TNT

Felipe Barbosa

his firecracker works are a little puzzling when initially looking at them. barbosa paints firecracker snaps and glues them onto a plush toy. the photographs make the work appear flat, but maybe that's also some kind of optical illusion if you're a certain distance from the work set against a flat black background (which i think is actually a pretty cool presentation for sculpture). the constructive processes play with the viewer in multiple ways. its construction is visually playful because of the actual explosive charge packed into his party popper material. his fuzzy and cuddly Tweety and Sapo (Toad) are ironically constructed from materials that will deconstruct with too much tactile playing. the subject, cartoon dolls for kids, inhabits more twisted and dynamic sensibilities than its innocent demeanor suggests

the colorful curling sparkers of Ursa Maior (Bear) are visually ecstatic. individual colors and placement give a unique hand to the manufacturing process of plush dolls, especially ones whose images are iconic. its detailed placement and assorted variety calls the viewer's attention to the handmade assembly process

his other work like Cubic Idea draws upon ideas of Constructivism in form and ideology. construction plays with permutation and pattern while aspiring to psuedo-ideal geometries. his work alone seems to conduct experiments in optical effects like in Three-Dimensional Opp Ball, the Op Art "somewhere in between understanding and seeing" (Lancester)

Kathedrale I (2007) Andreas Gursky - Cokes (2006), Pill Ball (2006)

[via Sara Meltzer Gallery]

No child left behined

Lewis Hine

social reform photographer, worked for NCLC (National Child Labor Committee) and then later for government agencies that worked in concert with businesses in a capitalistic market, which portrayed the industrial worker as kind of a modern hero (they were often advertisements photographed by artists who were funded by the Works Progress Administration in the '20s and '30s for businesses to solicit employees. shaped a new labor business management model where the worker had greater independence and worked under better conditions. reform!).

Mornings on Maple Street is an awesome site run by this dude who just had an interest in uncovering the identities of the exploited child laborers in Hine's photographs (that he did for the NCLC). really interesting stories of who these children are, what they go on to do, and how he tracks down the people who knew them

"The real problem in America is not child labor, but child idleness. You cannot convince me that it hurts a child (age 4+) either physically or morally to make him work. Where one child has been injured from work, 10,000 have gone to the devil because of lack of occupation" -Charles S. Thomas, US Senator from Senator from Colorado from 1913 to 1921

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) (John Singer Sargent) - Girl at Spinning Machine, Cotton Mill (1908) >> notice how the tropes of the "Romantic" bourgeois child are being subverted in the modern child laborer, one existing ahistorically, and the other living in "industrial time" (Chinn). i'm making a stretch to connect this, but the converging diagonals place the vanishing point around the area of her head, similar to the placement of the vanishing point on Christ's head in Leonardo's famous The Last Supper, emphasizing her status as a martyr.

Men at Work series (1931)

Taking a Break High Above Manhattan - that famous photograph that (i think) was in my pediatric dentist's waiting room. "go see your family dentist if your child smokes or eats candy or something like that"
not like you couldn't tell from the pictures, but like the workers, Hine put himself in extremely dangerous situations to shoot. five died working on the Empire State Building.

re: ESB construction >> "Topping Out Day" was the day that the last steel beam was set in its place before the dressing of the empire state building, a very overlooked day in our history (May 1st)

for further reading, check out The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (JGAPE)

Cotton's candy

Will Cotton

king of confectionery and 'cotton' candy. older stuff has darker kind of ephemeral photographic quality to them, but i really like the direction that he went in, which is much lighter (Pastoral) yet still seemingly aware of time (time feels mystical in a funny way?), like Monument / Alpine Ruin. conflates maquettes and "real" homes of an imaginary landscape, or Cotton's "new frontier"

cotton candy cloudscapes with nudes resemble depictions of Venus, which date back to the italian renaissance. Cabanel's Venus, who seems to be posing for the viewer (between dreaming and being awake like a game of cat and mouse with the (male) viewer), diffuses an ebb and flow of erotic tidal energy. Cotton's work, on the other hand, in which "all desire is fulfilled all the time", recognizes that its absence of anything 'lacking' eliminates the potential for any actual desire. desire, Cotton says, can only exist where there 'lacks'
pretty much the opposite of jeff koons' "Made in Heaven" exhibition


CANDY LAND >> "My initial impulse to make these paintings really came out of an awareness of the commercial consumer landscape that we live in. Every day we're bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages designed specifically to incite desire within us."
The Birth of Venus (Alexandre Cabanel) - Cotton Candy Cloud
Girl with the Pearl Earring (Vermeer) - NOEMI
Ripe (Ed Ruscha) - Insatiable
Ames Gate Lodge (H. H. Richardson) / Parc Güell, Entrance Pavillion (Antoni Gaudí) - Nut House 
Teenage Dream - Cotton Candy Katy  << art enthusiast katy perry had "no idea the paintings were so expensive." (imagine that!) pop culture enthusiast mr. cotton emailed her back and asked if she was a singer. well kind of, "P.S., is this Katy Perry, the singer?". you can now buy his reproductions for $9.99 instead of his actual work for 60K, THX GURL \m/

[via MARY BOONE GALLERY, New York, PACE PRINTS, New York, MICHAEL KOHN GALLERY, Los Angeles, BALDWIN GALLERY, Aspen, JABLONKA GALERIE, Cologne, GERMANY, GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON, Paris, FRANCE]

false prophets and a dark subconscious

Folkert de Jong

amsterdam born, looks to history / newspapers / old photographs for political and cultural reflections (like The Shooting...at Watou).  drunken revelry and merriment have historically always been part of Dutch and Flemish culture.

