Alexa Meade, a Story of Contrasts

Check this work out:

Looks a bit like a Norman Rockwell painting was superimposed on a photograph, right? Makes you think about the miracle of photoshop.

Look again.

And, again.

That’s a real man.

Alexa Meade is a “25-year-old artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation.” She paints models in the style of 2D paintings and then sets them free, running through our 3D world, re-compressed into the final product we see here. She straddles the split between reality and perception in her art, and makes us question our own knowledge in the process. Her work brings the art of trompe l’oeil into the modern age.

From the Washington Post:

Meade uses a brush. She paints skin on skin, lips on lips and eyebrows on eyebrows, and the insides of nostrils, using her own mixture of nontoxic paints and unspecified ingredients. Her subjects must sit still for multiple hours as she follows the natural contours of their faces, varying brushstroke and color to exhume their inner essence. When she’s done, they appear banished to two-dimensionality, yet they also seem fuller, more dynamic. She then sets her subjects in an installation, or photographs them. There are no touch-ups or special effects beyond acrylic on flesh and the initial complacency of the observer.

Check out her other work here.

The Snow by Tokujin Yoshioka

The Snow by Tokujin Yushioka is currently installed at the Mori Art Museum in Japan.

The piece is a part of a larger exhibit called “Sensing Nature.”

Inside the 15-meter tank are millions of feathers that float within.

It must be amazing to behold.

One Month Until China

Court Robe, late 19th Century, China. via non-westernhistoricalfashion.tumblr.com.

I am so close I can almost taste it. I am enchanted with Mandarin Chinese, Chinese folk history and song, but I still feel as if I know nothing about the country’s pop culture–I still can’t help but think of the damning word foreign when I imagine China.

In explanation: I am spending four months in Beijing, my first travel destination outside of the Americas and Europe… and my first destination where I will not be able to read the signs or barter with locals (not yet, anyway). I will participate in an intensive 3-week language training before I start my 3 class civilization sequence (in English), and I will live on the Renmin University campus with a Chinese roommate.

Rice terraces, Guangxi

To ensure that I get the most out of my experience, I have a list of personal goals to meet:
1. Engage myself with the art of Beijing and its residents.
2. Learn as much Chinese as possible–focus on your bartering tactics!
3. Take pictures every day. Even if it’s just one.
4. Update your blog daily (hi!).
5. Don’t waste time napping–get out there and live!
6. Be the 20-year-old female version of Andrew Zimmern. Eat a bug, a snake, whatever–as long as it’s edible and not poisonous, it’ll be a good story.

and the slightly less sensational:

7. Remember to go to the gym. 3 months without running is physically painful.

Public Lace Installations by NeSpoon

These sculptures and stenciled graffiti were created by the artist NeSpoon, who describes her work as “jewelry of the public space.”

In her works, she rejects the classic interpretation of lace and doilies as stuffy, grandmotherly items and attempts to redefine their forms by stenciling them in gritty and/or unexpected locations such as urban streets, Baltic beaches, and public parks.

NeSpoon has succeeded in making once-outdated lace designs urban and contemporary, and in the process has brought new life to dilapidated and dull city streets. To some extent, she has also decreased the gendered associations with lace by engaging the general public with her art, opening lace up to future exploration within art and academia.

Click here for more information (NeSpoon’s personal blog).

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Tokyo Compression is a photoset by German-born, China-based photographer Michael Wolf.

These pictures are tender portraits of hectic souls. Their emotions are carefully stowed away in favor their public persona, but glimpses of their feelings break through, especially in the photo above.

The rain droplets don’t touch her but leave snaking shadows across the planes of her face. Her mouth open and her eyes downcast, she seems occupied and introspective, so much so that she has almost forgotten to guard her own expression. That preoccupation that she embodies is a human condition–I see myself and my own conflicts reflected in the unknowable depth of her eyes.

Full set here.

The Ring, a Parisian installation by Arnaud Lapierre

The Ring was recently installed in Place Vendôme in Paris–it was formed as a way to interact and distort the area around it, and as a result causes passerby to restructure their thinking about their surroundings.

I only wish that I had known about this when I was in Paris a month ago–from the pictures, it seems like something out of a dream sequence.

