Found on Flickr: Picazzle's intricate jigsaw puzzle collages. They're retro! They're postmodern! They make my head hurt, in that good way.
Picazzle also links to jigsaw puzzle art by others on Flickr.
David Choe Docu Trailer and Screening Dates
2 Dogs by David Choe
LA underground artist David Choe delivered this item to my inbox late last night:
Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe
Documentary Competition (USA, 2008, 92 mins) World Premiere Directed By: Harry Kim
Los Angeles artist David Choe's kaleidoscopic work can be playful, confrontational and sexually frank. His personal life is no less complicated, as revealed by close friend Harry Kim, who documented Choe's life and crimes from 2000 to 2007. From the manic highs of commercial success and dinosaur hunting in the Congo to the self-destructive lows of Japanese jail sentences and bouts of self-doubt and depression, what begins as a gleeful portrait of a bad-boy artist slowly becomes a poignant celebration of one man's journey, both artistically and spiritually, toward his own uncertain salvation.
Saturday, June 21st 9:45pm (world premiere!!!) Majestic Crest Theatre $12.00
Sunday, June 22nd 4:00pm Mann Festival Theatre $12.00
Thursday, June 26th 4:30pm Mann Festival Theatre $12.00 June 26th 4:30pm
http://www.lafilmfest.com For ticketing information please phone 1-866-345-6337 or email boxoffice@filmindependent.org
Here is the trailer for the documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Life of David Choe.
When you go to David's website, you'll see a popup window titled "News and Weather." Do yourself a favor and stick around to browse it. In this news section David shares a little insight about the documentary filmmaking process:
The guy living at my loft, sleeping under my trampoline, is filmmaker harry kim, he made a short ten minute movie about me two years ago ,and has been following it up with a full length feature, so he’s been following me with that fucking camera the whole time, only thing is he has no funding and his parents don’t like the fact that their son is spending his whole life making a movie about a guy that destroys the earths surface , my place is big , so he’s here with me now, I introduce him to everyone as my documentater but he’s always drunk, asleep , or dancing with girls ,so I spend more time documentating him these day . I keep telling him he hasn’t earned the right to sleep in yet.
Masami Teraoka at Samuel Freeman Gallery
Over at Right Some Good this week there's an announcement of a current show by Masami Teraoka. The show is at Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica, and it closes May 24. So if you're in the area run on over.
Venus and Pope's Workout by Masami Teraoka.
Masami Teraoka has long been one of my favorite painters. His watercolors from the 1980s about the AIDS crisis are an evocative mix of beauty and terror, sensual forms startled into abrupt mortality. (Dear Lord Baby Jesus, if I work really really hard, can I be this good a painter someday?) His new series, The Cloisters' Confession, draws upon the traditions of early Renaissance painting from Europe, particularly the altarpiece form. (I'm seeing both northern and southern elements here, even a play on Botticelli's Birth of Venus.) There are even some oil-on-canvas miniatures -- quite a departure from his earlier large-scale watercolors. Is it too cliched to characterize this as East Meets West? Possibly. At any rate, let's not pigeonhole.
In recent years Teraoka has been painting flesh with a curiously post-mortem pallor. The corpse-like appearance of these figures, treated with rolling Florentine sensuality, plus a generous dose of taboo sexuality, sends us straight to Bosch and back again.
Teraoka points out a similarity between European early renaissance and ukiyo-e painting: the tendency to flatten physical space into a series of stacked planes. The paintings in Cloisters' Confession recall Flemish horror vacui. The resulting scenes are not what you would call realistic -- in other words, not what you would see with your own eyes out in meatspace. Instead it's a melding of learned visual information (what the eye sees, further processed by memory) and graphic language used for narrative purposes. This concoction elevates the image's importance beyond the need to represent a scene realistically. Taraoka is using pictures to tell us something.
Geisha in Bath, from the AIDS Series, by Masami Teraoka
(A side note -- I see in several of the altarpiece paintings that Teraoka has placed Venus figures and geisha side-by-side. A few years ago I enetertained the notion of combining the features of a Botticelli beauty with the feminine ideals presented by Kitagawa Utamaro. I wondered what would happen when two disparate paradigms of feminine beauty were put together. Teraoka's works remind me that I should dig out those images and post them.) Right Some Good is where Kirsten Anderson (of Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle) has been blogging about some of her favorite contemporary and historical artists. In the post about Teraoka's show, she mentions an essay in the works about the return of the grotesque in contemporary art. I'm looking forward to that.
Book Design Envy: Nom Nom Nom
Cover for A General Theory of Love, designed by John Gall
Have a look at this charming video interview with book designer John Gall. He talks about his idiosyncratic design aesthetic and willingness to make bold moves.
Gall mentions the dichotomy of quiet time balanced by bursts of creative energy. I find I spend a lot of my creative time just looking, considering, trying out ideas. After a certain point I reach a watershed and the image just pours out.
Gall is also right that deadlines are powerful motivators. Here's another interview with John Gall at Step Inside Design.
Great design awes me. I've never considered myself an Idea Man, but I believe that is what a designer does. They hold up a clever mirror to culture. When I see a piece of good design, a well-made form that complements the content it's wrapped around, I think "Of course! Why didn't I look at it that way before?"
Elia Woods and Whitney Forsyth at IAO
A show of mixed-meda works by Oklahoma fiber artists Elia Woods and Whitney Fosyth is currently showing at IAO Gallery at 811 N Broadway in Oklahoma City.
Walking Home, mixed media work by Elia Woods.
Elia is a versatile artist and thinker, whose work spans many media and disciplines. She employs an evocative mix of alternative photographic processeses and fabric to describe the complicated relationship between people and the natural world. Plus, she's a lovely person, to boot.
"What we eat has profound implications for our own health and the health of the planet. With this body of work, I invite the viewer to consider the nature and quality of our food, where it comes from, and our relationship to it."
Elia also cultivates a community garden at 31st and Shartel.
This show's reception is this Friday 05.16.2008 from 6 to 9 pm.