Morbid Anatomy's Contemporary Artist Blogroll

If you enjoy antique medical models, specimen collections, and anatomical diagrams from various cultures and eras, please treat yourself to the Morbid Anatomy blog. It's not (too) icky, I promise. The author is kind enough to include several thorough blogrolls, including museums, online exhibitions, a bibliography, and other like-minded websites. They also have compiled a list of contemporary(ish) artists whose work recalls anatomical study, whether morbid or not. The list goes from Gorey to Bourgeois to Ryden to Hirst and back. Check 'em out.

Anatomy of the skeleton, attributed to Avicenna, 980-1037. From this article on the history of anatomical maps in Asia, via Morbid Anatomy.

Related: Sarah's del.icio.us bookmarks tagged "anatomy". And everyone else's.

Paho Mann and Dylan Bradway, My Famous Friends

Untitled (Re-inhabited Circle-K Store, Albuquerque), photograph by Paho Mann. Click image to visit the artist's website.
Two things happened on the internet this week. (That's right, just two. This blog post makes three.) Two of my artist friends, Dylan Bradway and Paho Mann, have been recognized on blogs with startlingly high readerships.

Dylan Bradway is an up-and-comer here in Oklahoma City. In addition to quality graphic design (such as the catalog for Art 365), he creates evocative paintings incorporating stylized characters and street-influenced calligraphic line. He and his partner-in-life Amanda Weathers-Bradway recently set up shop in OKC's Plaza District.

This morning I got a text from Dylan instructing me to "check out Juxtapoz.com." Sure enough, the Juxtapoz blog is featuring a group show of train car designs that includes a piece by Dylan. (That guy in the green hoodie on the red car? That's Dylan's.) The Train Car Project will be on display at Papa B Studios in Brooklyn, October 10-22.

Paho Mann is an old friend and colleague from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A precise formalist photographer, Paho has long been interested in typologies -- objects that are of a category and also have unique characteristics. My favorite series of his is the re-inhabited Circle K stores, a staple of Albuquerque's accidental non-architecture.
This week Paho's Junk Drawer series was discovered by a New York Times blog called The Moment, a kind of digital-state-of-the-union roundup, followed by Kottke.org. Here is a transcript of the email I sent him upon learning this news:

YOU HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY THE NYTIMES BLOG AND [redacted] JASON KOTTKE DUUUUUUUDE THE ENTIRE INTERNET KNOWS YOU NOW OMFG YOU ARE FAMOUS

Splendid job, guys. Keep it up.

Xerox Transfer Workshop at Untitled Artspace, OKC

Gift, oil and alkyd on canvas, 2004 by Joe Ramiro Garcia. Click here to visit the artist's website.

I mentioned in an earlier two-part post that there are many ways to transfer an image from one surface to another. Untitled Artspace in Oklahoma City is offering a workshop on one of these methods, taught by visiting artist Joe Ramiro Garcia.

Xerox Lithography Workshop October 18 - 19, 2008

Joe Ramiro Garcia will teach a two-day Xerox Lithography Workshop on Saturday and Sunday, October 18 and 19. The workshop will have sessions from 10 am - 6 pm each day. Xerox lithography involves using a Xerox copy of an image and transferring it with gum arabic. Garcia is a Santa Fe-based artist and exhibited his art at Untitled [ArtSpace] in May and June 2007. ... Supplies will be included.

If you're in the area and interested in this method of image transfer, a workshop at Untitled is a fabulous way to leapfrog into some new work.

Synechdoche, NY (and its cousins)

The trailer is out for Charlie Kaufman's new film, Synechdoche, NY. (If that sounds familiar, it's a play on the real-life location Schenechtady, NY.)

After watching the trailer, I had to go remind myself just what a synechdoche is. It's a grammatical term for a metaphorical phrase in which a part stands for a whole, such as "wheels" for a car or "all hands" for the crew of a ship.

The real treat (as if reading about nuances of the English language wasn't scintillating enough) came at the end of the Wikipedia article, under the See Also section. Here's what I found:

* Conceptual metaphor * Figure of speech * Metonymy * Pars pro toto * Totum pro parte * Hendiadys

If that was the guest list of a dinner party, I would totally bring the chips.

Related: Sarah's words on Wordie.

Near Future Laboratory's Criteria for New Media Art

View of Liso Armonium, an installation by Sagi Groner. Click image to view its source on Flickr.

How can you tell if it's New Media Art? Here are some tips.

(New Media Art in the Aughts is what web art was in the 90s, installation art was in the 80s, and performance art was in the 70s. That is, largely oblique and inaccessible unless done very well.)

This handy list was put together by the Near Future Laboratory, a "think/make design & research practice focusing on digital interaction designs based on "weak signals" from the fringes of digital culture, where the near-future already exists."