12/23/2014
12/17/2014
EXTRA: SAM JINKS' "UNSETTLED DOGS" (2012)
Sam Jinks,Unsettled Dogs (2012)
Photograph: RMIT University Art Collection/Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney
EXTRA: Abraham Poincheval's "Dans la peau de l'ours" (2014)
Abraham Poincheval, Dans la peau de l'ours (Inside the skin of a bear), 2014
Photo: André Morin Image provided by: Palais de Tokyo, Paris
12/14/2014
EXTRA: "ONLY THE ANIMALS" BY CERIDWEN DOWEY
"The souls of ten animals, each killed in a human conflict of the past century or so, tell the story of their deaths in turn. There is the camel killed in colonial Australia and the blue mussel killed in Pearl Harbour; the cat who died in the trenches in World War I and the bear who starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo; the dog who lost his life on the Eastern Front in World War II and the parrot killed during the 2006 bombing of Beirut; the ape who died in Germany during World War I and the Russian tortoise lost in space during the Cold War; the elephant killed in the civil war in Mozambique and the dolphin who chose to die during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Each of the animals also pays homage to a human writer who has written imaginatively about animals during much the same time span, from Henry Lawson to Ted Hughes, from Kafka to J.M. Coetzee, from Colette to Virginia Woolf, from Tolstoy to José Saramago, from Günter Grass to Jack Kerouac, from Tom Stoppard to Julian Barnes. As the soul of the tortoise explains, borrowing the words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, ‘So little of the total suffering, human or animal, can ever make its way into literature in the end. When it does, we should pay attention, and pay our respects.’"
LINK: Ceridwen Dovey
12/06/2014
EXTRA: Mishka Henner's "Feedlots" (2014)
Artist Mishka Henner's medium of choice is satellite photography. His subject: Texas feedlots, where beef cattle are sent to be "finished", aka to quickly gain weight for slaughter on a diet of corn. Needless to say, they look horrifying.
LINK: MISHKA HENNER (via Kottke)
11/24/2014
EXTRA: Andy Warhol's Endangered Species series
Andy Warol, Elephant, 1983 African Elephant, D James Dee/© 2014
"Warhol, ever the animal-lover, was approached by environmental activists in the 80s to make a set of rainbow silkscreens that showed the horrifying numbers of near-extinct animals around the world"
Source: The Guardian
06/08/2014
EXTRA: Cai Guo-Qiang’s “The Ninth Wave” (2014)
Cai Guo-Qiang’s “The Ninth Wave” sailing on the Huangpu River by the Bund, Shanghai, 2014 (photo by JJY Photo, courtesy Cai Studio)
LINK: Cai Guo-Qiang
06/07/2014
EXTRA: Joana Vasconcelos' crocheted animals
A series of scultpures by Joana Vasconcelos featuring wasps, lizards, snakes, crabs, lobsters, frogs, bull-heads, donkey heads, horse heads, wolves and cats wrapped in five-needle lace, handmade cotton crochet. The Portuguese artist has appropriated the ceramic artwork of fellow artists Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846-1905).
LINK: Joana Vasconcelos
06/05/2014
06/04/2014
EXTRA: Sarah Charlesworth'S "OBJETS OF DESIRE" (2014)
"Objects of Desire is a five-part extended series which explores the iconography of popular culture and the desires and values it supports. Sub-series focus on the color and formal attributes of specific cultural arenas. These works address the language of gender and sexuality, popular conceptions of nature, religion and spirituality, as well as the framing of material desire. All works in the series are Cibachrome prints with matching lacquer frames. This exhibition is the first occasion various works from each of the five-part series have been brought together.
In making Objects of Desire, Charlesworth extracted a wide range of images from books and magazines, including contemporary fashion, symbolic animals, ancient statuary, and emblems of power. She then re-photographed the images against solid color backgrounds, presenting the results in matching frames. With the introduction of new colors with each sub-series, Charlesworth’s subject matter was framed by another layer of symbolic context, i.e. red as sexuality, yellow as material desire, blue as metaphysical longing, green as nature, or black as the unknown." (Maccarone Art Gallery)
LINK: Sarah Charlesworth
(Image courtesy of Sarah Charlesworth Estate and Maccarone, New York)