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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.
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.
[Photographs by Marcus Gaab for the New York Times.]
Imagine coming home every single evening and casting your gaze upon this sucker in your dining room? Well one lucky couple in Munich can, and does. Suspended 25 feet in the air is a 12 foot amoebic creation designed by legendary lighting designer, Ingo Maurer. He calls it a Biotope.
Incidentally, a Biotope is an actual thang: a contemporary combination of the Greek terms Bio, for life. and Topos, for Place. In short, it’s a fancy word for habitat, and quite frankly, we should all start thinking more about our own Biotopes. Seriously, bitches.
Maurer was commissioned to create and design this masterpiece to illuminate and act as a sound barrier in a dining room whose previous life was a 19th Century chapel. He describes it as a ‘hybrid lighting and acoustical devise.’
In order to satisfy the ‘sound deadening’ challenge, he came up with quite the ingenious usage of sponges; yes, sponges. Farmed of course, because that’s what responsible Biotope developers would do. Each sponge was then sprayed with a specially formulated green pigment. L.E.D lamps, along with an integrated sound system are hidden throughout the structure. If Bach composed a Katydid Concerto in D Minor, this chandelier would have it on repeat.
But it gets better: Maurer wanted “something artificial, something abstract” so his team of Creatives set forth to locate a Californian artist who makes insect replicas. Adding delicate butterflies, dragonflies & insects, this light fixture takes on a world of its own.
Breathtakingly brilliant. A Home Tree for the rest of us.
I call it as I see it: genius.
Diego Diaz Marin is a Spanish fashion photographer from Torre Del Mar in Malaga. That sentence alone made me swoon, but I’ll admit, much as I found these kaleidoscopic images utterly otherwordly, I was just as intrigued by the self-portrait of Mr. Marin on his site. Beauty begets beauty, it would seem.
His work is layered and evocative, almost cinematic. It’s the kind of work that is sometimes flawed in its technical delivery, but so full of spirit that mostly you don’t care. Purists may decry these geometric repetitions, but the effect cannot be denied. Looking glass, eat your heart out.
From Mr. Marin: “The shoot is entitled Gypsy Crisis, with Spanish model Fabiola Gomez, my personal muse. It is a story of an Andalusian girl, an elegant millionaire, who finds herself suffering from the current economic crisis in Spain. The focus was strong color and feeling. These kaleidoscopic images are meant to be disorienting but also beautiful.”
Discover his work for yourself. Beware, though, you may find hours slipping by before you know it…
The HYÈRES FESTIVAL is a competition that takes place each spring in the south of France at the Villa Noailles. The very selective and prestigious competition has two categories: fashion and photography. Young designers and photographers proffer to the public their work, which is then examined by a highly-esteemed jury.
This year that jury is a veritable roster of fashion’s most notable names. In the designer category: London-based wunderkind Christopher Kane, Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez & Jack McCollough and Tim Blanks of Style.com. In the photography category: Tom Watt of Artreview and Jason Evans and Magdalene Keaney of Fashion Space. Intimidated yet?
This is a fantastic opportunity to shine if you think you have the talent. Not sure? I’ve devised an easy litmus test:
a. Have the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus appeared to you in visions and donned your new collection?
b. Have you awoke from sleepwalking hanging off the edge of a building clutching your Canon 60D in a divinely inspired attempt to photograph the brilliant light of dawn against a crumbling facade?
If you answered yes to either you should apply.
This is how Viktor & Rolf got their big break, after all, among other terrifically notable designers and photographers. Applications are due December 5th, so start your sketching and snapping ASAP.
DETAILS HERE.
