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.
Danny Sangra’s FILM NUMBER 9 is an ode to woodsy rambles and sweet leather jackets. It combines a few of our most favorite things— tangly trees, pretty ladies, heavy percussion, and exploration—into a kooky pastoral odyssey.
More of the artist’s films can be spotted over on his Vimeo page, including the trailer for DOOMSDAY KIDS SAY HEY, which combines water towers, chalk drawings and greasy breakfasts into an irresistible set of clues for something we can’t wait to unravel.
Sometimes it’s not a bad thing for art to be inscrutable— provided that its inscrutability invites further attention rather than repelling it. Petra Cortright’s work is nothing if not a cypher, but it certainly makes for alluring objects of interpretation. Cortright’s animated gifs, videos and still image pieces take their aesthetic inspiration straight from the lore of the internet, drawing on misspellings and trailing cursors and emoticons to form genuinely stunning experiences.
Cortright has talked about her love of google image search, weirdo software effects and default settings. “I am a really impatient person,” she said in an interview last year. “Gifs and webcams are so fast, low file size, load fast, they are almost scraps. I like not having the commitment of working with hi-def vid/images.” Viewers need not be scholars in internet history to enjoy the work, however: “Even if the internet references pass over some heads all my work is so extremely visual and people can enjoy it on that level alone,” Cortright clarifies.
Bruno Dicolla’s video Sabotagem is a technicolor dreamscape of hopping bunnies, squirming organic forms (is that a butterfly or a millipede or a flying millipede?) and what look like migrating amoebae. See more of the work on Dicolla’s website and flickr page. In a world designed by us, this is what the iTunes visualizer would look like. Simply beauteous.
Mina Fina, in her own words, “wakes up everyday with good intentions but ends up eating cakes.” Oh, but she does so much more! Living and working in Slovenia, the artist is a wellspring of creativity. She makes videos, books, drawings, websites, zines, keeps a Polaroid diary, sends exquisite cards to her friends and collaborates on installations.
If it were possible to reproduce Mina Fina’s entire portfolio right here, in this blog post, we’d do it. We like it that much, and want to share it that much. Given the constraints, however, you’ll have to go spelunking on your own. The best we can do is supply a bouquet of links and point to the news page of Mina’s website, which keeps us up to date on her output.
Finally and also worth mentioning is the artist’s interactive experimental comic book project Enoletnica/YearBook. We were lucky enough to obtain a copy of the book project, which is a gorgeous, sturdy diary-calendar divided into twelve months. Cryptic drawings, prompts and designs cover each page, and a sheet of stickers is included for customizing the book. Instructions and further keys to interpreting the book are available each month the book’s corresponding website.
To e is Michael Crowe’s collection of YouTube screen grabs, some of which are altered and some of which are left as found. Try browsing for a minute or two. And then try stopping. Sometimes the simplest things can be profoundly mesmerizing.
Also be sure to check out this BBC News Report on one of Michael Crowe’s projects. Genius!
Veritable patriarch of contemporary photography William Eggleston is essentially the king of color. But this feature-length film, Stranded in Canton, demonstrates just how masterful of an aesthete Eggleston is– color or no color, frozen images on film or slices of life on video tape.
Shot in the early ’70s on Sony’s revolutionary portable video recorder, Stranded in Canton is a marvel of documentary cinema. It strings together a wildly diverse set of scenes with no narrative thread to speak of, and yet leaves you with an impression of intimacy and voyeuristic thrill.
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