Cool Hunting
| 29 November 2006view entries from: this week | this month | view previous day | view next day |
Airside Popup Shop
by SummerSeventySix
London design studio Airside has always had a close relationship with music, thanks mainly to director Fred Deakin who is one half of technicolor twosome Lemon Jelly. For the festive season, the firm has a pop-up shop in London's Covent Garden, bearing the Wham-punning name, Last Christmas I Gave You My Art. All the stuff, like t-shirts and badges, that you can pick up at the online Airside Shop is available, but the space has been taken over primarily to promote a collaboration with music publishers EMI called It's Pop It's Art.
Famous lyrics are hand-drawn in attractive, colorful fonts by the Airside team, then printed poster-sized in limited batches. To go with previously-available efforts that cribbed from the likes of Primal Scream's "Come Together" and "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" by Indeep (right), new ones that quote Monty Python, Jay-Z and John Lennon will soon be ready. More interesting though is the bespoke service they're about to offer.
Called The Singles, it will let you pick your favorite lines from one of the one-and-a-half-million songs in the EMI vault, and within about three months, Airside will create a one-off print for you. The waiting list is now open but expect to pay around £4000. For that price, you had better really love the lyrics, or have a rock 'n' roll income.
Last Christmas I Gave You My Art
16 Earlham Street
Covent Garden
London WC2
United Kingdom
Open until 31 December 2006.
Juliet Rose: Atmosfear
by Ami Kealoha
Juliet Rose, the London painter whose subject is the ephemera of everyday life, is one of nine artists showing their work in the upcoming show called "Atmosfear." Opening next Monday, 4 December 2006, at the Air Gallery in London, the works exhibited in the week-long show all share "a profoundly atmospheric aesthetic." For Juliet, that includes silver combs, keys and other trinkets that she arranges evenly against a monotone background, like in "The Story of Ten Days" (pictured left) and "Paroxismal Confusion" (pictured right). (Click either image for detail and see the flyer here.)
Atmosfear
Private View: 5 December 2006, 6-9pm
Through 9 December 2006
Air Gallery
32 Dover Street
London WIS 4NE
tel. 07966 140770 or 020 7704 2838
Evolver Tee
by Jacob Resneck
The latest Go Ape tee to arrest our attention was the Evolver design: a Beatle-esque pencil drawing of apes a lá the frequently ripped-off jacket artwork on the 1966 classic LP.
There are other gems here: "Elliot's New Friend"—a classic Stephen Spielberg spoof featuring BMX bicycle's silhouette cascading over a full moon with Ridley Scott's "Alien" in the front basket. Sick. (Yet funny.) For the Return of the Jedi buffs out there, "Boo Boo Walker" has an At-At four-legged walking machine with the same lampshade cone that dogs have to wear when they come back from the vet so they don't gnaw their wound. Sick? Funny? Yes, absolutely.
Printed on American Apparel, tees start at $18 from Go Ape.
Ray Caesar
by Leonora Oppenheim
Recently spotted in Los Angeles: two young girls wearing cat masks and outfits match ing the floral wallpaper behind them. Other strange figures, like a beautiful woman lying on a couch with a blood-red organism growing out of a wound on her back and another woman lying on the beach with a parasol and octopus tentacles for legs, were seen as well.
Welcome to the bizarre and fantastical world of Ray Caesar. His mesmerizing digital paintings were shown at the Berman Turner gallery at Bergamot Station art center last month.
Familiar and yet strange, contemporary but at the same time classical, the paintings have contradictory effects on the viewer. The compositions are inspired by famous paintings such as Boudin's impressionist "Woman with a Parasol on the Beach," or Boucher's "Mademoiselle O'Murphy." These revered art works are doctored by Caesar's extraordinarily furtive imagination, transforming classical beauties into beautiful but disturbing technicolor monsters. At first the works seem painted, but on closer inspection the incredible detail and texture of the image are clearly digital. Caesar says "from its creation to its method of printing, I create models in a three dimensional modeling software and cover these models with painted and manipulated photographic textures that wrap around them like a map on a globe. Digital lights and cameras are added with shadows and reflections simulating that of a real world." Except this is definitely not the real world, this is Ray Caesar's world.
