EARonics on Sale?? Yes, it’s true! We’re having the OMG-the-iPhone5-is-Out-and-We-Still-Have-iPhone4-Cases-Plus-We’re-Moving SALE! All cases are now $15 and there’s still free domestic shipping and $5 international. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for! Tell your friends! Tell your family! Heck, tell your enemies!
Buy them here.
(And, yes, we are well aware that the Sotheby’s art handler above has a freakishly large hand coming out of his collarbone…but, hey, he’s got an EARonic!)
Click to enlargeBeijing-born and based artist Li Songsong is probably best known for his thickly applied contemporary oil paintings; some on canvas and others on aluminum panels. In his latest work, a tunnel-like installation at Pace Beijing, he inverts his usual style, leaving the aluminum as the exposed exterior, while the interior is made up of 91 sections of very thickly applied oil paint on differing shapes and textures in varying colors. The effect would seem to be a cross between entering a stripped away space shuttle and a 3-dimensional abstract painting. Cool.
Click to enlargeFrench artist Jean-François Fourtou has always wanted to be an architect. Through a series of experiments in his studio in Madrid, Fourtou played with dimension and proportion, mostly distorting them, and applying these experiments to a decade-long project of installations on his property in Morocco. Tombée du Ciel (Fallen from the Sky), the upside down house inspired by his grandparents’ home in France, reproduced to scale and plopped on its roof with its entrance via window, is one of these works. Reminiscent of scenes from books such as Alice in Wonderland or Gulliver’s Travels, the experience of walking on the ceilings (or, if you’re Lionel Richie, perhaps dancing) must evoke both a disorienting and funny feeling. Can’t help thinking of Stray Light Grey a little bit.
Currently, Fourtou is exhibiting a version of his Tombée du Ciel as part of the Festival Lille3000 Fantastic 2012 in Belgium.
via voanews
Click to enlargeAIGA’s (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Get Out the Vote project invites designers to create nonpartisan posters and videos that inspire the American public to participate in the electoral process and vote in the 2012 general election.
AIGA is hosting an exhibition in New York City from October 3–November 30, 2012 featuring the 2012 Get Out the Vote project, at the AIGA National Design Center. But have no fear, if you can’t make the show you can see the complete virtual gallery here.
Click to enlargeThis post is dedicated to Daniela who called yesterday and mentioned that designing shoes in Rome for a month is the latest on her to-do list. Not being much of a shoe person myself, I foolishly questioned why that would be cool. I get it now. Though judging from this list, The Netherlands might be the place to go.
From top to bottom, left to right: Czech designer Pavlina Miklasova draws inspiration from wooden models of the Hellenic History Museum of Athens.
Dutch designer Leanie van der Vyver’s Scary Beautiful forces a new way of walking, leaning forward while refining a painfully fragile balance. See the walking video here.
French shoe designer Benoît Méléard designs for many designers but these crazy wooden platforms are from his collection.
Dutch designer Rosanne Begsma’s Pumptouw.
All of Dutch designer Marloes ten Bhömer’s collections are pretty radical. Beigefoldedshoe uses the tanned leather from the soles as the uppers too. Bottom photos are hers as well: Noheelshoe.
RISD alum Martha Davis designed the sculptural wooden sandals, second from bottom.
Oooh, and there’s also this 3D printed Macedonia Shoe designed by Finnish designer Janne Kyattenen. Wild.
Click to enlargeThis is such a great public art project. From January 2012 up until just yesterday, a set of 30 red and black LED screens were installed on the roofs of bus shelters throughout the many boroughs of London. The project, sponsored by the Arts Council of England and the Olympics, was titled Bus-Tops and projected images up to those traveling on the upper level of London’s double-decker buses. If that concept alone isn’t nice enough, the added interactive aspect allowing anyone, of any age, to draw and submit their own artwork on the Bus-Tops site, with a chance for it to be projected on one of the many screens, is just genius. Taking a look at all the works (and there are hundreds of them ranging from typographic to illustrative, abstract to realist) showcased on the project’s website, some of the kid submissions are equally charming to those of their more sophisticated and slicker counterparts.
It’s a shame these couldn’t continue indefinitely. It would be great to see similar ideas executed in other cities as well.
Here is a video that explains the project in detail and shows some of the animated works.
via demagazine
Click to enlargeInteractive designers UltraCombos collaborated with Taiwanese dance company Anarchy Dance Theater, on their performance piece titled Seventh Sense which made its European debut recently at the TodaysArt Festival in The Hague. This viewer-centered performance detects all movements including those of the dancers and audience, allowing them to interact through visual effects. The audience becomes not just the viewer, but an active participant via the interactive projection mapping. Very cool.
