Artists & Art
bioephemera | March 31, 2010
With some portraits, you can feel the eyes following you around the room. With Sophie Cave's art installation make that fifty pairs of eyes - in fifty expressions ranging from disgust to shock to delight. All suspended above you in the atrium of a Victorian museum.
photo credits: Ashley R. Good and chatirygirl. Visit kuriositas for more pictures of the installation at Kelvingrove Art Museum.
Via She Walks Softly and many others.
bioephemera | March 30, 2010
Artists Bigert & Bergstrom create suspended globular clusters, reminiscent of molecular structures, with vinyl photographs on the outside and lighting within. The overall effect is a "luminous three-dimensional sculpture", light and airy as a memory, but distinctly industrial.
These sculptures used photos of a power plant, linking the molecular appearance to greenhouse gases and pollution. See more photos at today and tomorrow.
In contrast, Andy Harper's "An Orrery for Other Worlds" is a heavy, opaque sphere laden with detailed, lush botanical fantasies executed in oil paint. Oil is a…
bioephemera | March 29, 2010I don't think I've posted yet about Andrew Chase's graceful articulated metal sculptures. His cheetah is particularly stunning.
Click the image to watch it run!
Chase's mechanical sculptures have way more personality than metal should. The soulful eyes of his elephants and giraffes could reflect some futuristic world in which extinct flesh-and-blood animals have been (inadequately) replaced with patchwork gestures at nature. Or perhaps they look lonely because they're intimidated by the flesh-and-blood inspirations of which they are ingenious, but dead, replicas.
Robot Timmy Recharging…
bioephemera | March 28, 2010Jackrabbit #5
Joianne Bittle, 2009
Joianne Bittle has an awesome job (Exhibition Assistant at the American Museum of Natural History) where she gets to paint, draw and make dioramas. Wow. But she's also an accomplished artist in oil and wax, as these paintings attest. Her series of beetle paintings, A Royal Family, were the result of six years of life observation.
A Royal Family (Goliath Beetle)
Joianne Bittle, 2003
Joianne Bittle currently has work appearing in Entomologia, curated by M of Curious Expeditions! Check it out if you're in NYC - the show runs through April 4.
bioephemera | March 27, 2010
You may have heard from Slashdot that the University of Wisconsin is switching from Arial, a sans-serif font, to Century Gothic, a serif** font that uses 30% less ink, for default printing. The university hopes to save ink, which is both thrifty and eco-friendly. But you may not have seen this art project by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth: they used ballpoint pens to scribble large-scale test versions of various fonts on a wall, and the ink level afterward was an analog readout for which font uses more ink. Ingenious!
Word to the nitpicky: while there's no rule that a sans-serif font…
bioephemera | March 26, 2010
Shauna Richardson crochets life-sized taxidermied animals - "crochetdermy". Because she can and because no one else thought of it first. Read more at Dazed Digital.
bioephemera | March 25, 2010
I can't wait to get a copy of Jason Thompson's brand-new project, Playing with Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book. Thompson, the founder and creative director of Rag and Bone Bindery, has long kept a blog featuring the best book and paper artists. Now he's edited a book art book, and it looks great. I mean, it has a section on "shaping books with power tools" - what more do you need??
Playing with Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book at Amazon
bioephemera | March 23, 2010
From Richard Waller, "A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties"Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6, 1686/1687 (London, 1688)
Noting the lack of a standard for colors in natural philosophy, and inspired by a similar table published in Stockholm, Richard Waller indicated that his "Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple" would permit unambiguous descriptions of the colors of natural bodies. To describe a plant, for example, one could compare it to the chart and use the names found there to identify the…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010
Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments: Cystic Acne, Back
Lauren Kalman, 2009
Metalsmith and mixed-media artist Lauren Kalman explores the nexus of body, adornment, and disease in her remarkable series "Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments". Yes, those faux-diseases are actually piercing the skin - but only temporarily: they're gold acupuncture wires modified into jewelry by the artist. The temporary/permanent nature of the piercings echoes the temporary visibility of the diseases she depicts, like syphilis and herpes, which eventually clear…
bioephemera | March 18, 2010
Artist S. Shelley Jones sent me a link to some digital art depicting the lowly cockroach, who turns out to be much more attractive with a psychedelic spin. Thanks, Shelley!
PS. "The Psychedelic Cockroach" is a great band name, isn't it?
top: Cockroach No. V, 2009; bottom: Cockroach No. VII, 2009; by S. Shelley Jones.
bioephemera | March 16, 2010
Polly Law's Word Project is a series of mixed-media illustrations representing obscure words like dasypygal and nidifice. Though Law has exhibited her work in galleries, she hasn't found a backer to publish them as a book. . . yet. So she's seeking help at the entrepreneurial startup Kickstarter.com:
The Word Project book will be a soft cover, 10"x10". Each piece will get its own spread accompanied by its meaning, pronunciation & an example of use. Since 2002 I have been raiding the attics, basements and dusty cupboards of the English language in search of intriguing, odd & obscure…
bioephemera | March 15, 2010
Delicious - and suprisingly convincing - x-ray images of animals with "skeletons" made of typography by Katerina Orlikova. Be sure to check out _Motion Picture, a running cat-like creature reminiscent of Eadweard James Muybridge's vintage motion photography.
Via Street Anatomy.
bioephemera | March 14, 2010Print Magazine asked four designers to storyboard their own versions of Alice. I kind of like this script-rich lowbrow fantasy, with an anime-inspired Alice by Sebastian Onufszak:
bioephemera | March 13, 2010
By Joseph Hewitt, who clearly understands the Sb atmosphere quite well.
bioephemera | February 26, 2010One of the reasons little liberal arts colleges are awesome: this course at Lafayette. It's part of their Values and Science/Technology Program.
bioephemera | February 22, 2010
Feb 23rd (tomorrow) is the last day to snag advance tickets to the Seven on Seven conference in NYC:
Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new --be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine-- over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.
If you go, let me know how it is!
bioephemera | February 21, 2010FYI: the winners of the AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge are up! You may recognize some of them - including PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) cartoonist Jorge Cham. Check 'em out and share your opinions; I'll have more to say when I'm back from blogcation!
bioephemera | February 13, 2010
Upcoming at Observatory in NYC: Entomologia (Feb 26-April 4), a group show of art incorporating and inspired by insects. I'm particularly intrigued by the discussion scheduled for April 3, "Transgenics, Cybernetics, and Evolution:"
Silkworms engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and hormones, cyborg dragonflies designed for high-speed missions and surveillance... In connection with her recent work, Shanna Maurizi has been delving into the nether regions of genetic engineering and transgenics, molecular biology, and military cybernetics.
Ok, sounds good to me! Plus it's curated by Curious…
bioephemera | February 11, 2010
Just in time for Valentine's Day: the "Copulating Earthworm Necklace," from heronadornment on etsy.
Also love her anatomical heart locket.