June 18, 2012
Papel picado (‘perforated paper’) is a decorative craft made out of paper cut into elaborate designs. Although it is a Mexican folk art, papel picado is used as a holiday decoration in many countries. The designs are commonly cut from tissue paper using a guide and small chisels, creating as many as forty banners at a time. Common themes includes birds, floral designs, and skeletons.
They are commonly displayed for both secular and religious occasions, such as Easter, Christmas, the Day of the Dead, as well as during weddings, quinceañeras, baptisms, and christenings. In Mexico, papel picado is especially incorporated into altars during the Day of the Dead.
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June 14, 2012
Hercules and Love Affair is a musical project from New York based DJ Andy Butler. Members include Butler, Kim Ann Foxman, Mark Pistel, Aerea Negrot, and Shaun Wright. It is signed to DFA Records. The single ‘Blind’ featuring guest Antony Hegarty (lead vocalist in Antony & The Johnsons) was released in 2008, as was their self-titles debut album (produced by Butler and Tim Goldsworthy).
The band’s central figure, Andrew Butler, began his musical career at 15, DJing in a Denver leather bar run by a hostess called Chocolate Thunder Pussy. He then moved to New York, in order to attend Sarah Lawrence College. According to Butler: ‘I’ve been writing songs since childhood. I made music for dance performances in college (where he studied under Martin Goldray), like a remake of Gino Soccio’s ‘Runaway’ done in the style of Kraftwerk.’ In early interviews, Butler stated his intent to release music with a rotating cast of performers and musicians.
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June 14, 2012
The Copycat Building is a Baltimore landmark containing artists’ live/work/paint spaces. The building was originally occupied in 1905 by the Crown Cork & Seal Company (originators of the modern bottle cap).
It is home to many young artists, musicians, filmmakers, and professionals looking for a large space to live, create, study, and live in the city. The cost of rent is 50 cents per square foot. The building is used for the set of the talk show, ‘It’s a Remarckable Time Who Cares.’
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June 14, 2012
Future Islands are a synthpop band based in Baltimore. The band is composed of Gerrit Welmers, William Cashion, and Samuel T. Herring.
The band met and formed in while studying art at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Their first band was Art Lord & the Self-Portraits, which lasted from 2003 until 2005. In 2006, Cashion, Herring, and Welmers formed Future Islands with Erick Murillo, who played an electronic drum kit.
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June 11, 2012
The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed. Originally used in static photography to achieve blurriness or deformity, the slit-scan technique was perfected for the creation of spectacular animations. It enables the cinematographer to create a psychedelic flow of colors.
Though this type of effect is now often created through computer animation, slit-scan is a mechanical technique. It was adapted for film by Douglas Trumbull during the production of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and used extensively in the ‘stargate’ sequence. It requires an imposing machine, capable of moving the camera and its support.
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June 10, 2012
A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, faster-than-light warfare, love, betrayal, genocide, and a galactic Usenet (an early Internet discussion system).
The story is set in Vinge’s ‘Zones of Thought’ in which the results of technological singularities (the achievement of greater-than-human intelligence) are spread out in a predicable pattern: In the ‘Unthinking Depths’ near the core of the galaxy, no intelligence is possible; in the ‘Slow Zone,’ where Earth is, general relativity applies (i.e. faster-than-light travel is impossible); the ‘Beyond’ allows faster-than-light travel and antigravity, and in the ‘Transcend,’ mysterious god-like entities roam the cosmos. Thus, as you head out of the Milky Way, you see the same progression of advancing technologies in other galaxies.
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June 10, 2012
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century. Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series ‘Homage to the Square.’ In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares.
Painting usually on Masonite (an engineered wood product), he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works. Albers’s work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporated European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European. But his influence fell heavily on American artists of the late 1950s and the 1960s. ‘Hard-edge’ abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, while Op artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception.
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June 10, 2012
Richard Anuszkiewicz [an-uhskey-vich] (b. 1930) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and with German artist Josef Albers, at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts. He was one of the founders and foremost exponents of Op Art, a movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s which explore optical illusions. Victor Vasarely in France and Bridget Riley in England were his primary international counterparts.
In 1964, ‘Life’ magazine called him ‘one of the new wizards of Op.’ More recently, while reflecting on a New York City gallery show of Anuszkiewicz’s from 2000, the ‘New York Times’ art critic Holland Cotter described Anuszkiewicz’s paintings by stating, ‘The drama — and that feels like the right word — is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors, which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind it.’
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June 5, 2012
Matt Mullican (b. 1951) is a American artist and son of abstract painter Lee Mullican. He received his BFA from CalArts in 1974, and rose to prominence as a member of the ‘Pictures Generation,’ a group of artists know for their appropriation of images from the consumer and media saturated age in which they grew to maturity.
Mullican’s work is concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Mullican also works with the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. Mullican has taught and lectured at Columbia University, The Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), The London Institute, Chelsea College of Art and Design, and The School of Visual Arts (NY).
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June 5, 2012
Jim Woodring (b. 1952) is an American cartoonist, fine artist, writer, and toy designer. He is best known for the dream-based comics he published in his magazine ‘Jim,’ and as the creator of the cartoon character Frank, a bipedal, bucktoothed animal of uncertain species with a short tail, described by Woodring as a ‘generic anthropomorph’ and ‘naive but not innocent,’ ‘capable of sinning by virtue of not knowing what he’s really about.’ The character design is reminiscent those of old American animated shorts from the 1920s and 1930s, such as from Fleischer Studios.
Since he was a child, Woodring has experienced hallucinatory ‘apparitions,’ which have inspired much of his surreal work. He keeps an ‘autojournal’ of his dreams, which have formed the basis of some of his comics. His most famous creation is fictional—the pantomime comics set in the universe he calls the Unifactor, usually featuring Frank.
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June 5, 2012
assume vivid astro focus (avaf) is both an alias of Brazilian-born New York-based artist Eli Sudbrack, and the name of an international group of visual and performance artists, with French multimedia artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson as a main collaborators. Sudbrack was born in 1968 and moved to New York in 1998.
He exhibited there in 2000, at which time he used the name Superastrolab, switching to assume vivid astro focus in 2001, the name always rendered in lowercase. The name derives from two musical sources: Throbbing Gristle’s album ‘Assume Power Focus,’ and the band Ultra Vivid Scene. avaf’s work includes painting, drawing, photography, film, and digital technology.
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June 5, 2012
DEARRAINDROP is a Brooklyn-based artist collective formed in Virginia Beach that incorporates diverse disciplines to create multifaceted sculptures and installations. Their work includes painting, collage, video art, large-scale, interactive installation pieces, and hand-fabricated musical instruments.
Part of the collective’s operating philosophy is modeled on the ideal that the greatest human capability is the ability to work together to achieve a larger goal. Joe Grillo and Laura Grant founded DEARRAINDROP in 1998 as a clothing line, Billy Grant joined subsequently. They have also worked with digital artists Owen Osborn and Chris Kuscinski, as well as painter Alika Herreshoff.
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