Serendipity

 

 

 

Yesterday’s Dream by Griz.

 

 

 

 

 

“Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason”

~J.G. Ballard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week at the Museum of Contemporary Art I met world-famous artist Doug Aitken, commercially popular for his video art and now gaining recognition for his influence on a new project, Station to Station, which will have artists travelling across the country together by train. The group will be filming their trip and making stops along the way to host performances, exhibitions and musical gatherings— reminding me of the Further bus (see: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)and the journey of the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s.

At the end of the film crew’s day scouting shooting locations at the MCA, Doug made sure to give me a real kiss on the cheek as we said good luck to each other and parted ways.

Check out some of his work below!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In line with my idea that we are all waves, helpless to the pushes and pulls of the ocean around us, I have always been fascinated by the representation of water. I pay special attention, in life and in art, to the way light comes through the tips of waves and illuminates them. Today I was taken away when I found this phenomenon captured divinely, gracefully in the art of Samantha Keely Smith.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recalls an artwork I’ve always held onto,

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1850.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day I had a talktaive cab driver—a blessing. Trying to find out what I’m doing with my life, he asserted that whatever I do, it doesn’t mean anything if I don’t make a difference in the preexisting order. To make a change, I can’t be told what to do, allow myself to forever be assigned jobs by others. No, I need to create my own career, my own position, one so innovative that it might not even exist yet.

I asked him if he liked his job. He said he has a degree in social work, and he splits his time between being a taxi driver and working as a therapist in addiction counseling. He drives to afford a continuing education that will allow him to pursue the latter, which he has a relentless passion for.

This strive to make a difference was rooted so deeply within him that I found he could not easily separate the two worlds—with his wise words he was just as much a therapist when he was driving me as I was frenzied, late to work, as he probably is with his patients. Restoring my faith in selflessness, and wishing I had just a few more city blocks to talk with him as I got out of the cab, I told him that we need more people like him in this world.

 

Like these sand flowers I ran into by chance, sometimes we just need a beautiful blossom to make us stop and think amidst all the chaos of our fast-paced lives.

"What do these clouds mean?"

 

Geometer remixed by Jonwayne

 

 

New destination:

The Crystal Palace, Madrid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been having the time of my life interning at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Not only am I surrounded by the creative thinkers that make the shows possible, they have me writing press releases and sending out exhibition and performance listings to all the biggest media in Chicago (the Tribune, SunTimes, Chicago Magazine, etc etc.) Sometimes I wonder how I got myself a position with so many responsibilities, given that they trust my writing to get the word out about things.

This week I’ve been working on a press release about Jose Lerma, an artist who was in his final year of law school when he freaked, dropped out and decided to pursue a career in art instead. It is no surprise, then, that his work often mocks those with political power. Choosing subjects such as “infantile kings who evoke both the heroic and the pathetic” or “aristocrats who rise to power before falling from grace”, Lerma creates a landscape of humorous portraits of bankers and presidents that take the idea of a political cartoon to a whole new level.

 

 

Mocking the way historical portraits were always carefully-crafted to give the sitter a certain look of prestige and power, Lerma enjoys abstracting images of political figures so much that you can hardly see anything “real” about the person at all…

 

 

 

 

The sponsor of his MCA exhibition is BMO Harris Bank. So, for the show, Lerma decided to make a gallery-sized portrait of the man behind the BMO and Harris Bank merger out of carpet. The funny part is, this allows visitors to walk on the banker’s face as they peruse the gallery. I just love the metaphor.

 

 

 

 

Speaking of the MCA, I was leaving the other day and got a couple ominous pictures of some fog rolling into the city. The first shot is especially creepy with the “MOTHERS” sculpture disassembled on the ground.

 

 

The John Hancock building:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re as interested in internet culture as I am, you might want to look into twohundredfiftysixcolors, a new film by Chicago-based artists Jason Lazarus and Eric Frieschauer that is made entirely of gifs. Presenting these fragmented, infinitely looped images as a profound reflection of today’s culture, twohundredfiftysixcolors forces the everyday(seemingly meaningless) gif into the realm of artistic contemplation.

 

Trailer for twohundredfiftysixcolors by Jason Lazarus and Eric Freischauer.

 

 

 

 

 

Honorable mention: Gabriel Dawe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Everything small is just a small version of something big!” ~Finn from Adventuretime

 

Setting Up Camp

"Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. 

Camp sees everything in quotation marks...

it is the love of the off,  of things-being-what-they-are-not..."

Susan Sontag,
Notes on Camp

I believe the more abstract something is, the more reality it can provide. For how are we able to calculate anything, really, when even scientific fact faces mostly the unknown? Our reason is shaped not by what we know, but what we don’t and can’t ever know…that 95% of black matter that we float in, but have no means to give order or definition to. Thus 95% of the world is abstract. And that abstraction is our reality.

Lately rappers have been using phrases such as “I need commas after my commas” and “I wake up looking for commas”. For a minute I was under the impression that the expression meant that, like the function of a grammatical comma, these rappers take pauses upon pauses when they talk. They’re so chill they don’t need to finish their sentences right away- just add another comma. Assumedly they’re so important they can have as many commas as they want since the world will just wait on them. They just comma all day,

Today’s featured artists Gordon Terry and Keith Tyson

While doing research on playgrounds again I stumbled on another reason why American children struggle with obesity. It’s because we don’t have playgrounds like this, Woods of Net, in Japan:

It’s inside this thing:

We seriously need to step up our game.

One time my friend Franny accidentally took the wrong USB stick from her classroom. While we were snooping through the archive of her classmate’s saved work, an essay entitled “A Middle School Experience” grabbed our attention. Because it began with this sentence:

“It was a chilly February morning and the air stabbed at my face like a cool knife.”

As you can imagine, the rest of the essay couldn’t compare to that. But what a hook!