urban archaeology

Mark Bradford makes some amazing work. He collages pieces of billboard and print advertisements to create multi-layered collages that he gouges and melds to echo urban America. I love artists that take junk and trash and make stunning new works out of them, especially since his work has quite the same feel as where it came from, some like cities, buildings, or streets.

paradise regained

This weekend, for Valentine's day, in the spirit of love and beauty, I at last caved to Anthro's latest round of markdowns and bought myself Tim Walker's Pictures book. The cover is a Vogue shoot of a pin-up model wearing bunny ears, sitting on a pile of chairs, surrounded by white (live) bunnies. It seems glam, glossy, and contemporary. However the cover underneath the book jacket, embossed with silver ink on blue, reveals a more intimate view of the heart of his work. Its letters are hand-drawn, its border covered in drawings of fairytale ships, roses, beds hanging from branches, umbrellas, a goodnight moon. For Tim Walker, despite his impeccable sense for fashion, style, and brilliant success with the world's forefront fashion magazine, is, at heart, one who infuses dreams, fashion, reality, and nostalgic English countrysides filled with brown bunnies, ponies, and chickens.

From his forward, "daydreaming":

"When I think about it, photographs, to me are really a kind of dream state. It's not about a good dream, or a bad dream...its more important that your day hazes and your mind drifts towards only being concerned by your imaginings....and, as you tour your imagination you want to photograph what you are seeing...BUT...the only way you can do this is by BELIEF...really utterly absolutely passionately firmly believing...you see, you are SO very keen to show what you've seen that somehow it becomes true, and the picture you end up taking becomes a souvenir, a piece of proof brought back all the way from the daydream. "
-Tim Walker, London 2008

Perhaps I love these because lately I have been having vivid, crazy, sometimes-like-movie-stills dreams. Perhaps it is because I grew up making fairy houses out of leaves in my backyard. Or because there are still some of us who cannot keep going foward into modernity without taking a good look at how things used to be. How things could be. It is a bit idealistic and unrealistic to live in the clouds of our imaginings everyday, but it is far more creative than turning on the tv, for it demands us to be the agents of change not just the watchers. Tim Walker works primarily for Italian and British Vogue, and has been recreating British identity through his photographs. I wish he would do the same for America, too, sometimes. Because it's true, we can only cling to what is true by belief, and belief is what allows what is true to become real to us.

small little drawers and paper foldings

One day I started playing with book pages- staining them with tea, cutting them up with an exacto knife, making origami and folding paper swirls. I had just got this jewelery box at a rummage sale and it was waiting to be transformed by something and, viola, suddenly it was spilling with small bits of paper everywhere! Next time I am going to try with colored paper, like one of my favorite Cornell boxes (above)

if i had a room

I would fill it with wonders like Judy Pfaff.

Judy Pfaff has been a huge inspiration to me. I'm obsessed. Her way of working with materials to create space is magical. I love her craft and attention to detail. If I had a room, a blank studio, I would probably doubt myself. I would assume that paint could be no more than paint and charcoal charcoal. But when I look at Judy Pfaff's work I see the malleability of material and its power to create worlds. Wire and steel, wood and string, paper and glue transform into this familiar yet unexplored place.

Her most recent exhibition was "Paper", held at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in New York. This is an excerpt from the press release:

"Previous exhibitions at Ameringer & Yohe, Neither Here nor There and Buckets of Rain, illustrated her command of a wide array of media ranging from wire to neon, from blackened tinfoil to entire tree systems stripped bare of bark, all reinvented for her own creative purpose. In much the same way, Paper rewards us with Pfaff's talent for concoction and repurposing. While it is tempting to term her newest efforts "collage", the word leaves too much out. Judy Pfaff creates worlds with paper Small delicate drawings celebrate unfolding, expansive ideas. Large works (8'x8') wrestle to compress entire Pfaff installations into low relief. The viewer is invited to journey through a myriad of creative suppositions and baroque space"

Here are some images from the show!

The colors and textures are so rich and beautiful and I love the way that everything quietly but poignantly unfolds. Its a sort of gentle explosion. I also especially like the name of the last one, "I dwell in possibility".

"nature does not knock"

"the thing with feathers"

"konya"

"I dwell in possibility"

delectable

I stumbled upon this Chicago artist as I was on the School of the Art Institute Admissions site, whilst attempting to settle my life with a large continuing education decision. Which has been postponed, for good reasons. Good reasons being that I didn't have a certain deep down enough reason to decide a hundred grand away to my future all for the peace of mind that I could say I was on my way to being "successful" and "practical"....two words whose meanings have quite blurry edges.

Anyway, this girl, Rachel Pollak, is awesome. I want her degrees. Masters of Arts and Religion from Yale and Masters of Fine Arts from SAIC? Woah.

I want to print make with purpose, subtle beautiful purpose, purpose that is exclaimed through perfect ink edges and tiny lines and strong lines and stippling and texture. I like that I can see a bit of that in this.

These two are from her series, "Delectable Mountains".