For those of you in Spain, this Seventh Sense performance will be coming to Centro Parraga in Murcia, October 19 and 20, 2012, so you might want to catch it if you can.
Click to enlargeAy yay yay! So many free and cheap things to do in NYC this weekend and so little time. Here are over a dozen free and/or affordable cultural events in art, music, dance, theater, food and general fun for the weekend of 9/28/2012 to 9/30/2012.
1. Art/Design/Classes – From Photoshop and Dreamweaver to Economics. Trade School a self-organized learning space that runs on barter. Opens Friday 9/28 through 10/28. FREE (with barter items or services) Sign up here.
2. Art – Dev Harlan Untitled (Wave) at Christopher Henry Gallery All weekend. 11am to 6pm. 127 Elizabeth St. FREE
3. Theater/Installation – Habit (see post) directed by David Levine. All weekend, continuously loops from 1 to 9pm, FREE.
4. Design/Typography – Concrete Poetry to Feed My Mind, post-World War II experiments in literature that looked beyond the simple signification of words and meanings to a new mode of visual and linguistic communication. At NYU Open House Gallery, 528 LaGuardia Pl., All weekend, 1pm to 4pm. FREE
5. Art/Design/Books – NY Art Book Fair, at PS1. World’s premier event for international artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. All weekend, see website for hours and listing of events. FREE
6. Theater – Gilbert & Sullivan Players I’ve Got a Little Twist at Calhoun Theater, Friday 9/28, 7pm. $10 adults; $5 students & seniors.
7. Art – Saga Sites exhibit, Landscapes of the Icelandic Sagas. Saturday 9/29 and Sunday, 9/30 at Scandinavia Housethrough 1/12/2013. FREE
8. Art/Fun/Food/Music – Dumbo Arts Festival, All weekend starting Friday 9/28 night with Immersive Surfaces projection mapping show from 6pm to 9pm, continuing with vast number of events All weekend. Check site for event listings. FREE
9. Film – 5th Russian Documentary Film Festival, at Tribeca Cinemas. All weekend. Check site for schedule. $14.
10. Art/Performance – SkowheganPERFORMS at Socrates Sculpture Park, Saturday, 9/29, 1:30–5:00pm. FREE
11. Food/Fun – 10th Annual Oyster Frenzy at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. Includes Oyster-eating contest and Oyster-shucking contest. A variety of oysters, shooters and more. Saturday 9/29, 12 to 6pm. FREE entry. (Oysters are a la carte.)
12. Conference/Speakers/Art/Music – RUCKUS NYC is a one-day conference and concert on art and the web. Saturday 9/29 at Cooper Union, 10am to 6pm, (Registration starts at 9:30). $65 (Hey, that’s cheap for a conference.) $25 for just evening concert.
13. Food/Fun/Fair – Chile Pepper Fiesta, at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Saturday 9/29, 11am to 6pm. 20th anniversary with a full roster of sizzling music and dance from spice-loving regions around the world. Sample dozens of award-winning hot sauces, spicy pickles, salsas and chile-chocolates. $15 adults; $10 Students over 12 and Seniors.
14. Food/Music/Fun – The Atlantic Antic Street Festival, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. Sunday 9/30, 12 to 6pm. FREE
Alternatively: DayLife Festival, Sunday 9/30. Orchard Street in full effect as a 3-block special event with food, fashion, a full line-up of top-tier DJs, and games such as Twister, badminton and urban croquet. FREE
15. Film – Two awe-inspiring, informative, and entertaining documentaries, What’s For Dinner? and Vegucated, Saturday 9/29, 1-4pm at Anthology Film Archives. Part of Climate Week NYC. FREE with eticket.
16. Art/Classes – Figure Drawing classes at Brooklyn Art Space. Saturdays & Sundays, 3-hour sessions open to all. $12. See site for times.
17. Music – Global Festival Central Park Great Lawn w/ Neil Young, Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, Band of Horses, K’Naan, Saturday 9/29 at 5pm. All ages. FREE, register.
18. Music – Get tickets for Of Monsters and Men at Terminal 5, November 21, 2012. $25. (Oops! Sorry, sold out)
UPDATES:
Art – Museum Day! Saturday 9/29, Free entry to a list of Smithsonian-affiliated museums (see map): includes Morgan Library, Museo del Barrio, Museum of Folk Art, The Asia Society, Studio Museum in Harlem and many, many more nationwide. Sign up for a pass for two. FREE.
Art – Lucas Samaras: XYZ opens at Pace (W. 25th St) Friday 9/28 and Saturday 9/29 through 10/27. FREE
Fun/Music/Performance – Bushwig! Festival of Drag at Special Project Robot in Bushwick. Saturday 9/29, 3 to 11pm. FREE.
