Tag Archives: visual art

The art of glitches by Sara Cwynar

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Sara Cwynar, is an artist from Canada. She uses images from encyclopedias, biology textbooks, featuring sexy pinups, children, politician-on-TV subject matters, but each gives off an air of american antiquity. Then search the glitch effect she wants by using a scanner; moving the image while that is being scanned, the results are distorted figures. “By mashing up these two technologies, I want to highlight the obsolescence of the old one and the future obsolescence of the new one”. She thinks that the most stylish pictures are the kitchest ones.

Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar

When The Boxer Is a Painter

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Omar Hassan is 29 years old, Italian mother Egyptian father. There’s color everywhere, from the sketches on his shoes and laptop because Omar is a painter. Omar boxa with the canvas. Dips his gloves in painting and tum-tum-tum, you hear the sound of fists on the canvas, an artistic gesture summarizing street art.

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Eleonora Formiconi

Dispatchwork

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Jan Vormann is a German artist became famous thanks to a truly original idea: to fill the cracks of old walls, buildings and dilapidated structures with Lego bricks. The experiment, despite his art studies in Berlin, began during a visit to Rome by that time, thanks to his travels that have taken him around the world, has managed to put his signature everywhere. the aim is, through a satirical criticism, counter excessive seriousness of the citizens groups and to make them more cheerful and livable spaces.

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Eleonora Formiconi

#DefineBeauty series by Nowness

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Founded in 2010, Nowness is a video channel premiering the best in global arts and culture.

The channel’s programming strategy has established it as the go to source of inspiration and influence across art, design, fashion, beauty, music, food, and travel. They work with both established and emerging filmmakers which connect their audience to emotional and sensorial stories designed to provoke inspiration and debate.

The #DefineBeauty Series collects videos created for “unpicking the politics and prejudices of attraction”. 

#1 – Define Beauty: Les Fleurs by Saam Farahmand

Director Saam Farahmand heats up the body hair debate.

“One of the things I appreciate most about female beauty is what’s commonly appreciated the least” says Saam Farahmand of his ode to body hair that launches NOWNESS’ new five-part series #DefineBeauty. “I wanted to find something about women that was almost unanimously disliked.” The transformation of the female form from hairless ideal to glorious natural state is set to the rousing score of Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs”.

“There was something so affecting about Minnie Riperton’s ability to breathe her gender—she speaks to female sexuality in a way that seems to exclude male consideration” says the London-based filmmaker.

 

#2 – Define Beauty: My Scars by Matthew Donaldson

Each disrupted surface has a story to tell: a heavily scarred man and his lover share their intimate thoughts in Matthew Donaldson’s “My Scars”.

Matthew Donaldson illuminates the narrative function of scars in this stripped-back portrait of British photographer Sam Barker, accompanied by intimate reflections from his lover.

 

#3 – Define Beauty: Beyond the Skin by Jonas Åkerlund

Director Jonas Åkerlund takes model Shaun Ross on a hyperkinetic trip through LA.

“Hollywood is so good at only seeing what’s on the outside, and using that first impression instead of going deeper” says Jonas Åkerlund of the location of the final film in the #DefineBeauty series, in which he follows American model and actor Shaun Ross around the back streets and freeways of Los Angeles. “I think Shaun has spent all his life with those reactions. Look again and you see that this guy is really beautiful.”

His gothic style is apparent in today’s portrait of the famed albino model, who recently starred in Lana Del Rey’s 30 minute film, Tropico. “When Shaun showed up on Hollywood Boulevard, Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse were affronted” the filmmaker says of filming Ross. “Like, ‘What the fuck is this guy doing here?”.

 

https://www.nowness.com/tag/define-beauty

Don Hertzfeldt: World of Tomorrow

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Don Hertzfeldt is an artist, animator and independent filmmaker. His cartoons have been awarded over 250 times. They have been described as some of the most influential, vital and expressive animation films of the millennium.

The work of Hertzfeldt is marked by hand-drawn stick figures, traditionally created with pen and paper, and it employs old-fashioned special effect techniques such as multiple exposures and experimental photography. His drawings are combined with tragicomedy, black humor and surrealism stories.

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In January 2015, Hertzfeldt’s first digitally-animated short film, World of Tomorrow, was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival as the Grand Jury Prize. While in 2016, has been nominated at the 88th Academy Awards as Animated Short Film.

This short animated film is a science fiction vision of a future where the digital age and reality are connected via “Outernet”, a neural network that is a technologically advanced version of the Internet. All begins when little Emily answers a call of its communication unit.

