"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!

Immersed in The Twist

 

 

 

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”

~Twyla Tharp

 

 

Mah boy.

 

 

 

 

 

Massive, glitched out oil paintings by Corinne Washmut

 

 

 

 

“there's a lot of ‘reality’ in the virtual, and a lot of ‘virtual’ in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we're still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space. When we're frolicking through a field somewhere, our gadgets stowed far away, the internet still impacts our thinking: ‘Will I tweet about this when I get back?’

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the ‘real’ Paul and get in touch with the ‘real’ world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn't different without the internet, just that it wasn't real life.”

read more about the man who lived a year without the internet here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Safe?

 

 

 

 

Below are some shots from Fabian Oefner’s new experiment entitled “Black Hole”. Check out more of his half science, half art projects here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calming, larger than life works by Hiroshi Senju

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been having these repeating dreams of floating airports in the sky… I spend my time in the terminal looking out at the clouds, the atmosphere. The airplanes, they’re more like rollercoasters, in that they twist, loop, rise and fall, but never actually touch the ground. They simply arrive at another airport in the sky. One time I saw a funeral procession from above, unable to get close enough to the ground to prescribe the details of the scene, to see the sadness embodied in the faces of the loved ones…The plane kept me away from all that, wondering if it would ever let me land.