Check back for updates and take a look at our previous Culture on the Cheap posts for some ongoing suggestions. Enjoy.
Click to enlargeThis is a fun way to ‘dress up’ your old chairs. Dutch designers Anke Bernotat and Jan Jacob Borstlap, along with their team, look to “heighten the contrast between the mundane and surprising.” Their challenge is to recombine the old with the new. Their Chair Wear line is the solution. From pockets to turtlenecks, these old, classic chairs, come to life with their new outfits. Very clever.
Click to enlargeI vote Karyn Olivier to design the next playground in town. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Olivier studied undergrad and graduate school in the U.S. Her work includes sculpture, photography, videos, and drawings, but here I’ve just included some of her sculptures. These pieces, at first glance, are humorous and playful, but the artist speaks of nostalgia, betrayal, dysfunction, danger, and isolation in her work. Maybe not the best words to associate with a real playground. Nonetheless, these are quirky and appealing sculptures that seem to call out to be played with.
via Skowhegan Art
Click to enlargeNot usually much of a theater-goer, this week has been the exception, especially when it comes to experimental theater. Today I stopped by Habit directed by David Levine; part avant garde theater, part installation, Habit is described as “The Real World meets No Exit.” A two-bedroom, one-bath apartment set, with sheetrock walls and windows, what seems like actual plumbing, and a kitchen, has been built in the middle of the Essex Street Market’s Building B. For a full 8 hours every day, three actors perform the looped play, strictly observing the script, but without stage directions. They are confined to the set, but can wander around as they please. Apparently, each loop presents a different iteration of the play. The audience watches from around the perimeter of the set, through the numerous windows. There’s not a lot of action (at least the 45 minutes or so that I was there) but I did witness tension and come-ons between the three, as well as a fair amount of snacking and tea-drinking, and a wardrobe change or two by Viv in her bedroom. It feels very voyeuristic to watch the play through the windows, more so than if you were watching the same action take place from a seat in an audience. It’s pretty interesting. I’d be curious to go back and experience a different time of day, much in the way that Christian Marclay’s The Clock was interesting to experience at different times of the day/night, though I’ve always been more of a film person, so that may have had more of an allure for me.
Habit is presented by PS122 & FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, through Sunday, September 30th, from 1 to 9pm daily at the Essex Street Market, Building B, Essex St. between Rivington and Stanton. And it’s free!
Visual artist Clara Lieu (also Daniela’s freshman drawing teacher at RISD last year) has created an interesting (and creepy) series of sculptures as part of her Falling project. A visualization of her personal experience with depression and anxiety, as well as the sense of loss of control, Lieu worked with actress and model Marianna Bassham, to recreate these emotions and expressions.
Lieu works in many mediums including printmaking, illustration, sculpture, and painting. You can see much more of her work on her website, and buy some of her work in her etsy shop. And here is an interesting interview where she goes into detail about her work.
Click to enlargeThis is not just an interesting-looking home, but also has an interesting story behind it. Retired teacher of industrial arts, Roberto Sanchez Rivera, who lives on the south side of the island of Puerto Rico, built his home to look like a spaceship, complete with lights and audio effects that sometimes play the tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other times salsa. The three-bedroom, two-bathroom house was built for about $150,000 and almost everything in it has been ingeniously created from discount store knickknacks and discarded auto parts. Objects such as the kitchen table and bathroom garbage can were designed to hover above the ground, while lamps are made from objects such as stove burners and lead pipes. Each room has a different personality and color scheme.
What possessed Rivera to design such a home? Love. As a teenager he had a girlfriend that left him after three months. From that moment he decided to build a home like no other to impress this girl. Even the location, up on a hill, visible from the main road, was chosen with the hopes that she would inevitably pass the house and notice it. You can read the whole story here but, in the meantime, needless to say Rivera has a new girlfriend and one unique home.
via The NYTimes
Click to enlargeThe Croatian-Austrian collective Numen/For Use (previously here) created a fun installation for the D-Day Festival in their own city of Zagreb. The suspended Field, executed in a former slaughterhouse, underwent the entire vegetative cycle from sprouting to disintegration. The grass field was grown on a floating piece of fabric, converting the designers into urban farmers and making them aware of the fragility and power of life. The growing field was not tied down to the ground, contradicting the usual assumptions that earth is an immobile mass of infinite weight and a two dimensional surface. I especially like the fact that people could wander under, as well as above, the installation, peering up through the holes in Whac-a-Mole style.
This might be a nice addition/substitute for the proposed Lowline project. Just a thought…
via frame
French street artist JR (previously here and here) is at it again! This time in Hong Kong. The immensely appealing photographer has pasted 16 large-scale portraits of Hong Kong city dwellers looking up, along Connaught Road footbridge in the center of the city. And, if that isn’t fun enough, he’s got an exhibit of his first sculptures titled Pattern at Galerie Perrotin through November 10th, 2012.
