Wood sculpture by Alastair Heseltine.
December 23, 2010
That’s quite a woodpile.
October 18, 2010
Evergreen Brickworks.
Wow. Toronto points. Actually, midtown Toronto points. Midtown doesn’t get enough love. C and I were thinking of moving to High Park area, but this place now has some big pull in the moving decision.
Evergreen Brickworks is the newly retrofitted environmental education centre that used to be home to Toronto’s brick quarrying and manufacturing. A massive geologic deposit of clay soil allowed for major brick production in the quarry stopped producing that now features an environmental education centre, modern art installations, a Saturday farmer’s market, event space, and about 8 other buildings worth of drools. The best part? Our walk involves no roads or streets or sidewalks. Through the park, through the Mud Creek ravine trail system, right to the Brickworks. They knew what to do.
Bustling market – beautiful looking prepared baked goods, hot lunches, etc. Not much produce when we got there (late), just apples + cider.
Construction is still ongoing, but most is done.
Into the art installation building. Yes, I loved that they’ve kept as much of the graffiti intact as they could. Sad to say, I’m not Rob Ford. Was impressed (with myself) that I recognized a name from one of the installations (Werner Herzog).
Forgive me and my blatant perspective photos, I’m no photog. And we did not leave empty-handed. Of all things I found some great looking tomatillos at the market. Never made Mexican salsa verde before so I went for it. That’s why I love markets – great alternative ingredients to really get something new on your Sunday dinner plate.
This place really stands at the Venn circle intersection of food, environment, and design. Let’s start our own lecture series and call it FED Talks.
March 5, 2010
The vow of not photoshopped.
Thanks be to Cracked for this post. I’m just showing my jaw droppers. This generation is all about making non-verbs verbs. Texting, nexting, photoshopping. Ugly words ahead.
These are not bad photoshop jobs, they are actual installations. People like art that’s comprehensible, and I am one of those people.
Sculptures by Alan Gibbs.
An actual horse through bonfire race in Scotland.
Look for the slight skin exposure around her neck, quite a job.
The gaseous outfall of a Russian test missile caught in a Norwegian night sky.
Months and months of modelling and construction. Complete trip.
February 28, 2010
Ascii art.
This is the only type of art I could attempt. Or the parallelograms and cubes I like to draw in the corners of pages.
October 21, 2009
North York – but with spice.
[via National Post]
A house painted green to resemble a Monopoly board game piece is one of a series of art installations on Leona Drive in Toronto. The Leona Drive Project is a unique contemporary art exhibition set in five vacant Toronto bungalows that addresses the shifting space of the suburbs. Eighteen artists were commissioned for projects in the series of bungalows slated for demolition by Hyatt Homes, a developer in Willowdale.
August 26, 2009
Commercial/art.
Multi-talented artist Justin Broadbent was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to temporarily transform the unused lower portion of Bay Station into a massive installation. I didn’t even know there was an unused subway platform period, although I do remember seeing an awful Midway State video that exploited this very place. See more pictures and an article here.
I don’t have major opposition to commercial sponsored art projects, but it definitely depends on the amount of control demanded by the payer. No one else is supporting independent art in this country (especially visual art), so if it has to be private interest that supports struggling artists, fine by me. Fortunately in this instance, Absolut gave Broadbent free reign except they wanted him to use the Absolut font (which he liked). Not a bad compromise for a hopefully large (and unmatched) paycheque for the artist. Yes it’s a slippery slope, but supporting freely developed art matters more. Jes?
July 4, 2009
Eat that tape art people.
Beatles’ Abbey Road and The Clash’s London Calling meets a Michel Gondryesque love of pixel art.
June 20, 2009
______________________
We always like these, and not because it’s meta. A couple more here. Not new but still neat.
[via iri5 flickr]
January 16, 2009
Distroboto.
Montreal arts scene gets big points for this.
So instead of throwing out old cigarette vending machines from decades ago, for the past decade the Montreal art community has reclaimed them and installed various objets d’arts inside. Called the Distroboto, it sells various CDs, books, comics, crafts, films, animation, and other pieces in old cigarette vending machines all across the city.
I just found them online as a fellow musician is selling some of his CDs through these vending machines.
Pretty cool idea. Website here.
December 24, 2008
Tech intersection art.
The Wood Mirror - My definite favourite in this genre – this 1999 piece by Daniel Rozin uses a hidden video camera to capture what is in front of it; the mirror’s 830 wooden pixels then tilt to reflect back a shaded mosaic of its surroundings.
Here’s a video of the piece, he’s done mirrors on many surfaces (trash, circles, etc.). It’s beautiful.
Bumper Art – These art-bots by Christian Cerrito each cover a sheet of paper, drawing as they move. The three BumpBots are wirelessly linked, so whenever one of them hits a wall or encounters an obstacle, all three change course.
Handicam – Seung Jun Lee’s table lights up and pixelates whatever is above it (with aid of an overhead cam). The table also responds to objects with abstract musical effects.
DJ Like Spinning Plates – Thomas Gerhardt allows users to create unique musical tracks by spinning modified dinner plates at different speeds.
[adapted from Scientific American Online].
November 7, 2008
Bezembinders.
A friend of mine introduced me to Bezembinders, a daily art blog from The Netherlands that has some amazing entries. A lot of people have “Artist a Day” stuff on their iGoogles or Facebook profiles, but I find their selections to be pretty bland or just simply not my bag. Bezembinder’s has some really interesting (and sometimes funny) stuff and feature a ton of mixed media – photography, digital, editing, canvas, sculpture, installations, interior design and architecture, etc. It usually takes on a Banksy, culture jamming social perspective to their art.
Here’s my downloaded gallery o faves:
