This guy is messed up. Really. But he’s a really good artist.
This installation is made from a crystal chandelier, paint, lollipops, vegetable matter, human and horse hair, mineral oil, rope from a ship found after midnight, glass shards, stones and artist’s blood and shit.
Now adding excrement to a piece of art is no new thing (heaven forbid). Yet every time I see it listed as part of an installation, I have to wonder whether-or-not we’ll ever become blasé about it.
Terence Koh – Sculpture – The Saatchi Gallery
Five artists make shortlist for Sobey prize
Kudos to those involved.
Five artists make shortlist for lucrative Sobey prize to be handed out in October – Yahoo! Canada News
Five up-and-coming Canadian artists, including one who has courted controversy for a work of art that supposedly incorporates his own excrement, have made it onto the short list for the $50,000 Sobey Art Award.
Terence Koh, who divides his time between New York and Toronto, is the Sobey finalist for the Ontario region. He’s become well-known in international art circles for installations that include glass boxes containing gilded chunks purported to be his excrement and casts of his naked body with the groin area destroyed.
Big Rubber Duck
Some fantastic inatllation projects by artist Florentijn Hofman.
Florentijn – Projects
Scary Little House
These are some pictures I took as an experiment with long exposure times. Now that the weather is nice(r), I’m going to try to get some more of these pics. I have a clever idea for a photoset.
Mark Rothko’s abstract language
A great read by Science Musings’ Chet on Rothko’s language of art. Rothko was a big influence for me.
Science Musings by Chet Raymo
It’s hard to say exactly what I feel, especially when in the presence of several Rothkos. Whatever it is starts in the gut and only slowly makes its way to the brain, and down the legs to where feet meet earth. I’ve read a number of critics who have tried to explain the power of Rothko’s works, none satisfactorily. The best explanation I have come across is in something the artist himself wrote in the early 1940s, before the rectangles, before his fame, in a little book called The Artist’s Reality that was only published 34 years after his death.
He talks about science, philosophy and art, what they have in common, how they differ, and in particular he skates the slippery boundary between the subjective and objective. He writes: “[The artist] must reduce all of the subjective and objective with the end of informing human sensuality. He tries to give human beings direct contact with eternal verities through reduction of those verities to the realm of sensuality, which is the basic language for the human experience of things…Sensuality stands outside of both the objective and subjective. It is the ultimate instrument to which we must first refer all our notions, whether they be abstract, the result of direct experience or of some circuitous reference to such experience. Sensuality is our index to reality.”
Modern Man – Ryan Brooks
Very cool project on Behance.
Modern Man on the Behance Network
World’s 50 Best Works of Art
Nice list, but who can possibly rank all the greatest works of art into a top 50? Try something a little easier, like “Top 50 paintings” or “Top 50 works from the 20th Century”.
The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them) – Telegraph
4. Terracotta Army
(c220-210 BC) near Xi’an, China
Getting there: difficult
Neither photographs, nor the British Museum exhibition can prepare you for the full army. The dead seem to have marched out of the ground, and are awaiting their next command, rank after rank, all subtly different. Some have been left as they were discovered – toppled, fragmentary, like old photographs from the trenches of 1916. This is a direct encounter with a distant, but still formidable antiquity.
Direct flight to Beijing (10 hours), then short internal flight, or rail to Xi’an
One Red Chair
Working on some designs for One Red Chair, a neat coffehouse in Bradford. They’ll show an artist’s work with the stipulation you give them one piece for their own use, and it needs to have a red chair in it (go figure).
Here’s some designs I’ve been tuning, all in the comic book style, made famous by that excellent app, Comic Life:
Three Sisters – painting reclaimed plastics
These aren’t a new project, but I finally got them photographed when I began archiving all my art (a process which, while ongoing, is made a little easier now that I have the bulk of it done). They are painted CPR dummy heads, in one of which I’ve implanted a flashing LED. They are currently on display in my home, in the second floor stairway. Seems weird, but I hardly notice them anymore, which is why they only recently got photographed.
A while ago, a friend of mine worked at a cryogenic plastic recycling plant, and they would get such strange things, including circus displays, toy and doll body parts, and many other strange things. I had her keep a lookout for anything strange and weird that I could use in projects, and these CPR heads were probably the best things she brought back (that I could keep).
The Behance Network
Very cool networking site similar to LinkedIn, but for artistic types.
Behance Network :: Creative Portfolios, Projects, and Collaborations
The Behance Network is a platform for creative portfolios, projects and collaborations.
Represent your work professionally.
Build a dynamic portfolio of your latest projects, open to all or shared selectively.
Connect and collaborate in “circles.”
Join or create groups of creative professionals, gathered around interests, to share content and ideas.
Discover job opportunities.
Behance’s GigList features great work opportunities for creative professionals. Creative industry leaders are also able to mine the network for talent.
Share tips and industry knowledge.
Behance’s Tip Exchange is a lively exchange of insights and helpful resources, all categorized and searchable.
Access resources that boost productivity.
The Behance ThinkTank features knowledge, interviews, and products for the creative professional community.