Click to enlargeThis weekend’s picks for free and cheap things to do in New York. Affordable cultural events in art, music, dance, theater, food and general fun for the weekend of 9/21/2012 to 9/23/2012.
1. Art/Architecture- Tatzu Nishi’s very fun installation: Discovering Columbus (see post), an elevated living room surrounding the statue in Columbus Circle. All weekend and through 11/18. FREE with reserved timed pass.
2. Art–Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years at the Met. All weekend and through 12/31. Pay what you will or suggested admission.
3. Film – The Coney Island Film Festival, All weekend. Screenings and parties range from $7 to $12.
4. Art/Design – Process 01:Joy, at the new P! Gallery in Chinatown, 334 Broome St. Friday 9/21 and Saturday 9/22, FREE. Also related: Saturday, 9/22 from 3 to 5pm the artists Carrion-Murayari, Conaty, and Martens in Conversation at Projects Projects (161 Bowery 2nd Floor) FREE with RSVP
5. Theater – Shuffle performed by the Elevator Repair Service in the stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library. Friday 9/21 and Saturday 9/22, 7 to 9pm. Use code BROK for 20% off tickets.
6. TV/Film/Book– Actress Penny Marshall chats and signs her new memoir at the Strand, Friday 9/21, 7 to 8pm. Purchase of book or $10 Strand Gift Card required.
7. Film – Williamsburg International Film Festival, All weekend, different locations. Check schedule. $5 to $10.
8. Food – Le Grand Fooding Brooklyn, Saturday 9/22 and Sunday 9/23, Brunch in Williamsburg $20, Lunch in Ft. Greene $15. Get tickets and details.
9. Music/Performance/Art/Food – Fourth Arts Block (FAB), will take over East 4th Street for its annual arts extravaganza. An afternoon of free performances by local artists, with multiple indoor and outdoor stages showcasing dance, theater, & music, local artisans and gourmet food vendors, art installations, Saturday 9/22, 1 to 5pm FREE
10. Music – Heritage Blues Trio at 3pm followed by Rory Block singing the blues at 4pm. Saturday 9/22 in Madison Square Park. FREE
11. Film/Documentary – Detropia at IFC. A lyrical and exquisitely shot meditation on abandonment, decay and unexpected renewal of Detroit. All weekend. Co-director Rachel Grady will be at the 6:10 show Saturday 9/22 for a Q&A. $13.50
12. Books –Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall, Sunday 9/23, 10am to 6pm. FREE
13. Music– Rupa & The April Fishes at Le Poisson Rouge, Sunday 9/23 . Doors 10pm. $15
14. Theater – The Exonerated with Stockard Channing & Brian Dennehy at Culture Project. 1/2 off Sundays. Sunday 9/23 . Tickets from $15.
Also in Theater – Get $15 tickets now to Sorry by Richard Nelson at the Public Theater 10/30 to 11/18 before they sell out.
15. Food – Get 1/2 price tickets now for next Sunday’s (9/30) Pickle Palooza above Bowlmore on University Place. $15.
UPDATES:
Performance/Food – 10th Autumn Moon Festival, Sunday 9/23, 11am to 5pm. FREE
TV/Fun – Emmy Screening Party, at Brooklyn Winery, Sunday 9/23, 7 to 11pm. FREE 21+
Art/Music/Party – Animamus Art Salon Tube Party at Low Brow Artique, Sunday 9/23 at 7pm. $10
Check back for updates and take a look at our previous Culture on the Cheap posts for additional suggestions. Happy weekend!
Click to enlargeThis is it! The day New York art lovers have been waiting for. Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus (previously here for background) opens to the public and I’ve got my free pass to stop over later, however, I couldn’t resist the sneak peek from the VIP listers. The large elevated living room is just as described: built around the famous Columbus Circle statue, that stands tall on the coffee table in the center of the room. The wallpaper print is made up of iconic New York City American images ranging from the Empire State Building to a mustard-slathered hot dog, Elvis and Mickey Mouse. There’s even a TV. Totally nutty and fun. I, for one, am really looking forward to this.
Discovering Columbus will be up through November 18, 2012. Visit the Public Art Fund’s website to reserve your timed free pass.
Click to enlargeBrazilian artist Vik Muniz—known for his photographs of his creations ranging from portraits made with melted chocolate, a Medusa in a plate of spaghetti, to his enormous portraits of local favela garbage workers in Rio made from the recycled garbage they collect—shot a series of iPhone photos using a Schneider iPro Lens attachment, leading to some interesting shots. The top one, in particular, is pretty amazing.
via Musée
CollabCubed 