for 6 months which led to his girlfriend leaving him and chronicled his financial ruin and mental collapse.

hand painted

a lovely little film about the rare art of hand painted advertisements and the men who make them.

shredded

In honor of tax day I thought I'd share Nava Lubelski's Tax Day 1997, made of shredded receipts, tax forms, pay stubs etc, coiled and arranged to resemble cell structures or lichen.

lovely.

makeshift

Starting September 1, 2009 Natalie Purschwitz began a one year long project of wearing only clothes she made.

She's 209 days in making everything, from coats and hats to socks and underwear, and the results are quite interesting. (check out more here.)

My friend Andrew Thompson did a similar project a number of years ago called "A Month of Uniforms" where he made new clothes each day before going to work.

I can't even manage to finish the scarf I started 6 months ago.