Art of Nicholas Galanin

The Good Book Vol. 15
Originally uploaded by www.nicholasgalanin.com

I can't resist art made with books -- maybe because I have to discard so many. This piece appeals to me on many levels. It uses books (which of course come from trees), it uses Tlingit carving motifs, and the book in question is the Bible. I think it's amazing and I am stunned that it escaped me until now -- this piece was shown in 2006 as part of an exhibit called "What Have We Become"

Galanin's current work is for an exhibit called "The Imaginary Indian" an equally interesting look at the way cultures can be collected, absorbed, and obscured. The pieces each feature Tlingit motifs covered in Victorian wallpaper. The artists statement however, shows yet another side,

The Tlingit art form continues to evolve though purists resist. This conservative shift has left a modern skeletal ruin of ghost like objects which hang on gallery and collection walls, most of which mimic a romantic cultural lifestyle, while shunning current cultural growth. Though this transformation is not entirety negative, it tends to suffocate progress, something needed for cultural survival.

This reminds me of Brian Jungen's sculpted "masks" made from deconstructed and reconstructed Nike shoes. Brilliant, thought-provoking, and something I would love to have in my home.

The last couple of days in photos:

A little art and a breath of fresh air....

There are two things almost guaranteed to put me in a happier frame of mind:

1. a self-directed wander, preferably with camera in hand and without a time limit
2. finding new art/artists

Today, I did both.

This morning, I got in a brief self-directed wander through Finnerty Gardens, as usual. The air was very cold and the skies were grey, but it wasn't raining so I did get some nice photos:

As for art, I took a few moments to look at some Paintings by Elephants (yes, real elephants) as well as photos of the International Quilt Festival in Chicago. The winning quilt is stunning -- it looks like a painting:

Photo by melissastanley727

I've also recently been enjoying the work of Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong (whose view of his changing country is reflected in his elaborate staged photos) and Canadian painter Wade Stout, whose show Macbeth: A Civil War of the Mind is showing in the Maltwood's McPherson Gallery until the end of May.

it's in the details....

I have a new favourite artist-of-the-moment: Diem Chau.

Check out her website... particularly these carved crayons... more on flickr.

this, that and the other...

this: Artist Chris Jordan hurts my brain. He has produced a series called Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait which adds a visual component to statistics of consumption. The one that really got me? "Plastic Bottles, 2007" which depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. It's enough to make me want to climb on a soapbox and start pointing at people yelling "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?" except that eventually I would get around to pointing at myself and then I would really look crazy....

that: Hubby and I have been getting angsty over unfinished projects again... however he has managed to build some really amazing things online this week, and I finally finished putting together the travel colouring kits that I prototyped years ago (when Kiddo was about 2 or 3 years old!) -- one, featuring drawings of my plush monsters, is now for sale in my etsy shop.

the other: the reality of moving must be setting in (not that we have found a place or listed our place, or really even started looking... ) because I am drawn to articles like Prepare Your Home for a Perfect Showing and Chunks of homebuying wisdom from the hive mind, even as I dream almost every night about moving, househunting, renovating, and everything about each of those things that might go wrong. It is not making for restful nights of sleep.

On art and translations...

There's a photo of a marvelous piece of art floating around out there in the blogosphere today. Its medium is porcelain, the artist is Lei Xue, and the title of the piece at its German gallery is "Tee trinken, 2007." The average English speaker would probably read that as "Tea drinking" which a quick Google search confirms is close to accurate ("to have tea" is the most common translation).

So why, then, are the objects pictured being described as beer cans or pop/soda cans? I presume because most people outside of Asia (and the Pacific Northwest/BC cities which boast large Asian populations) are unaware that tea and coffee are sold in cans, too.

Still, it's no excuse for laziness.

It even makes more sense as tea cans, because both the medium and the designs on the "cans" look like Chinese tea cups, thus the piece can be seen as a reflection or comment on modern convenience. I found another, larger piece by the same artist featuring even more porcelain tea "cans" at another gallery, unfortunately the page cannot be directly linked, but you can get to it from the artists' page by clicking on Xue.

***

As an aside, if you like these art pieces, you should also have a look at works by Ma Jun (see also Majun) who has in turn been compared to Charles Krafft (though Krafft's work has a much darker edge to its subversiveness). Incidentally, I would dearly love to have some of Krafft's Delft-like Disasterware™ plates hanging in my next kitchen....

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And on the opposite end of the art scale...

Simone Racheli makes chairs, bicycle frames and other objects look like they were made from meat. Eww.

At least they only look like meat... unlike Jana Sterback's famously disturbing "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic" (1987) which one viewer noted was made from 60 lbs. of meat "fresh enough to stain the hardwood gallery floor."

Sterback drew her title, and perhaps quite a bit of inspiration, from Dutch painters' vanitas paintings -- still life paintings of rotting fruit and meat. Mmm. Good times.

Fan-freaking-tastic book art

This is the kind of art that gives me that fluttery happy feeling inside. On one hand, it's completely destructive (though now I know of another use for those old biology texts that SubText is always giving away); on the other hand, the results are stunning, unique pieces of art which both literally and figuratively add another layer to the way we view books.

The artist is Brian Dettmer and this is from his series of Book Autopsies.

Friday Night Entertainment..

Had the day off... ran some errands (Including taking a very nervous cat to the vet. He's fine, just one really rotten tooth that will have to be pulled), hung out with kiddo.

This evening, we dropped kiddo at her Granny's for the night with the plan of heading off for the Off the Grid Art Crawl. The idea, in principle, was sound. Unfortunately, as with most art showings, we both came away with the feeling that our art was just as good (or better) and thus we did not actually finish the crawl. In between galleries, we did have a very nice dinner at the Sushi Rock Cafe, and Studio 16 1/2 in Fan Tan Alley is one gallery I will visit again ... maybe even work up a proposal for a show.

So then we were left with deciding "what to do" on a Friday night. It seems we have alienated almost all our friends -- well, the ones without kids anyway -- gone are the days of the last minute phonecall "let's go to the pub!" There were no movies in town we felt were worth paying $20+ to see, and no bands playing that we wanted to see.

I suggested, finally, that we take the tripod and the cameras and go up to UVic to shoot photos for the Grid Project. To my surprise, this was acceptable. Yay! So... we spent a couple of hours poking around taking photos. ...

Eventually, we got restless and decided to go somewhere for dessert... we tried Whitespot... but the two things we ordered from the menu turned out to be unavailable. Grr. After some consideration, we ended up getting treats from Dairy Queen. Woo. (Actually, yummy.)

Tomorrow, we are (once again) headed up-island after retrieving the child. Whee!

Artist's response....

I often forget this blog is not only public but searchable... well, it's not that I forget, just that I don't really think about it. So anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to get a response from the artist to a little post I put up about his work over a year ago. The artist in question is Thomas Allen, and I blogged about his Good Light series of pulp novels-as-art.

He was amused by the banter in the comments, and then quietly pimped his forthcoming book, Uncovered, to be released in fall 2007 by Aperture (a very kick-ass press that publishes some of the finest photography out there.... and some of the weirdest I've seen, now that I think about it... we get their journal here in the library, and many times I have stood there totally sidetracked as I "just flipped through" to look at the issue I was shelving).

Aaaaanyway.

Turns out Thomas Allen also has a blog ... and, he's an engaging writer as well as a clever artist.