London-based paper artist Claire Brewster, whose work we first spotted over at Colossal, creates beautiful, intricate cut-out birds and plants from old maps. We love how the play of the shadow behind the paper figures seems to give them a sense of movement, and we’re fascinated by the concept of birds painstakingly built from the colorful patterns of what used to be a complete birds-eye-view. Somehow, they make us want to stay in and re-decorate our apartments and also go on a round-the-world trip all at once, which is quite a lot of emotion for some cut-up bits of paper. Click through to see some of our favorites of Brewster’s work, and then be sure to head over to her blog for even more.
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Thursday’s meal may not be a crowning moment for the avian kind, but birds have done well making a name for themselves in pop culture. From the lovable Woodstock to Harper Lee’s lessons in morality, the trendy act of microblogging to birds that actually microblog, they have left their tiny tracks all over our consciousness. With anthropomorphic birds (see Big Bird), humans channeling birds (see Björk), and even birds killing humans (see Bird Flu), it seems that the two species have never been more closely linked. Below the jump, we’ve rounded up 40 cultural it birds who did better for themselves than the one on your Thanksgiving table. Read More »
A flock of starlings is what’s known as a murmuration — one of the most beautiful words we’ve ever heard and a breathtaking phenomenon that finds thousands of the small birds forming swirling clouds that swoop across the sky. Sophie Windsor Clive and her traveling companions were canoeing across the River Shannon in Ireland when they floated right into a dense murmuration. Luckily their chance encounter was captured on video. Apparently the birds can reach up to 20 MPH in flight, and the murmuration builds in size over the course of the day as the starlings look for a place to congregate at night. Click past the break to marvel at this natural wonder.
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It’s the end of an era: the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that it would stop relying upon its color-coded terrorism alert scale, which means that no longer will the nightly news give us an inexplicable craving for Life Savers. We here at Flavorwire thought the government really had something with their Rainbow Brite approach to the truly terrifying, though, and decided to re-purpose their spectrum of scary things for the new year.
After the jump, take a peek at Flavorpill’s very own Pop Culture Advisory System and the celebrities, shows, and films that have terrorized 2011 so far and are on our cultural disaster watch list from here on out.
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Artist and photographer Chris Jordan examines the bad habits of human consumption with work that depicts trash in all its incarnations.
From a distance, his collections of bottle caps, bullets, or Barbie parts are pleasantly abstract, though carefully orchestrated in their large-scale, long-zoom formats. As a body of work, Jordan’s photographs and multimedia pieces — combining documentary with staged production — reveal stunning data about the accumulation of stuff, wrapping social commentary in an attractive packaging.
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Walton Ford’s paintings of wild animals combine the austere mastery of New England-style naturalism with a dark sexuality and satirical humor.
Ford’s latest project is Pancha Tantra, a signed and numbered edition from Taschen; its title is a reference to the Sanskrit tradition of animal fables as sociopolitical commentary. The artist’s exotic birds of prey, equine species, and their surreal orgies, tea parties, and surroundings act as metaphorical indictments of the insatiability and violence of his own species’ appetites. Read More »
