xim's blog

Colette Calascione

2007-11-15T23:00:00.000+01:00

Navegando por myspace me encuentro con esta maravilla... sin palabras... breathtaking*

Addressing the issue of gender identity and particularly that of "female identity," Calascione's imagination takes her into flights of fancy and fantasy in her paintings. She paints women in all guises, mostly unclothed, sitting on divans brocaded in satin, standing provocatively, looking at the viewer, reclining on a bed surrounded by the stuff of dream and fantasy, purring cats, fairy tale fish, toy soldiers.

Her "Self-Portrait with Internal Landscape" reveals the artist in a tiered yellow period dress with a roundel of a landscape brooch at her chest being opened by a man's hand, which enters the painting from the right side, a fragment of a person? To the left is a partial view of a table with vase and roses, above this hangs what appears to be a detail of an old photograph. Only a corner of this photo is revealed to the viewer, with curving legs of a table, and legs of a gentleman garbed in a tailcoat. Could this be a romantic connection? A black eye mask--inviting the viewer to peer into the artist's eyes and keeping the viewer at a distance--conceals the artist's pretty and gamine face.

Painted like old master paintings with a careful drawing, a monochromatic under-painting phase followed by many layers of oil, the artist beguiles us with her images and her imagination.

Colette Calascione was born in 1971. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Guy Bourdin

2007-11-01T14:35:00.000+01:00

(...) In the seventies, alongside Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin created some of the world's most scandalous fashion images. Bourdin's work for French Vogue was chic, disturbing, and often surreal. In his glossy netherworld, beauty was extreme, and fantasy was grotesque and sometimes macabre...

Eviana Hartman in Vogue US, april 2003

Ion Birch

2007-10-27T21:55:00.000+01:00

Generally modest in scale, Birch's carefully rendered graphite drawings have an effeminate old-world softness. Enraptured men and women housed in both Victorian and contemporary settings are depicted in perpetual stages of anticipation, expulsion and debauchery. The protagonist/antagonist in each piece is a thinly disguised version of the artist, appearing as the focus of the narrative, or featured in the periphery. Through this indirect form of self-portraiture, Birch offers us works that are journeys of self-discovery, taking particular interest in the awkwardly inaccurate ways one sees oneself.

Birch’s works delve into the Fin de Siècle notions of utopian optimism. By allowing genitalia and unbridled acts of hedonism to populate his pictures, the artist strives to demystify that which is typically puritan and suppressed. The Freudian subconscious inevitably peppers his scenes; his ethereal human tableaus manifest in fleeting moments within the mind and once put on paper act as a device to negotiate the artist’s innermost thoughts. By this method Birch deconstructs our preconceptions of sexuality framed as they are in high artistic form.

Loretta Lux

2007-10-25T14:29:00.000+01:00

Loretta Lux (born 1969) was born in Dresden, East Germany and is a German fine art photographer known for her surreal portraits of young children. She currently lives and works in Monaco.
Lux graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich in the 1990s, and debuted at the Yossi Milo gallery, New York in 2004. The show put both Yossi Milo and Loretta Lux on the map, selling out and setting prices never before seen from a new gallery.
In 2005, Lux received the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography. Her work has since been exhibited extensively abroad, including solo exhibitions in 2006 at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands, and the Sixth Moscow Photobiennale. Her work is included in numerous collections in Europe and the United States, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fotomuseum, den Haag; Reina Sofia, Madrid and Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. She has had portfolios featured in numerous fine art magazines.
The artist executes her compositions using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation. Lux's work - at once alluring and disturbing - usually features young children and is influenced by a variety of sources. She originally trained as a painter at Munich Academy of Art, and is influenced by painters such as Diego Velázquez, Agnolo di Cosimo and Phillip Otto Runge. Lux also owes a debt to the famous Victorian photographic portraitists of childhood such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll.

Blonde Redhead, track: top ranking, director: MIKE MILLS

2007-10-25T14:13:00.000+01:00

Me encantó la expresividad y simplicidad de este video dirigido por Mike Mills...

Mike Mills (born 1966 in Berkeley, CA.) is a film director/music video director and graphic designer. He graduated from Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
He has created videos for such musical acts as Moby, Yoko Ono and Air. He has also worked as a graphic designer on promotional material and album covers for such acts as Beastie Boys, Beck, Sonic Youth, and Ol' Dirty Bastard. In addition he has created graphics for X-Girl, Marc Jacobs, and currently produces his own line of posters and fabrics called Humans by Mike Mills.
Air named the fifth song on their album Talkie Walkie after Mills.
Mills played guitar and performed background vocals with the short-lived indie side-project band Butter 08 along with Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Russell Simins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Rick Lee of Skeleton Key. The band released one self-titled album in 1996 on the now defunct Grand Royal record label.
Thumbsucker is his feature-film directorial debut.
He has also released some of his art/documentary photography works with the two books, 'Gas Book 11'(2003) and 'Humans'(2006).

