Cool Hunting
| 05 April 2006view entries from: this week | this month | view previous day | view next day |
adicolor Podcast: Green
by Josh Rubin
The second podcast in the adicolor series is just now out. Green was created by HAPPY and features a surreal tale of how the Finkles and the Gladstones get together each year to celebrate the end of the nuclear winter.
HAPPY is directing duo Guy Shelmerdine and Richard Farmer. After having established award-winning careers in advertising, they began directing commercials and music videos in 2002. They immediately won the Best New Director award at Cannes and since have made it onto Creativity Magazine's Top 25 Directors list, two years running. At the top of the commercial world, HAPPY is vigorously breathing down the neck of TV, feature films, and much more.
Previously on CH: adicolor Podcast: White (aka adiporn)
Fabrican
by Jacob Resneck
“It is what it says, simply, fabric in a can,” states Fabrican's no-nonsense website.
The London-based company has developed spray-on cotton fabric. While initially it's quite thin, you can spray on more coats making it thicker. The potential is wide for many uses from industrial purposes, medical sectors, and of course fashion applications.
The technology was developed in 2003 by Dr. Manel Torres and Professor Paul Luckham at Imperial College London. It’s a private venture, and they’re looking to partner up to mass produce the product.
The fabric itself can be designed to be “soft as silk” or as “durable as hemp” the manufacturer says. We’re keeping our eye on this one.
I mean, imagine if during Janet Jackson’s NFL Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction” last year, she had been carrying Fabrican. After a quick squirt, all could’ve been mended and perhaps CBS Television wouldn’t have been fined that $3.6 million by the FCC.
Liza Lou
by Ami Kealoha
If one desires to engulf oneself in a delightfully transgressive feeling, MacArthur genius grant-winner Liza Lou’s first London solo exhibition at White Cube is open until 8 April 2006. Otherwise, wait for announcements from Deitch gallery, representing Lou in New York. Forms in the show are also good inspirational resources for visual communications folks who need representations of purgatory on earth.
Cell and White Cube are two new works of black hole beauty. White Cube is a vacant closet size space with a bucket and a noose. Cell, constructed over the course of two years using wood, fiberglass and glass beads, is more elaborate and even more distressing. By refusing to name the exact imprisonment it represents, the void becomes a universalism. Around the room are new additions to Lou’s town off contorted human figures, also painstakingly covered with beads. These beads, consciously or unconsciously, speak about the lingering pre-Reformation Catholicisms in punitive Christianity as well as the tautology between and allegedly redemptive Calvinist work ethic and unforgiving self-punishment.Born Again, a 50 minute film interview with Lou about her Pentecostal upbringing is being screened at near-by Hoxton Square Cinema. Hopefully, a similar stateside show will come around. If Lou’s work were a classic rock album, she’d be Metallica’s self-titled album mashed up with Joy Division’s Closer with a little In the Nursery thrown in.
by Kristopher Irizarry
London's Ready to Eat
by Evan Orensten
London's passion for all things fresh and homemade has created a city full of markets, shops and restaurants that ask you to slow down and enjoy your food. While in town this week we've hit three of London's best food halls. While they all have a lot in common—each sells a range of packaged gourmet items, fresh fruits, vegetables and prepared items, and offers the choice of table service or to go—they also shine in different ways.
Patricia Michelson's La Fromagerie (middle photo above) has two locations. The Moxon Street shop offers a small market with fresh produce, a large variety of teas, gourmet items and accessories in addition to its amazing cheese room. Table service in the back of the shop provides you with several choices of tasty, homemade food. A recent lunch included a salad of white asparagus and monk's beard with an anchovy, chili and lemon dressing, and lasagna with chestnut mushrooms to accompany a stellar cheese plate. Next door is The Ginger Pig, an excellent butcher with some of the most amazing looking savory pies in town.
Ottolenghi (left photo above) has three locations. A few gourmet items are available but the focus is on the freshly made food which is available to go or served on site. The croissants, meringues and macaroons rule.
Flâneur is the largest of the three, and features a market with fresh fruits and vegetables and shelf after shelf of chocolate, spices, tea and gourmet items. A large selection of prepared items is available for take out, and there are plenty of tables to enjoy their freshly prepared food onsite.
Andrew Sutherland
by Josh Rubin
Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Sutherland works as a composer of mundane materials and uneventful spaces. Using corrugated cardboard, vinyl and medium density fiberboard, he recalls iconographic minimalists Sol LeWitt and Tony Smith. Colorful, layered work in ethylene vinyl acetate like 2005’s ‘Scrap Bin,’ leans towards late-career Frank Stella, but the work itself has taken Paxil to relieve its anxiety. Instead of working large, he operates in small dimensions.
Corrugated cardboard is the substance and surface of the artist’s most elegant work, like his representations of wood grain (above)—made by layering paper into the form of a tree and then cutting it down into slabs—and the complexly simple renderings of semi-surreal boxes recently exhibited at New York’s Pulse Contemporary Art Fair. (More woodgrain and other paper-based work pictured above and after the jump.)
Free Range 2006
by Ami Kealoha
British summer for posh yachties means heading the Isle of White and for art gallery talent scouts, it means heading to the Free Range art exhibition on 1 June 2006. Held at the 11-acre Old Truman Brewery site, the annual show features the best work from UK students in fine arts and design and is the largest exhibit of its kind in Europe. Rumor has it mega-collector and human art market value barometer Charles Saatchi finds future stars for his influential collection while they’re still penny stocks at Free Range. According to Tamsin O'Hanlon, one of the show’s coordinators, this year will see 2000 participants in 53 exhibits and has gotten so important that extensive press coverage is likely. “We are in the process of forming a panel of the high-brow, the great and the good who will collectively highlight the best from this year's show in their view.”
Some first-year student standouts from 2005 are returning in 2006 to exhibit their second year work. Claire Suckall is one such returning artist who has also garnered stateside recognition in recent years. The Goldsmiths College student describes her mixed drawings and serigraphs as depicting "events that take place when no one is present." Like some of Daumier’s less involved prints, she uses the loneliness of paper white space. Her installations read like orphaned ephemera gathered together as an improvised family.
by Kristopher Irizarry
More images and info after the jump.
