There's a lot of chaos in Laurent Impeduglia's paintings. Each canvas is charmingly covered corner to corner with compacted images: houses on pillars, messiahs on mountains, and evil-looking castles all standing shoulder to shoulder. And that's just from "What Did God Do For You Today." In his work, the weather isn't just bad, it's terrible. If it's not a lighting storm, it's a biblical intervention.
Impeduglia seems to mock the idea of idolatry. He has a series of paintings of huge memorial statues built on isolated mountains that bear the artist's own name, and another in which he illustrates numbered black tables covered with various idols.
Impeduglia's images depict moments of action in post-apocalyptic (or at least post-logic) cities. Sometimes he scrawls cryptic messages as titles like "Master of the Dunjeon" or "This Is Pop Shit" at the top or directly in the center of his paintings. The titles read like another element of the spontaneity in his style. We get the feeling his process includes an improvised composition, taking cues from one form to the next, rather than executing a detailed plan.
Among the eight designers awarded the 2013 AIGA Medal are Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, also known as the typography studio Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The vid looks at recent works-in-progress, cruises through H&FJ’s offices and allows the designers to explain how they got into type, why they teamed up, and how they divide up the work making new fonts for new types of content. We found it surprisingly stimulating.
Families in developing countries, says Designboom, often use a system consisting of three rocks and a bundle of firewood to cook food at home. While the three-rock stove can be put together on a small budget, it only uses about 10% of the fire's heat for cooking. When the trip to get more firewood takes an entire day, conserving firewood is essential.
To create a more efficient stove, the designers at Claesson Koivisto Rune worked with families in Kenya to test prototypes and provide feedback at each stage of the design. They mimicked the function of the three-rock stove with a recycled aluminum structure that could concentrate the heat of the fire, and still use a families' existing cookware. The final product, the brightly colored Baker Cookstove, is manufactured locally in Kenya and distributed directly to villages.
In some cases, stoves are available for $29. A crowd-funding campaign is ongoing.
Even if Trevor Crump's photos didn't twitch and shake in animated GIF form, they'd still be impressive compositions. His Tumblr boasts GIFs of bands like Ty Segall, White Lung, and Yo La Tengo slightly moving mid-performance, and charmingly goofy backstage portraits of Bleached and Widowspeak and a ton of others. The limited movement in the GIFs works to Crump's advantage: the stereoscopic format doesn't distract from the photos, and gives the images some tasteful depth.
Follow Trevor Crump on Tumblr.
Kirra Jamison's modern paintings might seem a bit random, like cast-offs from a Matisse cut-out broken up, but they're actually created through a more intricate, inspired process. Jamison began with scraps of vinyl on the floor of her studio, arranged them into abstract collages and then screenprinted over them for the series "Total Control." For "Locomotor," she took the smaller prints and recreated them in acrylic. The effect is strangely pleasing to the eye even if it isn't even obvious that her creations are drawing from the material world.
"Tenon Cargo"
"Mortise"
"Hum 2012"
"Arch" from "Total Control"
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