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"Art & Design"
P.L.U.R. (peace love unity and respect) are the four pillars of raver culture. This acronym is frequently featured on the brightly colored ‘Kandi’ jewelry that so often adorn the limbs of these ecstatic dancers. Now, I’m not saying you should walk out of work right this second and buy super baggy neon pants and furry ears to wear around on the daily, but there is something magnetic about the colors featured in this culture, and Blandine Bardeau, the French jewelry designer has very succinctly captured this fluorescence in her pieces. These are by no means understated, in fact, they are outright loud, yet they carry a beauty that evokes Zulu tribal jewelry, Native American beadwork, and most notably the aforementioned London rave scene.
Blandine Bardeau graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2009, and in addition to her jewelry she actively pursues illustration. In both mediums she deals with the fantastic, allowing for a graceful touch of the absurd in all of her work. Despite her newcomer status, she has already designed and put together jewelry for a Selfridges storefront, had her jewelry featured in many music videos, and has pieces that can be purchased in stores all over the world.
GET IT HERE.
“Marc Jacobs International is known for its commitment to charity in the communities in which it operates…” From an interview I did last Spring with Marc Jacobs International President & Cofounder Robert Duffy. Yeah, I just quoted myself. Isn’t that cool? NAWT…
What is cool, however, is that Marc Jacobs has started a special promotion to support one of Boston’s greatest cultural institutions, the Boston Ballet. In all seriousness, two programs from last year’s season at the Boston Ballet had me in tears, and, as you’ve probably surmised from reading my misanthropic tomes, I don’t much fancy crying. The dancers and the repertoire are really just that good. James Whiteside + Lia Cirio = OTHERWORDLY AND BREATHTAKING AND OMGWHATAMIWATCHINGTHISCAN’TBEREAL AND WAAAATAMICRYINGDAMNYOUDAMNYOUDAMNYOU. And of course we all already know that Marc is dope.
Want to do your part? Marc Jacobs is making it easy-peasy for you. Through December 31st, all you have to do is:
1) Go see the Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker because a) it’s incredible and b) this is the last year the ballet will perform the now decade-running production. It will be revamped next year.
2) Keep your ticket stubs.
3) Take said ticket stubs to Marc Jacobs at 81 Newbury Street, Boston, MA.
4) Be super proud of yourself because…
Marc Jacobs is donating a crisp dollar bill to the Boston Ballet for every ticket stub submitted. Basically, you enrich yourself by seeing the Ballet (Hi, you’re a cultural noob, get on it) and then, without doing anything except exercising your way to MJ, you support the Ballet alongside, you know, Marc Jacobs and his crew of übercool, acid-washed-denim-wearing, tattoo-having, always-smiling-because-they’re-cooler-than-you-but-still-somehow-unnervingly-nice cats. (I realize saying übercool cats = me not being cool at all. TOTALLY AWARE KTHX.)
If that weren’t enough, a submitted ticket stub means you’ll also be entered into a raffle that could result in you being $350 of Marc Jacobs richer. Which is like $1278931287312381237123 richer in regular dollars. OBVIOUSLY.
You read that right. So…. go do it. And STAT.
I don’t know about you, but I find numbers stiff, rigid, stuck in the interminable grasp of tradition, each digit signifying aging, death, and destruction. They make reading a clock an utter chore, droll forms leering back at you, forcing you to linger on how much time you just wasted. Ick.
So I searched for an alternative… a clock unlike all other clocks. I found just that in the above, a clever take on the age-old device, courtesy of the London-based Paula Collective.
Introduce yourself to the Solid Ho Clock, a time-telling device that employs shapes to do the job of numbers. The clock begins with a tetrahedron, and ends with a dodecahedron. This is for the geometrically minded, the artists, the unabashed aesthetes.
GET IT HERE.
Fashion & design powerhouse Hermes is gettin’ bizzay: through the 22nd of November they are teaming up with some well-known contemporary Dee-zigners to produce ‘Petit h’, a line of accessories, gifts, and just plain coolness made from leftover materials.
Here’s to making recycling even greater than it already was. Hippy never sounded sooooooo good.
A Brussels advertising agency uses an incendiary realization of Kafka’s metamorphoses to make a point: read more books. Would this bring you to the bookstore or keep you away from it?
Don’t miss Samson Gallery’s current show by Mark Cooper, titled “More is More”.
The exhibit is an apotheosis of decades of work, spanning every tangible medium imaginable. Walking in, the senses are hit as if by a freight train, each fragment of the work puncturing a different visceral moment of recognition. Cooper works with sculpture, paint, and paper primarily, but his antic shapes are maggots in doll’s clothes, playful yet completely and compellingly unsettling.
There is something grossly honest about this work, like the first time a child looks at you in earnest and asks why people have to die. The show runs through December 10th.
MARC COOPER
‘More is More’
Samson Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue / 29 Thayer Street
Boston, MA 02118
T | (617) 357-7177
On November 1st, as part of the DANCE/DRAW exhibition at the ICA in Boston, Paul Chan and William Forsythe will be speaking in conversation with ICA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth. The talk will explore the junction of performance and art, focusing on 21st century artists that have branched out from their specific medium. The DANCE/DRAW show, which opened October 7th, is an interesting mélange of works in and of itself. Here Molesworth is attempting to examine how the body leaves traces after movement, exploring performance, performance art, and more traditional physical arts, and how the interplay between these different dimensions of art has formed something a little more complex when one compares the corporeal verses the ethereal.
William Forsythe is a brilliant contemporary choreographer and dancer, known for being one of the first to re-envision classical ballet choreography, deconstructing said choreography’s structures and forms in extremely groundbreaking ways. He is also acutely engaged in other forms of art-making, particular performance and multimedia work.
Paul Chan is a contemporary art genius out of New York, and truly embraces the contemporary interdisciplinarity of art-making, working primarily in multimedia but never limiting himself to one medium. His work has been in many exhibitions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the New Museum in New York. He is represented by Greene Neftali gallery in Manhattan.
Find out more about the talk and exhibition at the ICA’s website.
