We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Conceptual art—well, maybe all art—should sock you in the gut and then hypnotize you. In that order. Eric Yahnker’s work is a one-two emotional/intellectual punch that combines immaculate craftsmanship with a brain of intimidating powers.

Witness <0 - 101 (above), a work that combines various media with numerical titles into a sequential order from “Less Than Zero” to “101 Dalmatians”. Or the artist’s colored-pencil commentaries on dianetics and Lance Armstrong. Or the beheaded John Wayne in tennis gear.

Yahnker’s work deals with death, neuropathology and the mucky vicissitudes of life in a manner that combines high-concept trickery with immediate visual appeal. Go forth, wanderer, and click heedlessly.

Oh, what we’d give to visit the studio of Bianca Hester! Hester is an artist/handywoman/creator across all platforms living output is so varied and so unexpected that we can’t quite wrap our heads around the whole of it.

For starters, Hester makes and modifies instruments, orchestrates fruitful installations and collaborations, produces lovely art books, writes with great insight, creates video, turns leftover installation materials into light fixtures for her friends, and, need we say it…MUCH MORE.

The world is Joshua Petherick’s oyster. The world is also Joshua Petherick’s range of working materials. The Melbourne-based artist incorporates everything from pine shelving systems to cork rolls to squashed coins to polypropylene hessian (what is that?) to marble to bubble wrap into his unclassifiable pieces.

Needless to say, the results fascinate us. So do the titles. Petherick has a gift for language, giving his works the most enigmatic/appealing monikers imaginably. A few examples: BOOTLEG AT THE MANOR, JOINT HASSLES, WISH YOU WERE HERE (SLOWLY) and MUNDUS VULT DECIPI, ERGO DECIPIATUR (That’s Latin for, “The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.”)

Sarah De Bondt has done a whole bunch of things we could praise, but we’re gonna hunker down and focus on a few for now.

Her project The Free Library appeared a few years ago in New York and Philadelphia, and was based loosely on a film (La Chinoise) by Jean-Luc Godard. Erase any thoughts of pretense from your mind, however: the traveling installation turned each gallery into a functional library-type space where visitors were encouraged to hang out, browse books, lounge on beanbags and explore the space.

“Overthrowing the King in His Own Mind” is another highlight of the De Bondt oeuvre, a persimmon-colored catalogue, poster and invitation to an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland. Finally, we suggest checking out Wiels, De Bondt’s ongoing work for the new contemporary art center in Brussels.

Well everyone the time has come for We Love You So to take a much needed rest. When we started this project last year we had no idea how much fun it would be and how much support we would receive from so many places around the world, but like anything this site must also end.

This coming Tuesday, June 15, WLYS is going to be going to sleep for a while. With any luck we will be back, in some form or another, soon enough. Meanwhile, to celebrate the final week we’ll be revisiting some over our favorite articles from our time here and also announcing one FINAL giveaway for all the fans out there.

Stay tuned and thanks again for everything!

Holy smokes, Ditto Press is so cool we could plotz. The UK-based independent publisher produces the most beautiful books imaginable using Risograph technology (do we sense a growing sector of Risograph devotees?) and incredible bookbinding techniques. The shop and blog are practically epilepsy-inducing in its variety and desirability, offering books that range on topics including academia, fine art, photography, popular culture, literature and poetry. Zoinks? Zoinks.

Selected highlights include a revisited Edgar Allen Poe story (designed and produced in-house), prints by WLYS favorite Jiro Bevis, a limited edition book by Joseph Clayton Mills, “Herschel’s Telescope”, a 2-color riso printing for Laurence Barber with exposed-sewn single page sections and 9 digitally produced gate-folded inserts…and so much more.

Recognize the name? Hisham Akira Bharoocha is known for his legendary status as founding member of Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. But oh, he’s so much more: a photographer, an image-melter, a collaborator with Doug Aitken and Boredoms and Gang Gang Dance on sound pieces, and a creator of works “that show the absurdity and logic of how each mind works, what kind of relationships it creates between experiences and images that we absorb through our senses moment by moment.” (That’s from his artist’s statement.)

At the moment we’re particularly enthralled by Bharoocha’s photography. As the old cliché goes: every picture tells a story.

Benbo George’s images are the sort of thing a very talented person might come up with in a lucid dream about image manipulation. Cosmic and shimmering, the images use repetition and mirroring in ways that thwart facile interpretation. The graphic designer/illustrator claims to divide his time between Liverpool and London, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the astral plane figured into that itinerary somewhere.

Jiro Bevis is an illustrator with a rad name, a killer set of design skills and a knack for picking up on the grotesque element of everything from pizza pies to Nike sneakers. It’s fun to hop between categories on his website, picking out the signature elements and marveling at the variety of their deployment.

Bevis also distributes his work gracefully across a variety of mediums: tee shirts, silk screens, and so forth, some of it available for purchase at quite reasonable prices. Anyone looking to redecorate his or her clubhouse?

Arne Bellstorf may be a wizard of graphic novels and illustration, but he’s no lone wolf. Bellstorf also happens to have a natural instinct for collaboration and community-building, graphically speaking. Among the artist’s many projects are the annual magazine Orang, which he co-edits, and the small collective and independent publishing house Kiki Post, which puts out a variety of neat comics.

He also contributed to the 2wBOX collection with the above mini silk-screened comic, published by B.ü.L.B. comix from Switzerland. Explore the archives and parse continual updates at Bellstorf’s website.