January 2009
20 posts
Bruce Montcombroux
Bruce Montcombroux’s assemblages of pseudo-machine and environments read like instructions, but the purpose of what is being instructed is obscured. There is a sense of impermanence, as if Montcombroux is creating these machines/environments/ instructions from memory. Over time our relationship to the machines we use change. To look back on what we used can seem quaint, childlike, or...
Dominic McGill
Dominic McGill’s piece, Project for a New American Century, Is a vast sixty-five foot graphite drawing that tells the tale of American history in slue of graphically used text and images. In an age of Flickrstreams, RSS feeds, tickers, and charts where endless amounts of data are assimilated, McGill’s presentation of American history feels like one suited for it time. Significant...
Kiel Johnson
Kiel Johnson’s sculptural works have an animated sense to them. They feel remarkably solid, with crisp vector-like planes of simple color. This conveyor belt from his show Atmospheric Conditions plays with notions of control, and the mundane. The weather/time passes by the same way over and over again, however it’s passage is under control. If you missed something you could always...
Frank Magnotta
Frank Magnotta’s work cobbles together brand names and pop cultural icons into an architectural mishmash that feels like a shopping mall gone awry. A frenzy of consumerist urges intertwine, mutate and erode. In an interview on fecalface.com Magnotta describes influences;
“I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 70’s, in the midst of a recession. Back then, my friends and I...
Paul Noble
Paule Noble’s Nobson Newtown series is a stunning combination of architectural planning, wit, and draftmanship. The eight-year project consists of numerous wall-sized drawing, each depicting a different section of the fictional town. Designer John Coulthart describes Noble’s work best on his blog Feuilleton
“Each blocky construction is crafted out of a grouping of letters that...
Josh Keyes
When looking at Josh Keyes’s work I’m reminded of dioramas in natural history museums and illustrations from vintage science text books. There are cross sections, geometric shapes and images of the natural world presented in a stage like manner. However in keyes work you get the sense that something is not quite right. His animal characters are presented in small isolated version...
Galen Johnson
Galen Johnson takes architectural drawings away from the idealized, finished state, that technical drawings are presented in and creates structures that are in flux. If technical drawings are plans for what is to come, Johnson’s drawings account for imperfection, construction, change, and time. His drawings are holistic looks at structures hinting at their birth, growth, and final...
Brendan Monroe
Brendan Monroe is a artist working out of Berkeley, California. His work (painting, Printmaking, sculpture) enlarges worlds that are often to small to see. Like Zachary Rossman’s, Monroe mixes scientific imagery with personal phenomenon. Monroe adds narrative and character to sometimes barren, always juciy landscapes that feel like biological text books come to life. In a piece for...
Zachary Rossman
Zachary Rossman’s subtle drawings, often on found paper, feel like scientific illustrations of personal phenomenon. Rossman’s work features cross-sections, blackholes, stephan hawkings, stange plants, and encounters with the unreal.
Oliver Jeffers
Artist/Illustrator Olliver Jeffers combines two methods by which the world can be assessed, art and the sciences. While these two disciplines are often presented as oppositional forces, Jeffers uses the combination to a humorous effect. In Still Life with logic and a Choice of Beverage a mathematical equation is placed with a selection of two beverages(appearing to be milk and orange juice). One...
Coming Back Down to Earth
And to Bring Flying houses to a close, the photography of Franck Juery. Juery is a freelance photographer in France. Her work possesses a strong nostalgic quality. The soft focus and use of miniature objects makes her work feel like one is looking back on childhood memories, slightly distorted over time.
House on Tricky Track
My own flying house, on a rickety, tricky track. The track has lost it’s beginning, and at it’s end there is no track for the house to continue. It’s stuck on one section of track that’s quickly crumbling. However the line of action in the drawing is rather enthusiastic. It’s not an all together unpleasant section of track to be on. Who knows where the house will...
Amy Casey
Amy Casey paints worlds which have/are falling apart, but they veer from pessimism with their playful quality. While one part of her compositions usually have something crumbling, the other shows a sign of unity where, in many cases, houses are banding together to keep some form of order. I thought this segment of Casey’s online statement best summed up her work.
“My paintings...
Vasco Mourao
A house(s) that has seem to come free from its moorings, I like the pen work in illustrator Vasco Mourao’s work. Using simple black and white, Mourao suggests an obsessive,intricate, but structural world that is sometimes towering and often clever in it’s use of space.
10 Mintues After the End of Gravity
Adam Cvijanovic’s, Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity) sends homes,among other things,to the heavens, both illustrationally and figuratively. His vast portable murals (75ft long) combine Renaissance fresco painting with a Pop,consumer estecy. Love poem depicts a 1950s esque suburb in the thralls of a disaster movie like scene, ten mintues after gravity has expired. The consumer...
Ben Grasso
Continuing the theme of flying homes (or homes that will soon be airborn) are the painting of Ben Grasso. I’ve been looking at Grasso’s painting over the past year to great amusement. I found this Snippet about Grasso on his website, I felt it characterized why I enjoy his work, and how it reflects on my own.
“Ben Grasso, like many contemporary painters, takes decay as his...
Flying House
I’m enjoying the whimsy of Artist Peter Garfeild’s Mobile Homes. They take the security and asspirations often associated with the home, and literally throw it all up in the air. The homes twist, turn, explode, or seem to float. At times they hint at tragedy others times, a surreal curiosity. This image strikes me as part Wizard of Oz, part Sublime. The house seems to be there with...
Sony Bravia Commercial
Continuing the theme of colored spheres, Sony’s Bravia commercial from a few years back, makes excellent use of colored spheres to show you how good the color is on the Bravia brand of screen. While this is a commercial use, and the song they use for the commercial doesn’t quite fit, the magnitude and the extremity of the event makes life seem a little more malleable
Photo Via
Two Colored Spheres
These two colored spheres come from The Red Balloon Diaries on cattycamehome’s Flickr Stream. Another example I’ve found of people useing colored spheres to enhance and shape the everday.
Graziano Cecchini vs XKCD
Last year artist, Graziano Cecchini sent half a million colorful toy balls cascading down Rome’s famed Spanish Steps. The Stunt was in protest of lies told in the Italian parliament. I like the connection between Graziano’s stunt and Randel Monroe’s XKCD comic strip Grownups. Both address notion of authority and responsibility in interesting ways. While Cecchini is addressing a...