We've missed the 2008 Cartoon Forum held this year in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, from September 16-19. All we've got now is this gorgeous trailer, made by animation students, to heal our wounds. I hate to think we missed out on hanging out with all these cute creatures, but at least we get to watch them as they make their adorable way to the festival!
War and Peace. Yin and Yang. A young boy with a gun and a flower in his hat. The contradictions intrinsic to the human race take center stage in Shepard Fairey's newest exhibit, The Duality of Humanity, now fully online at the White Walls SF website. Included is his now-famous Obama HOPE poster. This exhibit runs until October 4th, so catch it in person if you can!
One of the things I love most about the online version of Juxtapoz is when they feature reader art. This week, the art of Quyen Dinh especially caught my eye. With paintings featuring such subjects as wolf-faced boys and pet death, her art is touching and universal without being overwhelming or saccharine. Here's a little bit from her bio:
"When it comes to art, there’s just something about the unadulterated colors of acrylic paint on canvas that is so visually titillating, visceral in effect, making it my favorite medium to work with. I suspect I never left that certain phase of childhood when bright colors, simple shapes, and outlines of Saturday morning cartoons and coloring books were the only images that captivated children for hours. Naturally, it is this love for simplicity and color that has found it’s way into my paintings. Making art for me has always been pure catharsis."
I hadn't realized just how much we have previously written about artist Kent Williams until I did this search, but he is worth every bit of ink or type or computer words we have spent on him, and then some. His work with light, composition, and the human form is stunning, so I'm glad we'll all have the opportunity to see his work again in his newest exhibition coming up at the end of this month. It's called Swim in the Deep Water and it runs from September 27 through October 25 at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in LA, with an opening night reception from 8-11 PM September 27.
The above is a detail from one of the pieces from the exhibit, "Icarus." I can't find any other previews of the show, but Kent won't disappoint. It'll be worth it.
Oh yeah--and that exhibit title? Damn good advice.
Spanish artist José Manuel Ballester has re-painted some of the most famous paintings in the world, with one slight alteration: He has removed any sign of human life. To contemplate these settings, now devoid of people, is to consider context from a whole new angle.
This project reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, which contains a famous seven minute-long montage at its end of places from the film, now stripped of any people. It forces you to contemplate the passage of time, the importance (or unimportance) of human drama, the value of your surroundings. Are they just incidental, or do they deserve a more starring role than the characters themselves?
I can't read Spanish, so hell if I know if that's the point of Ballester's exhibition "Espacios Ocultos" at the Distrito Cu4tro in Madrid. But that's what it made ME think of.
The Lee Miller exhibition "The Art of Lee Miller" at SFMOMA in San Francisco is entering its final week, and then it will be gone. This means if you want to walk the halls of the museum and bask in the glory of Lee Miller and her incredible career as a muse, model, surrealist photographer, and photojournalist during WWII, now's the time to hop to it.
Fabulist favorite Lesley Reppeteaux has a new show, entitled "Tumbling," opening at Thinkspace Gallery in Santa Monica on September 12. There's a great promo video above set to PJ Harvey's "Sheela Na Gig," a sneak peek of the show on Flickr, and SUCH a good interview over on the Sour Harvest blog. I am wowed and bowled over and about a million other things, so if you can go to the show, go to the show!
So if you have several hundred dollars to spare, instead of several thousand dollars, now's your chance to pick up some snazzy paintings. I'm particularly digging the sushi, lemons and starfish paintings by Jennifer Tong, myself. Don't touch that "Lemon, Little Lemon" painting. I have dibs on that!
Square America is a journey into faded beauty - snapshots and fleeting glances at a world both close by, and far, far away.
The vintage photographs are wonderful, but the real genius lies in the curatorship. This is an online exhibition in the best sense of the word. The themes bring out all that is latent in those images - everything blurred and sharp, bright and lost.
Look at how he has grouped them! There are people sleeping, smoking, and at dance lessons - 'a beguiling mixture of awkwardness and grace'. The groups are evocative, lonely, unexpected. We see the half-pauses, the stockinged leg, the moments before a childhood fight. There are photographs of the dead, of the limits of memory, of rising and falling. There is love.
The emotional content grabs you by the shoulders. What of 'On the Beauty of Absence' - an album where most, but not all, the photographs have been torn away? Or 'Defaced', where the faces have been destroyed, obscured, or omitted? Some of these faces have been scrubbed out, a violence on the page.
Alone, they would be powerful. Put together, they are transformed.
This is one man's journey through everything precious about the discarded, and the line he carves through the photos is as beautiful as the photographs themselves.
It is a dream, a story, a yearning and a contemplation. It is a site worth returning to. One to bookmark, and to fall into as often as you can.
Our friends over at Paper Tiger have released yet another gorgeous and very limited edition print, this time by artist Nate Frizzell. The print, entitled "Nest," comes in a small edition of only twenty-five prints and is also available as a hand-touched artist edition print. These are absolutely breathtaking just on my computer screen, so I can only imagine how lush and vibrant they'll be in person.
AND!! For the rest of this month, Fabulist readers will get a bonus "mini-print" with any order just by mentioning "Fabulist" in the comments section, as well as an extra 15% off their purchase when using the code "buyer."
Yes, it's exciting news, and these are very exciting times. Happy July to you!
I am not joking. These paintings are based on real-life events.
But for the rest of you, who aren't hip to Kentuckian ways, you should probably check out Kathleen Lolley's upcoming show "Myth & Magic" at Giant Robot San Francisco. I'm betting they'll have an online gallery up after the show opens on July 19, but in the meantime, you can get a sneak preview on Kathleen's Myspace page. Which also just happens to be one of my favorite Myspace pages of all time. Her interests include "surrealism, comics, alchemy, mystery, birds, strange text & folk lore," and it really comes through in her work. Those just happen to be some of my main interests as well, so I'm well excited for this one.
Jerry Levitan interviewed John Lennon in 1969, when Jerry was just fourteen years old. Now he's produced a film using the interview as the soundtrack. It's animated mostly in black and white, with the drawings flowing into each other at times almost like a Rube Goldberg machine. I thought it'd be a nice mixture of art and message and history and entertainment, all rolled into one tight little five minute package just in time for your weekend. Happy saturday everyone!
Happenstance was a incredible album. Strong from first to last song, the unreleased songs have also been very strong -two of which are showing up in this installment-. There is no doubt that her sophmore album will be its equal, if not better. It is our hope and I'm sure, the label's as well, that more people catch on to this very soulful jem of an artist.
Edgar on 
