Chris Ballantyne’s paintings communicate a specific brand of serene, solitary joy. It’s a little like riding an endless left alone at the beach: slightly spooky, slightly amazing. Ballantyne’s work has its own rhythm and its own emptiness. He’s definitely comfortable with the void.
Floating on muted fields of color, the islands, waterfalls, jetties, pools and buildings of the artist’s work adopt a weird significance that is alternately touching and alienating. It’s the kind of work you want to look at all alone, with no one else in the gallery. Possibly it has something to do with the birds-eye perspective of the paintings, or the fact that his subjects are the stuff of everyday life—the kind of stuff we gloss over in the course of our routines. Nice to see that someone’s giving it a closer look.
Whatever you think of the term “outsider art” (it’s a fraught one), there’s no doubt that Henry Darger is the consummate outsider.
A recluse in his Chicago apartment, Darger (1892-1973) spent his life writing and illustrating an original epic adventure titled “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.” The confluence of sheer visual genius, galaxy-sized ambition and wacked-out imagination doesn’t happen often, and in Darger’s case its lucky that his paintings even came to light.
Those interested in any of the above could definitely spend a productive hour or two scoping out Darger’s work online (it is well-represented). For those who develop a deeper interest, Klaus Biesenbach’s book of scholarly essays and biography and key texts will be one to add to the book list.
Like bats out of hell, Canadian filmmakers Corey Adams and Alex Craig are swooping into cinemas to revolutionize your concept of the skate film. Machotaildrop, their ambitious debut feature, is the awe-inspiring result of blood, sweat, and $1,000,000 in prize money from a Fuel TV short film contest. Our buddy Jeff from Booooooom tipped us off months ago to the radness of Machotaildrop, and this just-released trailer has only fanned the flames of our excitement. If your mouth is watering for more while we wait for a release date, watch the trailer for Adams and Craigs’ award-winning short film, Harvey Spannos.
Do you live in the New York area? Are you over 25 years old? Are you an amazing filmer/editor/cinematographer/photographer? If you are any of those things, or all of those things you should let us know. We are looking for a few rad human beings to be part of a truly fantastic top secret upcoming project happening in NYC in and around Feb-April of 2010. Strengths include : desire to make beautiful work, ability to work on the fly, love of art, music, and culture, knowledge of the internet and an overall sense of the difference between what is good and what is bad.
If this sounds like you, or sounds like someone you know, or sounds like someone that someone you know might know please respond to email hidden; JavaScript is required with the subject: TOP SECRET. Please include a link to your site/reel/blog/tumblr or whatever other means you think best communicates how great you are.
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In 2005, Copenhagen’s Hotel Fox invited a slew of designers from around the world to transform their 61 rooms into works of art. Artsy hotels abound in most metropolitan cities across the globe, but Hotel Fox remains one of the warmest creative spins on transitory living. Australian design collective Rinzen’s above-pictured room, “Sleep Seasons,” takes the cake. Who doesn’t want to hibernate in a big comfy tent, surrounded by adorable woodland forest creatures?
New favorite painter alert! Mary Iverson’s subject has long been the Port of Seattle, graduating from plein air studies to examinations of the area’s cranes, construction lines and shipping containers. (Side note: anyone who was into the second season of The Wire will find special pleasure in the aesthetic of ye olde shipping docks.)
When she recently switched focus to the Port of Tacoma, Iverson studied the port’s annual report to calculate the average number and size of shipping containers entering the port on a daily basis, then used this information to create 952 plywood replicas of the shipping containers. Rearranging these models in various combinations supplied the subject matter for Iverson’s new paintings, which do all sorts of neat things with abstraction and geometry.
Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely make a case for judging an artist by his iconography. Former graffiti-artist Jesse Hazelip’s chosen body of images includes visuals drawn from a bygone American natural landscape (buffalos, herons) as well as starker images of World War II bomber planes and weaponry. Hazelip’s juxtapositions of the two yield works equally provocative on aesthetic and political grounds.
Check out his new show, Sentimental Journey, up at White Walls in San Francisco until January 30th. (The scrupulous mixed-media pieces are realized on a larger-than-life scale, and they definitely benefit from real-life viewing.)
Worth mentioning also that the artist keeps things interesting on his blog with studio photos and snaps of pieces applied to the streets of Oakland (as well as the occasional post-buffing aftermath of such jaunts.)
Holy Moly, Aaron Rose is at it again. And he’s got every single one of our friends involved.
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present Projections, a festival of rare and hard to see films organized by Aaron Rose. Opening on Saturday, January 16th and running through February 20, 2010, Projections will feature short and feature length films by 31 of the most influential filmmakers of our time.
Opening night we will be screening selections from the PROJECTIONS program, as well as a very special outdoor projection of Jonas Mekas’ legendary 1968 16mm masterpiece, Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches. This film features appearances by Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Edie Sedgwick, Hans Richter, The Velvet Underground and Nico.
Also for all of you who didn’t get a chance to see it We Were Once a Fairytale will be there too!
This should be a really amazing opportunity for those of you in the area to watch some truly rare gems. And the best part? It’s all free!
Some really great people are coming together to launch a new gallery space here in Los Angeles. The key parties involved thus far hail from the opposite ends of the earth: New Jersey-bred husband and wife photo duo Day19 and Australian magazine/lifestyle troublemakers Monster Children. As they prep for what will likely be a very raucous grand opening they’ve been having guests stop by and play songs, pose for photos, and offer opinions on the state of the world. The entire process is being documented in a straightforward “this is what we look and sound like, love it or leave it” way by LA photo wizard Aaron Farley. It’s a simple formula but one that’s always fun to watch. We love creativity when it’s all stripped down.
“Being brave and seeking fun in rough conditions” could be the subtitle of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’sDirty Havana Trilogy, a novel about a former journalist pulling himself up by the bootstraps in modern-day Havana. In prose that sounds a little like Henry Miller and a little like Charles Bukowski—that is to say, vivid and slightly dirty and always truthful—Gutiérrez records the escapades of his hero chapter by chapter until the power of the stories equals way more than the sum of its parts.
If you’ve ever cocked an eye at a certain Caribbean region of the map and wondered what life is like on that island between Miami and Jamaica, Dirty Havana Trilogy is as close as you can get to visiting without doing anything illegal. Needless to say, the book is banned in its country of origin. Seek it out and count your blessings.
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