In the UK, wheatpasting posters in public spaces is often referred to as wild posting or flyposting. In the Manchester, UK project No Fly Posters, Jon Bland invites designers to produce unthemed posters for wheatpasting on the boarded windows of an abandoned building in the Ancoats area of the city. Seven posters in quad format by seven creatives are displayed in seven windows, each stating "No Fly Posters," a common admonition seen in urban spaces. Round 5 has gone up recently featuring designs by Dr. Me, James Joyce, Pascal Anson, Wim Crouwel, Atlas, Zoran Lucić and others. There are two more rounds yet to go up.
"Musical Ice Cream," an electronic music installation that generates original synth music by the act of eating, is a collaboration between Philly locals Little Baby's Ice Cream and Data Garden. The vine video below features Man Man drummer Chris Powell eating the piece at a pre-Independence Day party.
Philadelphia sound artist Sam Cusumano programmed the cones and explains the technology in the second video below. But basically it is this: A sugar cone gets a sleeve with aluminum leads where your fingertips touch it. An electric probe is slipped into the ice cream in the cone. When a human tongue hits the ice cream, the circuit is completed. The changes in conductance are mapped to MIDI and emerge as the sound via synthesizer. Cusumano can outfit two different ice cream cones with different tones so you and your pal can jam out on a dessert duet.
Pierre Le Riche's The Rainbow Room quietly challenges hyper-masculinity in the often traditionally male field of sports. The Capetown artist's installation, created from 17km worth of thread, represents a typical family living room watching the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final. The piece is a subtle comment on masculine cultural dominance in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly around the beloved game of rugby. We see 150 woven-rainbow-covered rugby balls, hanging or conscientiously piled neatly in a corner. A symbol of gay pride juxtaposed against sport fantacism seems to ask: How far has South Africa come after all?
See more of the Le Riche's work online.
The Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival for 2013, curated by the Land and Sea Department, celebrates arts, music, food, and culture in Logan Square, Chicago—which just so happens to be the home of Nothing Major HQ.
The fest features the work of over 50 visual artists and designers from the area (graphic superstars Drug Factory Press and Sonnenzimmer for instance) in pop-up galleries, live music on two stages (notable acts include Dam-Funk, Waco Brothers, Santah, and The Cairo Gang), and food booths from the likes of stellar local restaurants Reno, Chicago Diner, and Parson's Chicken & Fish.
But the MAAF is even better than that because Nothing Major will be on hand—in pop-up shop form, that is.
The Nothing Major shop at MAAF will be stocked with limited quantities of OLO Lightning Paw perfume, Juniper Ridge room spray, Taylor Stitch shirts, our Coil Lamp, totes, T-shirts, patches, and diamond pins. The shop will also stock a limited range of items from FairEnds, Needles & Pens, Co.lab and Filly.
We're also excited to introduce four new caps from our Nothing Belongs to Ebbets collection, which will be available exclusively at MAAF. Plus, we'll have discount code buttons for our online shop. So come on by and meet the team!
The Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival runs Friday June 28 5pm-10pm, Saturday June 29 12pm-10pm, Sunday June 30 12pm-10pm on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago's Logan Square. Visit MAAF online for more information.
Miranda July's upcoming "We Think Alone" project will exist only in the intimate space of the personal inbox. Over the course of 20 weeks, July will send subscribers 20 emails containing excepts from actual email correspondence from Lena Dunham, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kirsten Dunst, Sheila Heti, and more. The idea of sharing emails not meant for publication came about after July noticed the surprising amount of intimacy in mundane email composition. She writes, "How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view."
We Think Alone is part of a show called "On The Tip of My Tongue" commissioned by Magasin 3. Read more and sign up.
Fans of RAW artist Charles Burns may or may not know that The Believer magazine published the artist's work on covers between 2003-2013. Burns created the images of ink on paper in a strict format of 6x6. His distinctive black lines communicate sophisticated textures and lighting in the portraits. This summer, Adam Baumgold Gallery is featuring the many portraits Burns made for the magazine as well as a before-and-after series of works from comic Black Hole.
Over 300 drawings of artists, musicians, animals, and comic and fantasy characters as well as historical figures are included in the show. But today, we're focusing on the musicians Burns drew in yearbook style.
"Cover Portraits for The Believer 2003-2013 + Before & After Portraits from Black Hole" runs through July 26 at Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC.
Stephen Malkmus
Q-Tip
Kathleen Hannah
Nick Cave
Liz Phair
Devendra Banhart
Photos by Yewon Kim
Chicago is awash in street fests each summer, but the Guerrilla Truck Show, hosted by Morlen Sinoway Atelier during mega trade fair NeoCon each year stands out for its relaxed vibe and focus on creative work from small studios. Hundreds of designers and artists from Chicago and beyond show their latest projects and current wares from rented Ryder and U-Haul trucks. As one attendee noted Tuesday night, "it's a bad day to move out of an apartment in Chicago." As usual, we were inspired and enlightened.
The MOCAtv web series "The Art of Punk" we told you about is underway and the first installment on Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon is up. Pettibon's album art and logo were key bits of iconography for his brother Greg Ginn's hardcore act in the '80s. Pettibon's often captioned, often disturbing hand-drawn black and white images undercut the return to a golden age that the Reagan years promised mainstream America. Pettibon's work also turned up on Minutemen albums, and later Sonic Youth's major label record Goo. As great and lasting as Pettibon's work (he also named the band, we learn) has been on American punks, his Black Flag logo remains a masterpiece of underground artwork, expressing an attitude in a visual code that's both rebellious, mysterious, and incredibly powerful. The video features Keith Morris, Henry Rollins, and Flea as well as Pettibon himself talking about the Black Flag band name, logo, flyers, and album art.
Between the elegance of Moleskine and the ruggedness of Field Notes, there are literally reams of bound paper out there to save your brilliant thoughts and sketch world-changing ideas. But what if a notebook, a tool of the creative class, actually sparked creativity? Chicago artist and toy designer Shawn Smith’s Resketch project, currently on Kickstarter, not only records but elicits ideas from users with a series of creative prompts, pages with images, characters and creative inspiration sandwiched between multi-colored, multi-textured stacks of resourced paper. “As far as we’ve come with digital media, it’s still not as direct as pencil, pen, and paper,” says Smith. These sleek, environmentally friendly tomes manage to foster the sense of discovery that might lead one to furiously scribble inside a notebook in the first place.
Resketch books (7 x 9-inch, between 85-100 pages, and coil-bound with a thick chipboard cover and back) are currently available on Kickstarter; backers can also opt for the Artist Cover series, featuring prints from Art Baltazar, Andrew Bell, Chris Ryniak, Mig Reyes, and Smith.
Curated by Gregory Tom of Eastern Michigan University, the exhibition includes work from Jason J. Ferguson, Matt Kenyon and Osman Khan. The artists play with typical elements found in an American home; a table and chairs, a houseplant, or a beam, and alter them to express ideas about faith, the mortgage crisis, and the American family.
The exhibit ties into "Mobile Homestead," a permanent artwork by the late Mike Kelley located on the grounds of MOCAD and based on the artist's childhood home in Westland, a neighborhood which primarily housed many workers for the Big Three auto makers.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents (in)Habitation on Friday, June 7, 2013. The exhibition runs through July 28, 2013. There's an opening party tonight, June 7, with a live set from Illy Mack, $5 at 7pm.
Matt Kenyon, Spore
Osman Khan, House