Watch ondemand on Vimeo:

Sources:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2011-11-11/beautiful-bitter/

http://www.avclub.com/article/cartoon-about-clone-future-may-be-2015s-best-film-217741

The Art Of The Internet

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By the term net art, which is also referred with Internet art, it refers to a contemporary artistic discipline aimed at creating works of art with, for and in the Internet. This art form has bypassed the traditional domain of the Museums and Galleries circuit, leaving the main role of the experience of aesthetic enjoyment to the Internet or other electronic networks. In many cases, viewing the work it is disintegrated in a particular kind of interaction with the artistic work. Artists working in this way are often called net artist. A well-known theorist Lev Manovich, net art, says it is “the materialization of social networks on the internet communications.” In fact the precursor group of this artistic movement has been able to create an artistic genre especially through its ability to create networks and connect programmers worldwide around a creative practice but also ironic. Net.art fact has played a lot with the parody, with error and with the disintegration of the web pages.

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Cindy Sherman: the masquerade of identity

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Untitled Film Still #15. 1978

Gelatin silver print, 9 7/16 x 7 1/2″ (24 x 19.1 cm).The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Barbara and Eugene Schwartz in honor of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.© 2012 Cindy Sherman

 

The American feminist artist Cindy Sherman (1954)  “emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generatio
n of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era” .
She posed in different stereotypical female roles, she’s got plenty of subjective emotions she can exploit through the media: In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present with different costumes. She wants to overturn the trend of the american society based on appearence and consumption,ready to celebrate the product and not its producer.

“Throughout her career, Sherman has appropriated numerous visual genres—including the film still, centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image—while disrupting the operations that work to define and maintain their respective codes of representation.[…]

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) have been canonized as a hallmark of postmodernist art, which frequently utilized mass-media codes and techniques of representation in order to comment on contemporary society.[…]  Sherman’s stills have an artifice that is heightened by the often visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist, rather than a recognizable actress or model.”

From: http://www.guggenheim.org/

Portraits
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Untitled #359. 2000

Chromogenic color print, 30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. © 2012 Cindy Sherman

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Untitled #360. 2000

Chromogenic color print, 30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8 cm). Stefan T. Edlis Collection.
© 2012 Cindy Sherman
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Untitled #408. 2002

Chromogenic color print, 54 x 36″ (137.2 x 91.4 cm). Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond J. Learsy. © 2012 Cindy Sherman

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Untitled #132. 1984

Chromogenic color print, 67 x 47″ (170.2 x 199.4 cm). Collection of John Cheim.
© 2012 Cindy Sherman

With bright light and high-contrast color, Sherman focuses on the consequences of society’s stereotyped roles for women — in this case as a victim of fashion — rather than upon the roles themselves.

Giada Semeraro

Body Art: Shirin Neshat

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Shirin Neshat  is an iranian artist of contemporary visual art, known for her work in film, video and photography.

Shirin looks beyond the role of the women, she wants to branch off in the pure identity of each people. The heart of her artistic search see the body as a way to communicate a social condition, the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity..

She is able to shake us with mute stories.

From:
Gladstone gallery


Zarin Series, 2005 ; C-print 47 1/2 x 60 inches (120.7 x 152.4 cm)


Nida (Patriots), from The Book of Kings series, 2012 ; Ink on LE silver gelatin print 60 x 45 inches (152.4 x 114.3 cm)


Muhammed (Patriots), from The Book of Kings series, 2012
Ink on LE silver gelatin print 60 x 45 inches (152.4 x 114.3 cm)


Bahram (Villians), from The Book of Kings series, 2012 ; Ink on LE silver gelatin print      99 x 49 1/2 inches (251.5 x 125.7 cm)


Untitled, 1996 ; RC print & ink (photo taken by Larry Barns)

Giada Semeraro

Rashid Rana’s Multifaceted Imagery

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“Working with multifaceted, multiplied imagery, Rashid Rana splits the visible universe apart in order to remake it anew. In sculpture, video and photographic prints, Rana transforms snapshots of shop signs in Lahore into abstracted cityscapes or renders reproductions of Old Master paintings as digital fields of colour. Utilising the grid structure, the artist has recently begun to rearrange famous paintings such as The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618) by Peter Paul Rubens and the Oath of the Horatii (1786) by Jacques Louis-David, scrambling these famous compositions into pixelated and codified puzzles.

