Descriptive drawings from spam emails. Thanks, Veronique!
See more stuff here: http://www.elliottburford.com/
May 14, 2009
Maija Luutonen
Try to say that three times fast! …I apologize. I know what it’s like to have an unpronounceable name, too. Check out some work by Maija Luutonen. Another Finnish artist. It’s like a Finn menagerie here.
See more work here: http://www.maijaluutonen.com/
Favorite Artists: Erwin Wurm
If I could fall in love with and marry someone’s entire catalogue of artwork, it might be Erwin Wurm’s. It always makes me happy when I see it, it’s never tiresome or boring, and it never, ever wants to sit at home and watch football when there’s a party down the street. His work ranges from fat cars, houses, and refrigerators to performative sculptures. He calls them “One minute sculptures.” These are his “Instructions on how to be politically incorrect” that entail doing actions like “Spit in your neighbor’s soup,” or to “look for a bomb”. Obviously, you can look for a bomb in a variety of places…
Buy his book at: http://www.amazon.com/Erwin-Wurm-Artist-Swallowed-World/dp/3775718664/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242328506&sr=8-1
Not a girl, not yet a woman
Charlie White’s latest body of work, The Girl Studies, really hits home. Mostly, because I used to be a girl. Now, I suppose, I’m a woman. At least that’s what my boobs tell me. Trying to understand what womanhood means and developing my own ideal of femininity is something I’m still working out. It’s like, I know what most heterosexual men consider to be feminine and sexy, and yet I’m left to wonder if that’s really what they think or is it just this representation from the media that has everything skewed? Not that I should be caring what heterosexual men think in the first place. These are the things that keep me up at night….that and how they manage to fit all of that real cheese flavor into Cheez-Its.
I find the Teen and Transgender Comparative Study series to be a pretty sweet representation of the attempt to own one’s femininity, and the potential failure of trying to live up to someone else’s standards.
Charlie White’s website: http://www.charliewhite.info/
His other projects are definitely worth looking at. Most definitely.
Yi Chen
Paintings by Yi Chen. According to a press release (they never lie), he combines images he finds in fashion magazines from Beijing and other eastern and western countries. So what they’re saying is that he finds eyes in American Vogue, a nose in Italian Vogue, and a mouth in Chinese Vogue. I can get with that. Oh, and here’s why the mass population doesn’t care about the art world: “This continual shift of compositional style between figure and background evokes a sense of uncertainty, lending a mood of both fear and fascination within these creatures”. I kind of feel sorry for the pretty gallery assistant who has to write these every month. Kind of.
More here, including that beautifully clear press release: http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/exhibitions/2006_3_yi-chen/images/