What I like about this statue is that the structural beauty of its surrounding architecture is what makes the statue come alive; it draws upon and interacts with history, reflecting the high art of Haussmanian buildings (literally) in a new era. The sculpture reminds me of the hall of mirrors at Versailles in both the way that it elongates the space around it as well as the sheer luxury that the flawless mirror seems to embody. The Ring is a manifested “illusion” of grandeur, its material pulling in the blue from the sky as if laying claim to everything that it reflects.

Coded Stories: Planned Documentary on Mapuche Art & Identity, by Artist Guillermo Bert

Background from Bert’s Kickstarter page:

About. Coded Stories, a documentary film, weaves together contemporary art with indigenous rights to convey the struggle of the Mapuche of Chile to preserve their culture and way of life. After a year of original filming, we are reaching out to supporters to help us raise $25,000 to complete filming in Chile and Los Angeles through October 2012. The goal of Coded Stories is to spread awareness about the plight of the Mapuche, a people whose traditions are under serious threat and to share their beautiful art and culture with a larger audience.

The Story. The film follows artist Guillermo Bert, a Chilean-born, Los Angeles-based artist whose recent work was inspired by the similarities between Mapuche textile patterns and contemporary bar codes (QR codes). Bert’s art raises questions about identity, globalization, modernization, and challenges facing indigenous cultures in the Americas.

Click here to read more on kickstarter.

One of the pieces about which the documentary was made: Poem in Blue, based on a poem by Graciela Huinao, art by Guillermo Bert.

Mapuche Art is what I hope to study as I progress in my Art History career, and this man is doing an incredible job in increasing visibility of the indigenous Mapuche community as well as highlighting their integration with the Modern Chilean nation as well as the international, digitally-enriched world.

I sincerely hope that this project gets fully funded, because I would absolutely love to hear more Bert’s inspiration and art.

Thomas Jackson, Emergent Behavior

Thomas Jackson’s series Emergent Behavior is about expecting the unexpected, photographing “airborne swarms of common objects” in new and unforeseen circumstances.

His work is otherworldly, but hopeful. He employs incredible and sophisticated usage of light and shadow in every work that he creates. The result is magical.

I see a mutant, strange universe in his photographs, a sort of alternate reality that hinges on our own existence for inspiration but easily departs from it.

Thomas writes:

The images attempt to tap fear and fascination that those phenomena tend to evoke, while creating an uneasy interplay between the natural and the manufactured and the real and the imaginary. At the same time, each image is an experiment in juxtaposition. By constructing the pieces from unexpected materials and placing them in environments where they seem least to belong, I aim to tweak the margins of our visual vocabulary, and to invite fresh interpretations of everyday things.

Ran Hwang, Using Common Materials to Create Uncommon Murals

Korean artist Ran Hwang uses buttons, pins, and beads to create enormous murals of birds and cherry blossom trees.

In her words:

My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me find my inner peace. Pins are used to hold buttons onto the surface to form a silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so the buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I use buttons because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings.

I create large icons such as a Buddha or a traditional vase, using materials from the fashion industry. The process of building large installations are time consuming and repetitive and it requires manual effort which provides a form of self-meditation. I hammer thousands of pins into a wall like a monk who, facing the wall, practices Zen.

I think that the choice to use these materials to create figures such as birds is stunning–the way that she creates them make them look as if they are about to take flight, an amazing conclusion to make when you see the buttons up close (see here). Perhaps her zen-like creative state is how she truly achieves this.

Henrique Oliveira

Henrique Oliveira is a Brazil-based sculptor, a young and rising artist who has hit recent success.

He takes driftwood from the streets and creates these massive, living pieces of art within large spaces. He paints as well, creating linear designs on canvas in what seems to be an imitation of wood’s curving growth rings.

via Olveira’s site

In the above picture, it seems as if the wood has entered the home and burst out from the foyer, creating a growth that invades and lives through its location. The wood invades the sidewalk at the house’s front, yet it is completely still: it guards itself in wait.

The wood is its own being, reborn after being hacked away, reincorporated into a new entity. The wood itself defies defeat, and a tempest is created.