Matthew J Levin

Levin is nothing but stunning. More from him here.

Samuel F Stimpert

Icon II, Siddhartha Gotama in gas mask

More work from Simpert is here but it seems to be a dead page. I sincerely hope we'll see more from him...

My life in Monsters. Phil Tippett

The birds are flying

Miura Etsuko

More of Etsuko here.

Objects Being Sanded in Half

Anders Krisár

The birth of us (boy), Anders Krisár

Untitled, Anders Krisár

Untitled, Anders Krisár

See more of Anders Krisár here.

Of August gold

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Your Mommy kills animals

The last bus to St Clair.

Photo stolen from boxoflight

I once rode that last bus, left not far from Sylvia's house actually - from my flat, she would have been 16 years younger then - she might have had a better quality of life then, than me maybe - at the time, and isn't that the big thing - time..
I reread this story, every few days and it breaks my heart - but I rode that bus once in a desperate and lonely time - Dunedin can be a hard place. - J.M.H. 

Rest in Peace Sylvia Martha Neville.

Lost & Found

Lost & Found from Joey Bania on Vimeo.

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Yeah well, ya know.

The Pizz

 Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

                                                              -Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lost, standing still.

We're told often enough these days to question everything we see and hear. The out come tends to be on-line rants about the illuminati (I'm not putting a capital i there) or alien cover-ups. Myself, I guess I'm reasonably sceptical but especially so when it comes to memes and catchy good will heal the earth bullshit. Well I saw this today. It's obviously set up but I don't think that matters. I don't know what it says but the image is enough for me. I'm sitting in front of the heater bitching about the poor insulation.

Cracks in the mask.

If you find yourself in Sydney, I highly recommend a short stop at the Australia Museum. They have one of the best collections of tribal masks I have seen anywhere in the world including a few I have wanted myself for a very long time. I was stunned to see them in the flesh, these photos do not begin to do them justice at all but I hope they might inspire you to put the Australia Museum on your travel bucket list.  

 

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger

Dead frog with flies. Oil on copper. 1630

He who knows...

Surveillance cameras operate in this area.

I posted one of these on social media a while back and as I am sure you can imagine, the comments were text book. I'd been meaning to post SurveillanceCameraMan's videos here too but kinda got side tracked but also, wasn't sure if this was really of the minuet. Topical, yes but when I stumbled upon it, it almost seemed like a recap. I'm not sure I can explain that without sounding like I don't absolutely love this stuff but I suspect you'll know what I'm on about.

Forward twelve months or so and over the last few weeks Richard Prince has seized the press. Now before you buddy up as a fellow Prince fan I have to tell you, a fan I am not. His re-appropriation is in my opinion just really lame. The first time I heard about him I actually thought his concept was pretty cool and a fairly stiff middle finger to tweed and old port. It seemed like a warning of things to come... I'm sure you can see where I'm at. It's the same old joke and although his latest targets are fresh, almost poignant, I just can't get excited about it.

So I'll leave these for you here. A little different than Prince's angle I know but infinitely slicker in my belief. I'd love to know more about Mr SurveillanceCameraMan and I sincerely hope he has more tricks up his sleeve. There are currently eight videos on the SurveillanceCameraMan accounts on Liveleak and Dailymotion as well as one on YouTube with an interesting description.

Emil Alzamora - Mind Sculptures by Sabin Bors

Photo from Alzamora's facebook page

 In a 2010 article titled "Emil Alzamora's Sleek Metaphors," Benjamin Sutton says these sculptures "are like numerous cautionary anecdotes encapsulated in one human figure, however deformed."

The author remarks Alzamora’s “uncanny aesthetic” as “a fusion of classical sculpture and Surrealism, with occasional shades of Minimalism and Expressionism,” and that “each bust, body and hybrid organism has a striking presence and tangible mass. Most forms are creepily, intentionally lifeless, calling to mind ancient Greek sculptures, but also the imposing, enigmatic object-hood of a Robert Smithson installation. Other works still bare traces of the artist’s hand, calling to mind the stretched-out bodies of Alberto Giacometti.” (Benjamin Sutton, Emil Alzamora’s Sleek Metaphors) Mention of the “primordial chasm between body and mind” and the visual commentaries on contemporary body image issues “reflecting the idea of being fundamentally estranged from one’s body” avert the viewer to the artist’s manifest intention to denature conventional representations of the human form. Lyle Rexer too thinks that in Alzamora’s sculpture, “concept meets craft at a very high level,” and sees this in contrast with “the general de-skilling of art and the rise of conceptual strategies, which have gone hand-in-hand since the early 1960s,” amounting “to an old-fashioned, Henry-Fordish division of labor” that has taken over in the art world. Rexer adds Alzamora to a list of sculptors such as Cemin, Kiki Smith, Pier Consagra, Martin Puryear, or embroidery artist Angelo Filomeno, who “demonstrate that knowledge of materials, and, more importantly, of techniques, opens doors to imagery that can’t simply be ‘conceived’ out of the cultural ether.” (Lyle Rexer, Emil Alzamora: Random Mutations That Work) The author addresses not only the artist’s “virtuosic performances,” to mark the line between fairy tale and allegory, which – as in the case of Kiki Smith – is always “in danger of veering into literalness, an art that speaks too much for itself,” but also the psychological and political character of the distortions of the human “that work only as expressions of a distorted society.”

More from this article by Sabin Bors at Anti-Utopias.

Emil Alzamora's website

Alzamora on Facebook

Hanna Hasse Bergström

Hanna Hasse Bergström is rocking my world this week. I painted sheep skulls for quite a while but I never really got a handle on the surfaces. They are quite tricky and the areas broken up by the shapes and joins really are a difficult mistress. Give it a go if you dare. Check out Bergström's carved skulls and more of her work here.

I really am going?

The sleep is poor and has no definite pattern.