confronts viewer with the character's insanity, as they're hyper-aware of the viewer's presence and meant to make us feel bothered

they look haunting, like singularly-driven characters risen from the dead, more nightmarish than dream-like, or as de jong puts it, "from the darker part of the human's subconscious." (great youtube vid of an interview with him / montage of works). 

characters assume deceptive religious-like identities out of crisis: palm readers, false prophets, the great communicator, the manipulator, blue widows (beautiful sketch), architects, sculptors, and the devil (who's wearing a 'lifeguard' t-shirt lol), like in his Der Falsche Prophet exhibition. we're given something to believe in (despite its fiction), reflecting man's tendencies to direct things that aren't necessarily truthful into something recognizable. our need for guidance and role playing analyzed and critiqued. 

styrofoam and polyurethane. art is fun with a capital Frightening


The Bitter Draught (Adriaen Brouwer) - lifeguard (the devil)
Das Schlachtfest (brouwer) - dinner scene
Smoking Men (brouwer) - lounging
Three Musicians (Picasso) - The Player / Circle of Trust
The Banjo Lesson (Tanner) - The Shooting Lesson 
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (Degas) - ballerina
Broadway Boogie Woogie (Mondrian) - Last Boogie Woogie

[via Saatchi Gallery, James Cohen Gallery]

alt bros?

Kurt Kauper

first painting i looked at struck me as a 3rd wave feminist adaptation of James Whistler's 1st wave Symphony in White No. 2. aside from a visual/terminology pun (tan lines outline his symphony in white), he uses he elements of the whistler painting--the mirror that entraps the woman's domestic role (her mirror reflection looks painful and longing), the reduction of her identity to the beautiful objects around her like the china or japanese flowers--and completely inverts it. he changes her gender, doesn't try to conceal his identity (actor Cary Grant), or personality (characteristically debonair), and unleashes his passions by revealing the blazing fire, unlike whistler who obscures the fireplace with her virgin dress in which he acknowledges the repressed female sexuality

interesting use of curvilinear geometry to make use of motion in his paintings that otherwise feel like a still photograph from a time past.

smoothed out naked figures / realism / tilted picture plane feel like Philip Pearlstein's work

he also has some nice delicate mechanical drawings; you can imagine him transferring these visual studies onto larger canvas grids, about eight feet in height. i like when artists give the illusion of including the viewer into their private process of creating

magnify details by clicking paintings, would have missed orange sock reflection in 'Old Spice LIME talc for men'

Symphony in White No. 2 (James Whistler) - Cary Grant #1
After the Hunt (William Harnett) - Derek >>  feels like a similar still life arrangement on wooden panels in same color palette, 'before the game'. nice "sher-wood", derek!
Portrait of the Artist (Hockney) - Shaving Before the Game >> affectionate and plastic rendering of men (especially in profile) reminds me a little of hockney. shaving before the game is also my favorite painting of his

[via Acme]

flower vendoring bicycle riding animal holding hobo clowns

allison schulnik

her hobo clowns are emotionally primitive creatures and explore their surrounding relationships through poking and finger pointing. they are ceaseless in their discovery, like in Hobo with Bird, which captures a dynamic moment of becoming, understanding, and knowing. schulnik gives them a lot of psychological depth and awkward moments of self-realization (like in Performance #2, which also has one of my favorite color palettes), some even transcending the psychology of their own characters and becoming intimate reflections of the viewer's psyche.

even though her paintings are the most seducing, don't miss her sculptures, films and works on paper like Yellow Man. more modest, same emotional delight

grizzly bear commissioned schulnik to make a claymation vid for "ready, able". one viewer wrote, "I found this while trying to find grizzly bear attacks." in this way schulnik makes her videos multifunctional.

Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (van Gogh) - Sunflowers #9
Old Man in Sorrow: On the Threshold of Eternity (van Gogh) - Hobo Clown #2
Virgin and Child in a Flower Garland with Angels (Rubens - Virgin and Child // Jan Brueghel - flowers)  - Sunflower Wreath
Niagara (Frederich Edwin Church) - Niagara Falls #5
my beautiful dark twisted fantasy (George Condo) - Girl with Animal

[via Mark Moore Gallery]

poised toys

Hideki Kuwajima

Kuwajima takes found, recycled and cheaply manufactured children toys and water guns to construct these highly animated sculptures, part of her 'euphoria series' (euphoria 100320 (plastic), euphoria 100701 (plastic) both done in 2010). the appeal of these crafts are in their symmetrical construction, centering the viewer instead of leaving us overwhelmed or scattered, which must be difficult for this medium (bright colors/many smaller parts composing objects composing larger structures). but the standardization of its plastic parts does help maintain this control and (surprising) coherence. i like how her titles, describing each euphoria as an identification number, also references the mechanical, which feels oxymoronic in its nature (mechanizing a feeling). here's another 'euphoria', "euphoria 001" (2008), which resembles a festival, unabashedly celebratory. apparently Hermès has commissioned her for some window displays (cool!), but i can't find any pictures online (anyone know where to find this?)

she's not afraid to work small either. in 2009 she did these key-chain sized sculptures which are only several centimeters tall and wide. Kuru Kuru Scope 001 ed.3 and Kuru Kuru Scope 002 ed.3/10 are perfect pieces to design a home around.

a friend commented that japanese artists are drawn more to the 'cute' in the way american artists may be drawn to the 'sexy', as schoolgirls and childhood imagery are often fetishized in japanese culture, which i think is a great point.
*for mature audiences only*

Paprika (film still, dir. Satoshi Kon) -"euphoria 001" (2008)

[via Roentgenwerke]