The ultimate in crowd-sourced, user-generated, globalized wiki-culture, San Francisco-based designer Brian Singer’s 1000 Journals Project is as analog as can be.
In the decade since Singer distributed the project’s first notebooks — featuring original covers by popular young artists and an open invitation to fill some of their pages and pass them on — the journals have crisscrossed the globe. Along the way, they’ve accumulated powerful, eclectic stories and art, and spawned exhibitions, a book, a documentary film, and a second round of international paper-tag.
Anish Kapoor‘s bigtime solo exhibition at the Royal Academy ends next Friday, and with its deadline looming The Guardianwonders: how in the h-e-double-hockeysticks are they going to clean up that mess? You may recall that one of the main attractions in Kapoor’s eponymous show involves a cannon firing globs of red wax into a wall. Another work in the classical galleries is a length of oily red paint with a hulking door-shaped wax monolith at one end. The Royal Academy curators aren’t giving up their Fairy Godmother sanitizing secrets, but we know they must have a few tricks up their collective sleeve. Which left us pondering which other art exhibition remnants should be left to the pros of Sunshine Cleaning...
Font nerds, put your glasses on, because this comprehensive display of three-dimensional type has exited your computer screens and entered the real world. House Industries, a graphic design firm dedicated to creating a “tangible experience” around its digital type, is unleashing some of its most lauded products onto the public in a month-long exhibition at Type Directors Club in Manhattan. The show will comprise the striking prints, patterns, installations and sculptures based on House’s 16-year love affair with alphabetical forms. Read More »
15 second HD video loop, no audio, by Borna Sammak (2009).
Curator Thomas McDonell is a 23-year-old artist based in Williamsburg. While studying visual art in college, McDonell traveled across the world — Europe, West Africa, Southeast Asia — which informed the sense of global Aukflarung so prevalent in his work. Based in cosmopolitan Shanghai to research contemporary art, curator met fellow artist Borna Sammak and a partnership was born. We spoke briefly with Thomas about Sammak’s high-definition video work, launching for one day only at the Best Buy at 622 Broadway in New York City. Read More »
As a Brit, I’m often proud that we manage to beat the Yanks when it comes to cultural progress: the subway, Baseball, gin and tonics… we were there first. To this end, I managed to catch the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London last summer, where I was bowled over by the range of work showcased (from the artist’s early sketches to his most famous masterpieces) and the detailed curation (personal letters, photographs, and information about his greatest influences and turbulent relationship with lover, George Dyer). Bacon’s work is haunting at best and confusing at worst, and this exhibition brings out the former whilst dispelling the latter.
Don’t trust the opinion of a posh English snob? Here’s what the critics had to say about Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, currently on view at the Met through mid-August. Read More »
Launching this Friday and running through the 13th, Windows Brooklyn is an art exhibition that challenges traditional conventions of art display by taking pieces out of the gallery and into public spaces; storefronts will play host to a range of local artists’ work in a variety of media, including performance and video art. We sat down with one of the event’s curators, Sara Jones (a fantastic artist in her own right), to discuss space, emerging artists, and edible artwork… Read More »
