erin hanson: reminders.

I’ll admit it; I’m a huge sucker for projects utilizing photograph and text. The possibility for creating a double-meaning between the supposed emotion of the image and the ostensible meaning of the words is like a big ol’ playground. Plus any image that involves cut outs that look like real life old skool refrigerator alphabet magnets is good by me.

Some of my other fave projects in the same vein focus more on emotional depth or existentialist questioning:  Kotama Bouabane’s “Melting Words” is a lonely play on sentiments of love and loss at the end of a relationship, while the large outdoor works of Nathan Coley offer more questions that answers about us, our meaning, and our place in the world.

Taking a totally different route, Erin Hanson’s “Reminders” series is filled with  flashes of our most unremarkable thoughts. Banal, boring, and inconsequential, like little snapshots of the things that run through our minds during a normal day and, more often than not, are dismissed and discarded before we’ve even had a chance to realize we thought them.

To me, though, our hopes and fears can be revealed by piecing together the inconsequential things. Often we push aside everything we don’t feel strong enough to confront into the mundane, and these small thoughts are like after-shocks from much larger quakes. What does our vanity say about our true sense of self-worth, what does our sense of obligation or disconnection to our family say about our sense of home, and what does the need to remind ourselves to wake up or go outside say about our lethargy and our over-willingness to connect and live digitally instead of physically?

Via Share Some Candy

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dark igloo + the pump: do you eat crap?

Last time I was in New York, we stumbled onto The Pump. We were hungry, we were in a hurry, and we’re the kind of assholes who’d rather starve than eat non-organic bison. Luckily The Pump took care of all of that with a killer menu of organic, healthy, chic “fast food.”

I’m hyped to see that their marketing is as savvy and aware as their menu. Their new witty, satirical, retro-tinged online promo vid subtly taps into part of a larger conversation that been evolving the last few years; of what exactly we’re eating, where it’s coming from, and what it’d doing to us. I’d never really looked at the side of a cereal box until I started reading the frighteningly enlightening work of Michael Pollan. His best-sellers “In Defense Of  Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (both highly recommended, by the way) are at the forefront of a social rediscovery of “food.”

Created by Dark Igloo,  “Do You Eat Crap?” speaks to the new food movement with a series of snappy, detailed parodies of a whole series of food ads from the last few decades. The cheese spot above is my fave – it’s a perfect throwback to those ’80s, Doyle Dayne Bernbach-esque copy-heavy prints ads, right down to the font. Oh, what I would give to have been a copywriter during the glory days of long copy. A boy can dream…

To me the best part of the spot is that it’s informed by the growing hyper-awareness of food culture but it’s not sanctimonious in its stance. In fact, the video is totally hilarious, but the more interesting bit to me is that I don’t think the real meaning layered behind the humour would have been possible even five years ago. People just weren’t aware enough. While I think it would be still be funny no matter, what really makes it so killer is that it’s a total insider wink to its target: people who are willing to spend $15 on an organic, free-range lunch  and who want to feel like they’re in on the joke everyone eating at Burger King isn’t. And those people, myself among them, like to be winked at.

Via Kitsune Noir

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david o’reilly + jon klassen: black lake.

There are times when you fall in love faster than you thought you were capable of. All your old signals fade and your plans re-arrange without a word. Your stars align in brand new ways and all the nights you had designed become a dream for your days. Your heart expands and for a time your reality is married to the possibility of everything you can envision. Like a message in a bottle, gently nudged from your shore, this vision travels and, if you’re lucky, the person you love picks it up and carries it with you.

Sweetly, without warning, you construct your potential and in this moment your future and your present melt together. Into an instant eventual, an immediate inevitable. A second where  the possibility of love stretches before you like an ocean and you travel through your imagination; vast and epic and filled with hope, the way each wave yearns to curl up and crash back into the same waters it was first pulled away from.

This is that feeling.

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Following their work together on the video for U2’s “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”, the heart-achingly exquisite “Black Lake” is a collaboration between one of my favourite directors, David O’Reilly, and Jon Klassen and it’s beautiful.

Via Motionographer

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takcom + samurai jazz quintet: pico.

There’s something about the intrinsic freedom and improv history that’s sewn into jazz that lends itself particularly well to experimental visuals. Without words to guide along a pre-determined narrative, we’re left with an ultimate freeflow; we decide for ourselves what the story behind the sounds is, and the director gets an ultimate carte blanche to create whatever visual story he or she wants.

Directed by Japanese director/animator Takafumi Tsuchiya (a.k.a. Takcom) for experimental jazz outfit Samurai Jazz Quintet, “Pico” is twitchy, graphic, dimension-shifting animation gem. It follows no convention or boundaries, just visualizes, with complete abandon, the sounds it has merged with.

