the blog of makemassair

Levi van Veluw is a multidisciplinary artist, living and working in the Netherlands. I came across his work a good few months ago now and was struck by it’s ability to present a tactility to simple presentation. His work is afaik all self portrait based being both expressive and introspective. He is a one man process.

His works constitute elemental transfers – modifying the face as object – combining it with other stylistic elements to create a third visual object with a large visual impact. The work you see therefore is not a portrait, but an information-rich image of colour, form, texture, and content. The image contains the history of a short creative process, with the artist shifting between the entities of subject and object.

Levi van Veluw | Light | Light I | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2009

Levi van Veluw | Natural transfer I | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2009

Hair | 60×50cm & 120×100cm | 2007

Material transfers | Carpet | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2008

Some really beautiful black and white art from G. Bènard. A captivating darkness and erotica to the choice of poses and framing.

Living and working in Spain, Portuguese born artist G. Bènard explores the power and influence of memory in his work.

Surreal, occasionally bizarre, provocative, conceptual, often ironic, G. Bènard mixes cultures, rites and rituals, life and death. Encompassing everything human his work speaks of faith, sex, spirit and what it is to be alive and trying to make sense of a world that cannot make sense of itself.

Inner Placenta, a Dance in the Dark

a self dance in the darkness of a placenta. a self embryo in a video art poem. please listen to it loud to get the inner dialogue.”A fake self we are, in real mirrors we have”

I recommend checking out the large amount of photography on gbenard.com as well as his Youtube channel

A short documentary about Flavor Paper and their handmade wallpaper, including scratch n sniff.

Bringing a dose of modern irreverence to old world decor, Flavor Paper screenprints wallpaper by hand in their New Orleans studio. This episode of our video series visits with owner Jon Sherman and tours the factory to learn about how they do it.

If you have never heard of Cool Hunting, I really recommend you subscribe to their video podcasts.

Pretty much does exactly what is says on the tin, well if the internet was tinned. Check it out here

Discovered this image on what I believe to be Russian Livejournal account. I have no idea from the comments if this is the author or merely another interested blog/site like myself. Doesn’t matter really.

I also like this one, from the same Livejournal account:

Bizarre and odd work from American artist Margot Quan Knight. These pictures show of a weird beauty, similar to that fascination you experience with “Circus Freaks”.Beautiful yet disturbing. Images that require a double take, at which point surrealism comes bounding out.

Beginning with a sequence of photographic images created while a researcher at Fabrica—Benetton’s communications and research centre founded in 1994 to foster young creative talent from all over the world—Margot went on to develop her conceptual photography in bundles of themed images.

She draws inspiration from a rich history of photographic artists who focus on the body and her parents’ medical textbooks. She says, “I begin with objects or bodies or plants and try to give them more life, or a different kind of life. Loneliness, exuberance, and wonder take on physical form.” Her work has been exhibited all over the world and appeared in over 40 international publications. She currently lives and works in Seattle, where she is working on a new series called Procreation.

More information and pictures here, here and here.

Now, I like modern art. I like chin strokey, puzzling, in depth thought provoking artwork. But, on those occasions when I go round, for example, the fantastic Tate Modern, I can’t help thinking, to at least 40% of what I see there, the following:

This short film reminds me of the intro sequence to the VHS copy I had as a child of Rupert the Bear and the Frog Song, you know the one with Paul McCarthy in it.

From the artist himself Mark Andrew Webber:

This printed linomation (hand carved animation using Linoleum prints), was done using 296 individual pieces of carved linoleum which are 10 cm square each. This is a project for The Art of Lost Words. It’s all about words in the English language and artists’ interpretations of words that are not used so much anymore, and there are some pretty strange ones. I chose the word dehisce from a list of .ost words. ‘Dehisce’ means ‘release of material by splitting open of an organ or tissue; the natural bursting open at maturity of a fruit or other reproductive body to release seeds or spores or the bursting open of a surgically closed wound.’ It’s made to a loop so it can go on forever! For YouTube I decided to loop it three times to show the gist of the looping. My friend Adam Dedman created the sound for the linomation.

Found at Boing Boing

iri5, as they are known on flickr has created this piece amongst others. Quite impressive really, I’d be interested to know the technique involved.

Ghost in the Machine: Jimi Hendrix out of cassette, commission, 2009
(cassette is real, no paint, no photoshop)

He has also done Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, which you can check out here