Lina Scheynius

2007-10-06T19:08:00.000+01:00

Preciosas imágenes la de esta fotógrafa autodidacta sueca. Actualmente vive y trabaja en London.

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison

2007-09-26T22:25:00.000+01:00

«Inherent in this civilization of consumption and technology is the waste and destruction of the vulnerable earth. The mythic world we create in our photographs mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes we depict however, display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. We portray these attempts within our work by inventing machines and contraptions from junk and obsolete equipment. These contraptions are intended to help the character we portray to jump-start a dying planet. We patch holes in the sky, create rain machines, chase storms to create electricity, communicate with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, we create less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroy it.» ~ Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison.

sin palabras me quedo...

Anoush Abrar & Aimée Hoving

2007-09-25T14:30:00.000+01:00

A interpetation of the "coma".
What is coma ? A period between death and dream…
copyright © Anoush Abrar 2003

Jan Rocks*

2007-09-17T21:42:00.001+01:00

Eggshell Mind

My son, Jan... The Past Inside The Present

2007-09-16T22:13:00.000+01:00

Love u like hell*

Sur le fil...

2007-09-15T19:16:00.000+01:00

Yann Tiersen

Blind...

2007-09-15T10:20:00.000+01:00

snif

Talking Heads -This Must be the Place-

2007-09-03T21:53:00.000+01:00

:: Scartissue Magazine event on friday 07/sept ::

2007-09-02T20:52:00.000+01:00

Estáis todos invitados!

See u there*

Eugenio Recuenco

2007-07-15T13:08:00.000+01:00

Impresionante el trabajo de este fotógrafo español... Su portfolio no tiene desperdicio y os invito a que visitéis su website para que juzguéis vosotros mismos... Cada una de sus fotos me deja sin aliento. Tremenda puesta en escena, versatilidad y una sensibilidad para transmitir lo que se le antoje en su conciencia... Contextos oníricos, circenses, subrrealistas, cinematográficos... siempre desde "el ojo de Frosker"... breathtaking

Esperamos tenerlo en algún número de nuestra nueeva revista que presentamos en Barcelona el 08 de Septiembre en la Galería Miscelänea. La revista: Scartissue Magazine.

http://www.iqons.com/scartissue
http://www.myspace.com/scartissuemagazine

Search & Destroy

2007-07-10T15:52:00.000+01:00

A speech that Pop gave on punk rock from an interview on the CBC on March 11, 1977...
"I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.
I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?"

William S. Burroughs

2007-06-19T11:56:00.000+01:00

Icon of the Beat Generation... What can I say about this Gentleman?...

"La única ética posible es hacer lo que uno quiere hacer"

Nan Goldin

2007-06-18T11:46:00.000+01:00

'There is a popular notion, that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.' Nan Goldin
Tuve la oportunidad de ver una retrospectiva suya en la Whitechapel Gallery de Londres en el año 2002... breathtaking.

Mark Ryden

2007-06-14T07:04:00.000+01:00

Máximo exponente del LowBrow Art (arte sin pretensiones intelectuales) y del Subrrealismo Pop...
“la vida es una gran ilusión. Somos criaturas de energía pura y la carne es lo que nos mantiene enteros”

Oleg Dou

2007-06-12T07:50:00.000+01:00

Artificialidad y realidad se funden en el trabajo de este joven fotógrafo ruso...

New Photographers 2007

2007-06-11T18:03:00.000+01:00

Interesante link para ver el trabajo de emergentes talentos en la fotografía... check it out!

Foto de Holger Pooten...
Holger Pooten explores the space between the staged set and spontaneous reaction of his models. His hyper-real photographs create enigmatic fashion and lifestyle stories with a dark, humourous twist. (www.holgerpooten.com)

EL COMIENZO

2007-06-05T08:30:00.000+01:00

Me desvirgo en esto de los blogs... Intentaré usar este lugar como portal de opiniones, curiosidades, noticias, estados de ánimo, ilusiones y desilusines, experiencias, fotografía, diseño, tipograíia, video y arte en general... so u wellcome!!