Rana’s splicing and stitching technique can be carnal and violent, as in this ongoing series of brutally lacerated and reassembled Baroque and Neo-classical paintings, collectively known as the Transliteration Series. For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Rana has also reflected the legacy of the surrounding city in his source material, choosing paintings by artists hailing from Milan, such as Andrea Solari and Cesare da Sesto. While the originals are held in the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London, Rana symbolically returns the images to the source of their creators, albeit visually distorted and temporally displaced in the process. Rana complicates and realigns such divided notions as figuration and abstraction, manipulation and reality, but also succeeds in knocking the world off its axis and transcending both traditional and technological means of communication.”

Source: lissongallery.com

“Stillness of Life”, C-print, 172.5 x 105 cm


“War Within”,C-print, 200 x 300 cm


“Notions of Narration II”,C-print, 228 x 323 cm

Installation view, Lisson Gallery, Milan

Where Is Hello kitty’s Mouth?

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Have you ever noticed that Hello kitty hasn’t got mouth? Its designer, Yuko Yamaguchi, made it on pourpose. “I want people to be able to project their feelings on her. Kitty looks happy when people are happy and she looks sad when people are sad” –  Yamaguchi says – ” If she had a mouth, she would have an expression and nobody could find in her his mood, so I preferred to paint it not.”

Hello Kitty Pictures 8

Sources: http://slowbuddy.com/photography/hello-kitty-pictures/

  (in Italian)  http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Kitty

The Museum of Bad Art

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The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is “to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum”. It has three branches, one in Dedham, Massachusetts, another in nearby Somerville, and a third in Brookline, Massachusetts. Its permanent collection includes 500 pieces of “art too bad to be ignored”, 25 to 35 of which are on public display at any one time. MOBA was founded in 1994, after antique dealer Scott Wilson showed a painting he had recovered from the trash to some friends, who suggested starting a collection. Within a year, receptions held in Wilson’s friends’ home were so well-attended that the collection needed its own viewing space. The museum then moved to the basement of a theater in Dedham. Explaining the reasoning behind the museum’s establishment, co-founder Jerry Reilly said in 1995: “While every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art, MOBA is the only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the worst.” To be included in MOBA’s collection, works must be original and have serious intent, but they must also have significant flaws without being boring; curators are not interested in displaying deliberate kitsch. MOBA has been mentioned in dozens of off-the-beaten-path guides to Boston, featured in international newspapers and magazines, and has inspired several other collections throughout the world that set out to rival its own visual atrocities. Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine noted that the attention the Museum of Bad Art receives is part of a wider trend of museums displaying “the best bad art”. The museum has been criticized for being anti-art, but the founders deny this, responding that its collection is a tribute to the sincerity of the artists who persevered with their art despite something going horribly wrong in the process. According to co-founder Marie Jackson, “We are here to celebrate an artist’s right to fail, gloriously.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art

Allan McCollum’s Visual Art

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“When I see a picture frame that contains an indecipherable image in the background of a television scene, I take a snapshot of the TV screen. I then enlarge this indecipherable image photographically, and put it in a new, larger frame of my own. The source of the Perpetual Photo – the original snapshot taken from the TV screen – is pasted on the back of the frame, only to be viewed by removing the Perpetual Photo from the wall and turning it around.” A.M.

The artist frequently described these works as “pictures of the desire to see a picture.” He has said that what he finds poignant in the Perpetual Photos is “…that no matter how many times you enlarge the little blurs in the picture frames, you’re no closer to any answers to any questions. Part of the beauty the images have for me is the way they invite a futile impulse to use logic in an attempt to discover an emotional truth. And because these pictures are in a constant state of appearing and disappearing everywhere at once, it’s as if we are all perpetually suspended in our wishes to make sense of the represented world, and forever lost in our search for the recognizable.”

Perpetual Photos:

  

Allan McCollum and Laurie Simmons have joined forces in an unusually productive meeting of minds and visions. Their “Actual Photos” series consists of portraits of non-actual people-head shots of the minuscule figures used in the smallest-scale model train sets. Made of cast plastic hand painted with a single-hair brush, the figures themselves stand about one-quarter inch high; with heads less than one sixteenth inch in circumference, their features are virtually invisible to the naked eye.Brightly colored, alive with painterly flair and dripping (literally) with sculptural detail, these images exude an eerie, unfounded cheerfulness. But they also frustrate our desire for instant recognition; for the most part the images remain permanently blurred and out of reach. Ironically, this vagueness mimics the blurring effects of a camera in the wrong hands, undermining the technical precision that made these faces visible in the first place.

Actual Photos:

Sources: http://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/2004-09-01_allan-mccollum
http://allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/Roberta_Smith.html