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Via No Fat Clips

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delphic + andy huang: doubt.

I love the artistic study of the collision between the digital and organic, and the idea of a point where our physical evolution meets mutation and takes a shocking genetic leap forward. I’m drawn to depictions of that intersection where our microchips merge with our bodies, and how we’re forced to consider how the rest of us may react when the first of us transcend the boundary of the human and the mechanical and transform into an unimaginable new hybrid.

The new video for amazing alt-electronic outfit Delphic’s “Doubt” is a stunning physical metaphor for emotional mutation. Their faces and bodies crystalize, galvanize, and alchemize themselves against their emotional trauma and manifest into a physical protection for, and even aggression against, their new emotional world. Like second skins, metallic armours and cellular defenses slowly spread across their bodies.

Reminding me of the amazing genetic mutational imaginings of Lucyandbart, the vid is directed by another artist with experience in visualizing the future.I first discovered Andy Huang over two years ago with his spectacular short film “Doll Face”, a story of robotic narcissism that has to be seen to be believed, which he followed up with his sinister and disturbing “The Gloaming.”

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Via No Zap

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shapeflow.

Shapeflow is an open-membership French art collective that seeks to engage and inspire designers, artists, and illustrators to share and contribute their work to the collective. The work on the site is divided into “issues”, each with a theme that then puts out an open-call on the site for anyone to submit their work for inclusion.

The current theme, “Springtime” (which I find pleasingly optimistic since most of Northern Europe is locked down in a record-breaking cold snap right now) has brought forth some bright, geometric, and inventive work, including some illustration and some interesting web-sourced data visualization.

Via Yay! Everyday!

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mirrorshade + holy fuck: royal gregory.

I hate to think of my music video tastes as a foregone conclusion, but this vid has the hallmarks of everything I love: retro, colour, pixellation, Cubism, profanity, electro, a hint of Bauhaus, and video game references. I can’t stop myself and nor would I want to.

Directed late in ’09 by London-based shop Mirrorshade for Toronto’s own (Polaris Prize nominees) Holy Fuck’s ’08 track “Royal Gregory.”

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Via Motionographer

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anitabling.

This next post is sort of a big delicious colourful enigma for me. These multi-media works from anitabling’s Flickr stream are totally up my alley: graphic, bright, multi-layered (literally), and geometric. And almost geologic, with the multi-hued stacks, slowly piling up on top of each other, layer by layer, to create an incredibly detailed strata when cut into from the side. Like some sort of otherworldly hyper-coloured canyon or rainbow rock formation.

Though some of her taller sculptural works, housed inside acrylic boxes, are displayed like museum pieces, she also references the cutting technique in some of her other unbordered pieces by literally driving knives or saw blades into them. Haphazardly, like a knife left-over in the butter dish after a hurried breakfast, as if more chromatic cutting and splicing and slashing is left to be done once she returns.

Unfortunately, her Flickr page (I’m going to assume for now that she’s a girl named Anita) doesn’t link to another site and it’s all in Spanish. So I’m not sure what the rest of her details are. She’s shown a few times in Montevideo, so I think she could possibly be Uruguayan.

If anyone has details on anitabling, or speaks Spanish and can translate some of the info from Flickr, I’m dying to know more and my usual internet searches turned up nothing. Feel free to email me or leave updates in the comments.

Via Share Some Candy

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sia + dennis liu: you’ve changed.

Sia is one of those musicians who can pretty much do no wrong when it comes to videos. I loved her Claire Carre directed vid for “Soon We’ll Be Found”, and  though not quite as esoteric as Björk or as fearless as Fever Ray, she’s definitely inside a pack of artists who take the video medium as an opportunity to do quality work that augments and enhances their music instead of merely presenting it.

In her latest Australian single, “You’ve Changed”, Sia took a more light-hearted, pop culture referenced route. Directed by Dennis Liu (who also created the mega-popular Mac video for The Bird & The Bee’s “Again and Again”), this parody of Rock Band has a makeshift, arts and crafts feel that makes the extreme nerdy awkwardness of it’s teenage “players” particularly bang on. Inventive through, it’s totally witty, loaded with winks to gamers, and even manages to be a little heartwarming and optimistic at the end.

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isaac tobin.

Isaac Tobin is senior designer at the University of Chicago Press. That’s his title. What he really does is create book covers so succinct, so pleasing, so enticingly balanced and sparsely enigmatic, that you won’t know whether to read it or hang it on your wall.

Personally, I’d go with the latter.

Via The Post Family

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