Ben Tour is a 28 years old Vancouver based artist. More of his illustrations along with a 2006 interview with him over at FecalFace.com
Studio series focusing on disused electronics, as well as flora and fauna.
About Benn Innes:
Born in Knoxville, TN, Ben Innes now works, eats and sleeps in Minneapolis, MN. He gained his BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College Of Art and Design in the spring of 2009. (About)
First spotted via Coudal Partners.
 | The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other. |
“Drawing on the influence of anime, comic books, Otaku culture, and animal compendiums, the work of Nicholas Di Genova features an encyclopedic range of constructed creatures ranging from soft and nurturing to calculating and military. A vast and intense fabricated history acts as a backdrop to the hundreds of interconnected species, families and rival clans that find themselves projecting their habits, relations and environments to their viewers. Working with ink and animation paints, Di Genova’s paintings on mylar highlight his skill with line and his ability to manipulate colour. Always intense and intricately executed, Di Genova’s work rivals the quality of any fine art painter while firmly establishing itself on the fringes of contemporary art. The work brings together knowledge of art and design and samples from both fields, resulting in incredible visual and technical impact and an astonishing strong conceptual core which receives respect from both camps, a dichotomy often severely split.” (more at the LE Gallery)
Check his blo: Skeleton Hug.
| Contrary to “primitive” peoples, who endow everything that moves with personal expression ―or even the first Greeks, who deified every aspect and force of nature―modern humans are obsessed by the need to depersonalize (or impersonalize) all that they most admire. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is analysis―that marvelous instrument of scientific research to which we owe all our advances, yet which allows the soul to escape from one undone synthesis after another, until we are left facing a pile of disassembled parts and evanescent particles. The second is the discovery of the sidereal world―which is such a vast subject that it seems to destroy all proposition between our own existence and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. A single reality appears to subsist that is capable of covering both the infinitesimal and the immense at once: energy, that universal floating entity from which everything emerges and into which everything falls back, as if into an ocean. Energy is the new spirit, the new god. The impersonal is at the Omega of the world as well as its Alpha. |
Here’s the original French version:
“A l’inverse des « primitifs » qui donnent un visage à tout ce qui bouge, — ou même des premiers Grecs, qui divinisaient toutes les faces et toutes les forces de la Nature, l’Homme moderne est obsédé par le besoin de dépersonnaliser (ou d’impersonnaliser) ce qu’il admire le plus. Deux raisons à cette tendance. La première est l’Analyse, — ce merveilleux instrument de recherche scientifique, auquel nous devons tous nos progrès, mais qui, de synthèse en synthèse dénouées, laisse échapper l’une après l’autre toutes les âmes, et finit par nous laisser en présence d’une pile de rouages démontés et de particules évanescentes. — Et la seconde est la découverte du monde sidéral, objet tellement vaste que toute proportion paraît abolie entre notre être et les dimensions du Cosmos autour de nous. — Capable de réussir et de couvrir à la fois cet Infime et cet Immense, une seule réalité semble subsister : l’Énergie, entité flottante universelle, d’où tout émerge, et où tout retombe, comme dans un Océan. L’Énergie, le nouvel Esprit. L’Énergie, le nouveau Dieu. A l’Oméga du Monde, comme à son Alpha, l’Impersonnel.”
Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1956, p. 177. PDF.
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega.
Artist’s statement: “Taking inspiration from Dutch Vanitas paintings, these photographs incorporate personal artifacts within the tradition construct of still life. Pairing objects that belongs to my gandmother with my own possessions speaks to memory and the legacy that one leaves behind. Both the decomposition of the nature (rotting fruit and wilting flowers) and the break down of the man-made-objects, reference the physical body and mortality. The objects bear witness to a spiritual trace or imprint that is left behind or residual.” (visit Justine Reyes’ official website).
Sometime photography is inspired by painting, sometime painting seems to imitate photography.
Check out what Adam Voorhes has to tell show about himself. View more of the Exploded series. Read an interesting interview about the creative process he follow for the Exploded series. Visit his official website.
This is a woodblock print by Kunisada depicting a Scene from a Kabuki play (c. 1850). I scanned it from the excellent book The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. Here’s Shore’s comments about the illustration:
“Japanese woodblock prints use the frame in a way that is more reminiscent of photographs than of Western painting. It has been suggested that it was a result of the Eastern scroll tradition ― seeing the infinitly variable croppings that occur when viewing a scroll as it rolled from hand to hand. Perhaps by examining what it gives these prints their sense of photographic framing we canclarify what photographic framing is.
Notice how, in the upper right of the picture, the frame gives emphasis to the angel’s hand staying the sword. The angel is described with the greatest economy: the artist has given the least information needed for us to read this being as an angel. There is something slyly wonderful about our ability to make an interpretation based on this minimal description.
Now, notice the leg jutting into the image from the lower right. It is really amazing that the artist chose to add this. It doesn’t relate to any of the action in the picture. It is entirely extraneous. It typifies the sort of seemingly arbitrary cropping that occurs when the frame of a photograph slices through the world. While it doesn’t relate to the unfolding drama of the picture, it does imply that this drama is a part of a larger world.”
From The Nature of Photographs, 2nd edition, New York: Phaidon, 2007, p. 64-64 (Amazon).
About Kunisada:
“Utagawa Kunisada (1786 - 1865) (also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III) was the most popular, prolific and financially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.” (Wikipedia)
From the Disassembled Household Appliances set: “This was my senior thesis project at the hartford art school this past year…I took apart used cooking/cleaning appliances, and arranged their interior parts very systematically on a white sheet of bristol board. My intention was to explore the hidden “brains” of these appliances; allowing us to view these everyday objects from a new perspective.” Prints can be bought at Etsy
About Brittny Badger: “I graduated from the Hartford Art School with a BFA in photography and minor in visual communication design. I work for the Hartford Art School Admissions Department, recruiting talented high school students.” Check her blog. | I got four heads inside my mind Four rooms I’d like to lie in Four selves I want to find And I don’t know which one is me |
Listen to the song on YouTube. Read more about The Who’s album Quadrophenia.
| PowerPoint’s convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structures as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent design for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into sales pitch and presenters into marketeers. |
About Edward Tufte:
“Edward Rolf Tufte (born 1942) is an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University. He has been described by The New York Times as “the da Vinci of Data”. He is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Tufte lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. He periodically travels around the United States to offer one-day workshops on data presentation and information graphics.” (wikipedia)
Previously on Skandalon : Power Point.
Statement :
“Modernization and globalization shape urban development. In China, I have experienced and witnessed the changes that have taken place under the influence of Western modernity. These changes have contributed to a strong and powerful push for development in my country, but at the same time these forces are complicit in creating the environmental and social nightmare experienced in remote corners of China. I have lived overseas, and I have traveled back and forth frequently between my mother country and the West. It has informed my awareness of the conflicts between modernity and tradition, dreams and reality. These themes have taken on greater significance in both my artistic practice and in my personal concerns and have resulted in disCONNEXION.” ( more).
