Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Nate Page - House Beautiful


Suburban Reflecting Pool, 2012
Exhibition in a 1956 ranch style home on a cul-de-sac in the San Gabriel Valley. Above Nate Page's intervention with a mirror.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

DODGE Gallery: Twisted Sisters

Looks promising. Good roster. Hopefully will make it to NYC before it ends.
Twisted Sister at DODGE gallery, May 19–June 23, 2012.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Chair Shell


SIMPARCH, Academy Records, Chris Vorhees and the students of Depauw

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Elisabeth Condon


Enjoy my friend Elisabeth Condon's blog, especially in anticipation of her upcoming exhibition at Dorsh Gallery, Miami. Opens May 11. http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/

Breathtaking recent work above...

Monday, April 30, 2012

Keystone Habit Transformed Housing Color

I'm listening to the audiobook The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg, and he talks about how Alcoa's focus one simple change, improvement of their safety record, transformed the company into a efficient profit-making machine. An unexpected result, flexibility in the coloring of manufactured aluminum siding for houses, helped to reduce waste, lift profits, and exemplified better communication patterns.

Review of the book on Huffington Post
Charles Duhigg: How 'Keystone Habits' Transformed a Corporation

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Director Amanda Pope

Quote of the day from director Amanda Pope:

"You need to develop your ability to go and do the most difficult thing in front of you because it’s a more interesting way to live."

From a panel on women in the film biz from the 2010 Santa Barbara Independent Film Festival.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Monday, March 19, 2012

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Famous example of brutalism just north of New York City in Orange County, New York, about to be replace with unoriginal colonial-wannabee structure that looks like the architectural equivalent of clipart.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The Searchers II



Sasha Bezzubov & Jessica Sucher
American Sikh with portrait of Guru
Gobind Singh, at an international Sikh
boarding school (Amritsar, India)
2006
40 x 50"

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America


"The Influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America" by Eduardo Navas

Curator and theorist, Eduardo Navas, has published an essay he wrote to accompany the Transitio_MX 2009 exhibition which included Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art by Owen Mundy and myself. The essay, “La Influencia de los No-Lugares en el concepto de America Latina.” (English “The Influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America”), was published in Spanish in Errata #3, Cultura digital y creaciĂłn Dec 2010.

Here’s an excerpt of the essay in English. You can read more about (in English) on Eduardo’s blog or the full text is available in Spanish here.

Airplane travel and airports, which have been a key reference in the theory of non-places by both AugĂ© and Ibelings finds direct commentary in Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art. This time-based work consists of a photograph of the Tallahassee Airport Check-in area, which hosts a wall sized reproduction of McClay Gardens Park. In front of the wallpaper image we find: on the left hand side a plant in a pot and on the right a portable fan, next to three airportline-dividing-poles which are connected with a dividing strip, and a dolly cart at the far end. The photograph of the actual lobby is projected on the wall along with a series of numbers, located at the bottom of the screen’s frame, complemented with an algorithmic simulation of Tree Pollen falling surrealistically, while a sound track of birds plays in a loop. In essence the airport check in lounge is turned into a staged moment where the reproduction of a natural environment is treated as a mere decoration.

In Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art the airport as a non-place is taken apart. The image is not only commenting on how parks are careful orchestrations of nature to fit human ideals, but also exposes how this aesthetic has entered the airport, a space of transition, in order to make people feel comfortable upon their arrival or departure. If one tries to believe that what one is looking at is real nature, or even a meta recording of nature, one only needs to notice that the pollen is falling just a bit too perfectly, executing an algorithm meant to appear naturally, magically. This orderliness, this pristine aesthetic, as in the other four selections has a direct link to the control that is inherent in supermodernism: “This boundless space is no dangerous wilderness or frightening emptiness, but rather a controlled vacuum, for if there is one thing that characterizes this age it is total control. The undefined space is not an emptiness but a safe container, a flexible shell.” Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art exposes the type of activity that more privileged migrants perform—those unlikely to work in maquiladoras or any other blue-collar job. Therefore, the wall projection is a commentary on the growing supermodern aesthetic of glocalization, and thus a critical commentary on a specific activity that is ingrained as much in Latin America as well as other regions. Viewers can project themselves into the computerized image, and feel comfortable in the virtual airport lobby; whether the viewer may potentially be in Japan or Mexico is irrelevant because the language of non-places has transcended space in this sense. And therefore makes the conceptualization of a constant migration an issue of class rather than identity.

—Eduardo Navas

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

MASS MoCA :: Sol LeWitt :: Timelapse



MASS MoCA :: Sol LeWitt :: Timelapse

Anticipating the creation of my second temporary wall painting, a nod to Sol LeWitt, whose gesture of instructions was most pure.

