Indulging in some light Dan Brown? Perusing a Fabio-emblazoned romance novel? Maybe you’re curious about the oeuvre of L. Ron Hubbard, but don’t want people to think you’re a Scientologist. The solution is here! Book City Jackets makes beautiful paper bag-style book covers that offer discretion and style to any public reading experience while keeping your real book jackets clean and untorn. Book City’s brand new Artists Edition jackets present a pastoral scene from the tremendously talented Michael C. Hsiung, an ode to octopi by coffee-cup stippler Cheeming Boey and an elegant eagle portrait courtesy of Nishat Akhtar.
Why weren’t these around when I needed to cover my high school textbooks? Back in my day, we had to make do with the free book jackets advertising UPN’s fall programming and Mountain Dew they gave out in class. You kids have it easy!
Remember these guys? They’re like the equivalent of Transformers for individuals with a softer, more fanciful imagination.
Those with sharp memories will recall that the Magic Garden kits included little cardboard cutouts of mountains, trees and grass (treated with a mysterious solution) that you could set up on a tray. After dousing the cardboard with magical liquid, bright blooms began to grow. Soon you had a fuzzy Japanese garden, complete with nuclear-pink cherry blossoms, acid-green grass and a snowy mountain peak. Now it reminds us simultaneously of The Point!, cotton candy, toxic waste and clown hair. Awesome.
Populated by unexpectedly cuddly alligators, fuzzy buffalo, and mustachioed men, the curious paintings of Ben Kehoe balance precariously between gloom and whimsy; sadness and terminal cuteness. The permanent overcast of Kahoe’s wintry locales and the vulnerable expressions that his characters share create a cocooned dreamscape that’s punctured only by bouts of dark humor and well-executed absurdity.
There’s a reason why everyone in 4th grade math doodled cubes, barns and bubbly letters: creating the illusion of 3-dimensional objects satisfies some basic human urge. There is probably an evolutionary cause for it––some sort of adaptive benefit obtained from cool shading techniques and eye-popping shapes. For now, we’ll just call it fun.
Luckily, the feeling of sketching a sweet 3D shooting star can be recaptured. Not only recaptured, in fact, but improved upon! These days you can get 3D drawing kits that include a pad of stereoscopic graph paper (intersecting red and blue lines) and 3D glasses. It works like this: first, you sketch with a regular black pen. Then you put on the glasses. The filters in the 3D specs allow each eye to see only the opposite color on the graph paper, and as the brain melds the two images together our focal point is pushed backwards. Voila: the illusion of depth. Really, it never gets old.
Bryan Dalton’s photo-illustrations are models of simplicity. It’s all color and composition––no voodoo involved. Dalton’s subject matter is appealing but unpredictable, and includes everything from Slinkies to bronze busts to vintage GE tape recorders. Browse the work at his website, Mistake the Beautiful.
(via It’s Nice That)
Leaping lizards! There are so many rad artists– luminaries, really– involved in the latest gallery show at L.A.’s primo promenade, Space 15 Twenty, I don’t even know where to start. Curated by Family founder David Kramer, Main Street is an exhibition of fresh video and animation from Miranda July, Jacob Ciocci, and Andrew Jeffrey Wright, to name just three. The exhibition, which opens Saturday, October 24th at 7pm, will also be released as a DVD designed by Grammy nominee Brian Roettinger. Always a perfectionist, Kramer tells us how he plans to transcend the confines of a gallery screening: “We’re building a giant box/cinema in the middle of the gallery with benches for viewing!”
The videos range from the psychedelically patterned color abstractions of Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Kris Moyes, to the documentary-style mountain biking travelogue of Andrew Sutherland. Miranda July’s meditation on tribal drumming, and Peter Sutherland’s re-enactment of a dream where teenagers wreak havoc on NYC, their minds controlled by a diabolical, smoking stone. Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad defaces youtube videos of bedroom freak dancers with his brightly distinctive animations, while Melanie Bonajo records a deadpan conversation between two women with household items tied to their every limb. Lori D.’s cartoons focus on leering men, while Lucky Dragons focus on flower gardens.
Opening night features: Dunes (Live show)
DJs: Rob Barber (High Places) and Brian Roettinger
Check it out this weekend if you’re in L.A., and keep your eyes peeled for more info on the DVD!
Max Records cut his acting teeth on a pair of alt-rock music videos. After dipping his toes in the water with the warm and fuzzy sing along of Cake’s “Guitar Man,” (directed by the lovely Cat Solen), Max’s second role, in a Death Cab for Cutie video, strongly foreshadowed the young thespian’s capability to take on meditative, emotionally challenging roles with a natural grace. Shot in a tin shed on a shoestring budget, Max manages to convey a sense of loneliness and loss in this wordless performance that echoes throughout the atmosphere of the entire video.
Director Aaron Stewart-Anh contributes to Giant Robot and has helmed videos for bands like The Decemberists, The Album Leaf, and Asobi Seksu. He shot the somber, Silent Running-esque “Stable Song” for Directions, an ambitious project in which the filmmaker enlisted 11 directors to create long-form videos based around each track on Death Cab for Cutie’s 2005 album, Plans. Contradicting the conventions of the music video medium, Stewart-Anh’s project permitted the directors an unusual amount of creative freedom—the songs became scores for a series of short stories and visual experiments, rather than products being marketed by throw-away visuals. Originally released in weekly installments through the band’s website, Directions was almost a prelude to the plethora of indie rock experiments in video that would soon be fostered by the explosion of YouTube.
Lance Bangs, who contributed to Directions in the form of a bizarre and hilarious first-person live concert video, asked Stewart-Anh if he knew any kids capable of playing Max, and the rest is history.
British artist Keith Tyson has been praised to the skies (he won the Turner prize in 2002) and is known for his cerebral approach to fine art. He’s also famous for incorporating duel fascinations with science and philosophy into his work…all of which is good to know, but we like him best for his work with animal forms. These include roosters, walruses, penguins, bucks and humans, among others––always incorporated slyly and smartly into the work. “Nature is much better at painting than I am,” Tyson has said. It’s also pretty good at designing creatures.
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