Colossal

Kim Hyun's Dice Figures via Colossal

Christopher Jobson's blog Colossal is full of art, craft, and design inspiration. Go check it out!

Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993

Ai Weiwei outside Tompkins Square Park, 1986 via Asia Society

Celebrate the release of Ai Weiwei from Chinese government detainment by seeing over 200 of his photographs from his time as a New Yorker. They're now on view at Asia Society Museum until August 14th.

See more photos from Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs here.

Rouge 58

Installation view via Rouge 58

Rouge 58 is a brand new gallery and pop up show room in Williamsburg. Currently on view is FANATIC: Recent Works and Fan Art by Ruvan Wijesooriya. There are dozens of photographic prints and collaborations with illustrators that are "made to be accessible to new art collectors"!

Read and see more...

Artist Spotlight: Stephanie Liner

From Momentos Of A Doomed Construct via Stephanie Liner

"This work explores the connection between the human body and architecture, specifically the relationship between Interior and Exterior. I am interested in the way social expectations shape and dominate the exterior, both physically and interpersonally, and how those forces impact the interior."

This is irresistible. See more on her site.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog bridges a gap 30,000 years long when he takes us to southern France’s Chauvet cave in his latest documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This site of the oldest known cave paintings was discovered in 1994, and had been sealed for about 20,000 years pior. This allowed its paintings to remain fresh and for glorious champagne pink calcite to grow and sparkle upon nearly every surface. Shortly after its discovery, it was sealed once again by the French government.

In true Herzog fashion, he plows through obstacles to show us the unknown and unseen. We appreciate the journey all the more after he outlines the numerous restrictions to shooting, such as the film crew’s confinement to a two-foot wide walkway. He interviews the charming, often animated research team. They shed light on the purpose, techniques, and merits of the paintings. Most eerily, we see the path of a single cave painter whose handprints consistently show a crooked pinky finger throughout the cave. The Paleolithic painters used the rounded walls of the caves as dynamic canvasses and Herzog astutely chooses 3D to enhance their artistic choice. We witness the film crew’s discovery and the reverence for the people who displayed artistic sensitivity so mind-bogglingly long ago. The doc is filled with poetic moments, as Herzog probes into the origins of art, humanness, spirituality, and the continuing evolution of life on earth, which he illustrates in an odd but thought-provoking postscript of albino alligators swimming in nuclear plant water.

You won’t see this anywhere else.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is now playing

Running time: 95 minutes

Trailer

Laurel Nakadate

April 13, 2010 via Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Laurel Nakadate answers to “happy self-portraits people make day after day with with their cell phone cameras and post on Facebook” with 356 Days: A Catalogue of Tears. Every single day in 2010 she took photos of herself before, during, and after weeping in her apartment and on planes, trains, and hotel rooms around the world. Some show her photography training and some have a mobile upload feel. She appears nude and clothed, bawling and welling up. The variety prevents a single daily act from ever becoming repetitive, portraying a true spectrum of sadness. It’s an impressive piece of performance art that shows stamina, discipline, and tenderness.

365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears is on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects until June 25th

About one third of the series is currently on display at MoMA PS 1 until August 8th

Behind The Scenes

Behind the scenes of The Shining

You've gotta love old school behind the scenes candids...

Louise Bourgeois

Gallery view via Cheim & Read

“I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”

If you don’t know much about Louise Bourgeois, it’s helpful to do some wiki-ing before seeing The Fabric Works. My first impression of her came from Maman, so these comparatively understated works had me double checking the name on the wall. But the fabrics do indeed fit into her patterns. You'll see her spirals and webs and the theme of female identity inherent to sewing and mending. At eight years old she began working for her parent’s tapestry restoration business. Here we see her returning to these roots at the end of her life.

The raw materials are her own handkerchiefs, tablecloths, napkins, dresses, sheets, and towels. They span from precious frayed and stained linens embroidered with beads, flowers, and her initials to bold, blue geometric seascapes. Both are equally alluring.

The show concludes with a fabric sculpture that feels more representative of the artist, especially by introducing a bodily form. A vitrine holds a tree of thread bobbins as well as torso piled with stuffed berets. The sculpture is a satisfying end to the show of 2D works.

Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is on view at Cheim & Read on 547 West 25th Street until June 25th

Interactive Colours in Culture

An interactive infographic by David McCandless shows the varied meanings of colors across the globe. Also see a version of the graphic on the cover of his book Information is Beautiful.

Midnight In Paris

Midnight In Paris, the latest from Woody Allen, is loveable, clever, and refreshing. If you’re looking for subtlety, turn around and walk the other way. It’s so fantastical, it could have been an illustrated storybook. But then we wouldn’t have such glorious shots of Paris, which he treats with the same love and tenderness as he does New York.

Owen Wilson is an apt Woody Allen-character incarnation. He plays a wanderlusting, nostalgic writer who’s tying lose ends in his script about a nostalgia shop owner. He and his fiancée (played by Rachel McAdams) are tagging along with her parents on a business trip to Paris. What follows are Wilson’s time travel adventures in the 1920s, the time his Lost Generation heroes roamed the same Paris streets he does.

We feel both the slippery slope of a life ruled by longing for the past while delightfully indulging in it for just a while. In a time when even young adults can catch themselves doing the old man fist shake, Allen’s ideas are, ironically, timely. I walked out of the theater joyful, reflective, a little less cynical. Cheers, Woody.

Midnight In Paris is now playing all over New York

Running time: 94 mins

See trailer

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson's Your rainbow panorama, 2006-11 ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark

Cory Arcangel

Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011) via The Whitney Museum of American Art

Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools is at once humorous, solemn, and timely. His works are product demonstrations that he tinkers with to reveal the equal absurdity of outdated technology, advanced technology, and the speed of that exponential growth. In Various Self Playing Bowling Games, the highlight of the show, Arcangel hacks bowling video games from the late 70s to the 2000s and creates loops of gutter balls. The results are projected onto the wall in chronological order. The effect is something of a line graph, a horizontal failure over time. “I have found the repetitive failure of a poorly rendered 3D human figure bowling to somehow be an apt metaphor for our culture’s bizarre fascination with technology,” Arcangel says. Such are the matter-of-fact labels in the exhibit that describe strikingly clever ideas with ambiguously intentional humor.

This is, however, the tip of a tech-savvy, philosophical iceberg. Other sculptural, video, and print works continue deeper into his universally fascinating windows into human-machine interactions. Giant prints of Photoshop gradients, a video collage of Seinfeld clips that mention Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables...you should see it. In today’s contemporary art world where technological advancement is a ubiquitous subject for comment, and where the funny-sad tone pervades, Arcangel stands out for his fearless and astute statements that we don’t see anywhere else.

Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools is on view at The Whitney on 945 Madison Ave. at 75th St. until September 11.