More about LeWitt on artsy

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Edwin Deen



“Edwin Deen is an artist of comic relief in daily life. Displaying remarkable collections of combined natural and cultural objects which at first sight seem quite trivial, however with a closer look uncover a web of cross associations in shape, color, function and meaning. Using existing objects as mind triggers. Whether the objects are empty shampoo bottles, a juicer, a pressure cooker, parts of a freezer, Deen sorts, organizes and converts the objects stimulating a broad range of associations triggered by his manipulation. Because many of the objects have been stripped of their every day identity their definition becomes undetermined, hereby opening their reading to be interpreted anew.

Edwin Deen’s work and practice is very close to that of a scientific laboratory, with projects like Terra Incognita (2009) showing water and plastic’s ability to transform from solid to liquid to gas undergoing phases of melting and evaporation, his endeavors are of utmost focus however he deconstructs what we “know” as opposed to building on it. In science things are proven based on previously proven facts. Science needs imagination and intuition other wise there would be no progress just as in Edwin Deen’s homespun laboratory the search is into the unknown. In Deen’s work the facts are disappearing and the imagination is physical.”

– TAG

More at http://www.edwindeen.nl/

Friday, October 14, 2011

Tomás Saraceno's Cloud Cities




BERLIN ARCH LINK : Cloud Cities at Hamburger Bahnhof

Tomás Saraceno's Cloud Cities (2011) at Hamburger Bahnhof, my favorite art space in Berlin. Reminds me of some of my early expat drawings. Beautiful.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Zadie Smith on Maximalism

This is how it feels to me | The Guardian

While preparing to give a workshop on complex art forms driven by custom code, I flashback to Norman Bryson's description of Chinese Maximalism in his class on contemporary Chinese and Japanese art. By tapping into Wikipedia magic (however occasionally misguided), I find literary connections and am led to this compelling article by Zadie Smith. Enjoy...

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

LAURIE FRICK



A long walk thru cardboard from Yaddo 2010 was expanded to 100 ft and reinstalled for the Texas Biennial at Box13 Artspace in Houston 2011...experiments in rhythm using time studies of daily activity logs and sleep charts...More at Laurie Frick

Monday, August 29, 2011

Action Office



Mika Tajima Versus the Cubicle | "New York Close Up" | Art21 - YouTube: artist Mika Tajima

“She needs decor, color, warmth, vitality and something as basic and all inclusive as dignity. She’s an action secretary and she need Action Office.” From an Art 21 about artist Mika Tajima. The same better-living-though-design sentiment that drives my recent work.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Monday, July 04, 2011

VVORK


VVORK

Color like bandaid, covering Tirana, Albania. Amazing story in this video by Anri Salas.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Samantha Barber - Graphic Designer

Samantha Barber - Graphic Designer

Graphic designer / artist Samantha Barber with some work on female expat issues.

Thanks to Janis Conn for the link.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Passive House



Last week we went on an excellent Creative Sustainability Tour given by the Institute for Creative Sustainability. More information here: http://id22.net/en/

Favorite stop: Passivhaus Schoenholzer Strasse (pictured above). More information at http://deo-berlin.de/

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Case-Shiller Index Expected to Show New Low in House Prices - NYTimes.com

Case-Shiller Index Expected to Show New Low in House Prices - NYTimes.com

Quotes from the article:
- After every giddy boom comes the hangover, they acknowledge, but that deep-rooted desire for a castle of one’s own quickly reasserts itself.
- No one ever renovated the kitchen or redid a room for the kids in a rental...

Reminds me of our recent visit to Dresden. On a tour of the city, our tour guide mentioned that when the wall fell, her parents bought their home and did renovations. She explained that few people did renovations, especially outside of their homes, when they were state-owned.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Architecture + Art at UCSD





Kyong Park. 24620. Ongoing.

24620, a Kyong Park project, is an abandoned house from Detroit in search of a new home. The house was cut up so that it could be moved and re-assembled anywhere in the world. It is a 'fugitive house,' running from the city of Detroit, which has destroyed or burned more than two hundred thousand homes in the last fifty years.

24620 desperately extends its existence by travelling. Its first journey was made in April, 2001, when it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and was re-constructed and presented in the 3rd annual Archilab exhibition in Orléans, France. Since then, it has been to five other European cities, and continues on.

With its pieces misplaced and their incisions permanent, the house, when re-assembled, replicates the condition of a dysfunctional city in the violence of dismembered spaces. Wherever it may go, the house takes the ideals and failures of modernism with it, creating discourses on the cultural state and destiny of each community.

Architecture folks affiliated with my alma mater, UCSD. Important work. Hurrah.

Teddy Cruz
Kyong Park
James Enos
Sam Kronic