bethany bristow.

I’ve never seen anything quite like these small-scale public outdoor installations by New York artist Bethany Bristow. They basically look like glass-bodied rainbow-feathered birds who’ve been run over by a cab, and yet they’re gorgeous. Beautiful, multi-hued drinking cup bird remains… occasionally dripping corn syrup blood. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, but that’s what’s amazing about art. Created on the streets of New York City and Singapore, I love how the shapes seem sometimes like a living creature at rest and sometimes like something that once was living but is now dead. And the anatomy of the creature itself is so foreign to us we can’t really be sure which…

Via Fabrik Project

maya hayuk @ etsy.

One of my fave artists, Maya Hayuk, has a great new interview on Etsy, complete with lots of juicy pics of Hayuk-awesomeness. Watch it.

jiyeon song: “one day poem pavillion”.

How much do I love this? Let me count the ways…

Proof yet again that the most elemental concepts, envisioned in a different way, can have the most dramatic results. We’ve got words. We’ve got sunlight. We’ve got shadow. And Jiyeon Song has combined them into a breath-taking piece of public art.

Through a matrix of perforations, sunshine gets converted through the dome into lines of poetry underneath. For the text, Song chose classical Korean poems called “Sijos” and translated them into English. It takes about 8 hours to see the entire poem, with each line visible for about an hour. The design actually shifts poems based on the season (how they managed to get it to do that with only one set of holes in the top, I have no idea…). During the summer the poem focuses on a theme of “new life”, during the winter it turns to “reflection and the passing of time”. The time-lapse video showing the the delicacy of the words moving through the shadow of the dome is a must see.

On Song’s thesis site you can check out some incredibly detailed info on the project, from experiments and calculations on how the project would work to some amazing drawings from its developmental phase, like the chart below showing which words would be visible during which phases of the day…

Via draw.kyu via NOTCOT

magenta foundation: “flash forward” recycling bins.

Usually Canadians are pretty reserved when it comes to their public art. “Polite”, we could say, and just really bring that whole stereotype of the overly-cautious Canadian to life. It gets a little dull sometimes, especially in comparison to the ground breaking, architecturally daring public spaces that pop up in Europe and other places.

That’s why I get such glee out of this. We’re talking bright, in your face, acid-magenta coloured recycling bins featuring the work of up and coming Canadian photographers. On a grey, drizzle-filled winter day in Toronto, the brief respite these babies deliver from the monotony of your morning commute is enough to make any art-lover break down in tears.

(Artist: Nik Mirus)

(Artist: Adam Rankin)

(Artist: Scott Connaroe)

(Artist: Jeff Harris)

The Magenta Foudation is Canada’s first charitable publishing house, whose mandate is to nurture new Canadian artists and set them up for success and recognition on the international scene. Flash Forward is their yearly emerging photographers competition. Last time around, the artists chosen for Flash Forward got the added rush of having their work displayed on recycling bins around downtown Toronto.

The benefit of this is obvious. Metal recycling boxes are ugly. Art is pretty. Plus Toronto’s downtown core can benefit from all the added artistic exposure it can get. Aside from a few bright spots, it’s not exactly an area where accessible public art is popping up everywhere you look. Each time I came across a new one of these while I was walking around downtown it was like finding a chocolate egg on Easter morning. Plus I get a little misty eyed thinking of all the people who maybe wouldn’t have been interested in fostering or even noticing Canadian artists who had their attitudes changed by discovering works of art in such unexpected places.

Kudos to everyone involved in making this happen, and I can’t wait for next year.

(Artist: Eamon MacMahon)

(Artist: Adam Harrison)

(Artist: Jesse Chehak)

(Artist: Jamie Campbell)