Dominic Rouse

Dominic Rouse at Verve Gallery of Photography. "...Dominic was born in England in 1959 and started his career as a press photographer at the age of sixteen working for local and national newspapers. Finding himself constrained by the technical limitations of photojournalism he returned to college in 1982 to study commercial and advertising photography and developed an interest in multiple exposure techniques using large format cameras. After a brief spell assisting advertising photographers in London he opened his own studio in 1986." More... Works by Dominic Rouse at his personal site.

Four Films by Kota Ezawa

Four Films by Kota Ezawa at UbuWeb Film & Video. "...Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German artist currently based in San Francisco. Ezawa meticulously recreates, frame-by-frame, animated sequences from television, cinema, and art history using basic digital drawing and animation software. His aesthetic is a highly stylized mixture of Pop Art, Alex Katz, and paint-by-numbers pictures, to name but a few of his stylistic antecedents. This painstaking process creates an in intriguing facsimile of the source material, which include the Kennedy assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, and clips from the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (1966). More... Works by Kota Ezawa at Haines Gallery.

Frank Sinatra

Alterboys... Frank Sinatra (.mp3 audio 02:24). From the album CLUB FOOT (1981, Modern Masters Music). More about... CLUB FOOT.

Passing the Torch: The Chicago Students of Callahan and Siskind

Passing the Torch: The Chicago Students of Callahan and Siskind at Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, IL. "...Passing the Torch brings to light more than fifty vintage photographs - newly discovered works by accomplished but unfamiliar artists and unknown and lesser known pieces by those artists whose images you thought you knew well. All were students of Harry Callahan and/or Aaron Siskind during the duo's legendary years of teaching at the Chicago's Institute of Design, the single most influential school for photography and design in mid-twentieth century America."

Issei Suda: Vintage Photographs, 1970s and 80s

Issei Suda... Ota, Gunma Perfecture (1975, vintage gelatin silver print, signed in pencil on verso). From the exhibition Issei Suda: Vintage Photographs, 1970s and 80s at Higher Pictures.

Denis Darzacq: Hyper

Denis Darzacq: Hyper at Laurence Miller Gallery in New York. "...an exhibition of 15 color photographs by the forty-eight year old French photographer Denis Darzacq. HYPER refers to the new garish supermarkets in Paris and Rouen where consumer goods, brightly packaged and presented, make for a vivid and contemporary backdrop for his pictures. Darzacq brings street dancers, mostly young men and women in their late teens and early twenties into these stores and asks them to perform their leaps, jumps, twirls, and other gravity-defying movements. Darzacq's working methods are wonderfully captured in a documentary film by Marie-Clotilde Chery. The photographs explore the tension between being and having, between the human body and the built environment. They offer a fresh, witty and intensely colorful commentary on global consumerism and freedom of spirit." More... Works by Denis Darzacq at his personal site.

Night Mayor

Guy Maddin... Night Mayor at the Criterion Collection. "...a fourteen-minute work that the National Film Board of Canada website has been so kind as to post in its entirety. In the movie, made for the NFB’s seventieth anniversary, a mad inventor tries to harness the heavenly ethers of the aurora borealis and distill them into music and motion pictures."

The Private Collection of Henry Darger

The Private Collection of Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. "...Henry Darger had an art collection. He displayed it in his one-room apartment in Chicago, nearly one hundred artworks hanging from string, tacked into the walls, or pasted with glue directly onto various surfaces. Like many art collectors, Darger had a passion to amass images meant, most likely, to provide him with pleasure and satisfaction, as well as to amuse his curiosity and intellect. And like many practicing artists, he surrounded himself with his own production—paintings, drawings, and collages—made in a modest scale, with simple supplies and readily available material."

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century at MoMA. "...Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with 'the decisive moment' — the title of his first major book. After World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities."

Troy Dugas: Centered

Troy Dugas... Justice 38 (2010, 38" diameter, cigar labels on cut paper). From the exhibition Troy Dugas: Centered at Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, GA. "...Artists often see the extraordinary in the mundane, everyday world. Louisiana artist Troy Dugas brings this phenomenon to an entirely new level. In our consumer culture, the constant barrage of brand logos is familiar to the point of banality. Andy Warhol reflected this with his infamously snarky Brillo boxes. Product labels often do little more than subconsciously influence our purchasing habits. Rather than thoughtlessly dismissing this prosaic printed matter, Dugas is inspired to reconstruct the formal design elements into mesmerizing repetitious forms. The mandalas and woven compositions he creates are surprisingly beautiful. From a distance, the symmetrical forms have a meditative effect, pulsating with their own rhythm. A closer look reveals a dizzying array of meticulously placed text fragments, cropped images and other fractured graphic elements of the original label. The consumer context of the label is transformed into a new and refreshing language, singular to the artist. While the product of this translation is completely modern, his method is deeply rooted in the domestic traditions of crochet and quilting. Dugas' abstract minimalistic designs are at once sophisticated, witty and charming." More... Works by Troy Dugas at his personal site.

The Power of Refined Beauty: Photographing Society Women for Pond's, 1920s-1950s

The Power of Refined Beauty: Photographing Society Women for Pond's, 1920s-1950s at Duke University Libraries. "...The Pond’s Extract Company developed its Cold Cream, a skin cleanser, and Vanishing Cream, a skin protectant, as early as 1907, but only in 1916 did a concerted advertising campaign for the two beauty products commence. Both quickly became top sellers among women’s toiletries. By 1923, however, the rate of sales growth had slowed for both due to competition from new products on the market. Research by Pond’s advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), found that growing numbers of middle-class women, equating price with quality, and quality with European origins, were paying several times more for imported toiletries than for Pond’s products of similar, if not higher, caliber. At the same time, research indicated that prominent society women purchased Pond’s products even though they could easily afford more expensive imports."

Hasil Adkins - Drinkin' My Life Away

Hasil Adkins - Drinkin' My Life Away. A Collection of Folk Songs, Spirituals, and Field Hollers (1998, Shake It Records) at Revenant Glint.



Get Out Of My Car (Flash Audio 02:46)

48

I'm 48 years old today.

My Baby Just Cares For Me

Alex Chilton... My Baby Just Cares For Me (.mp3 audio 03:47). From the album Clichés (1993, New Rose Records 422481).

Summer Love

Piotr Uklanski... Summer Love (2006) at UbuWeb Film & Video. "...Summer Love (2006), the first feature film by artist Piotr Uklanski, appropriates one of American popular cinema's most classic genres - the Western - to create an allegorical movie. Uklanski shifts the Wild West frontier of America's past to the present of post-Communist Eastern Europe. Shot in southern Poland with a mainly Polish cast (dialogue is in English), the film's stock characters are instantly recognizable to viewers for whom the myth of the American West is ingrained by the Westerns of the 1950s, 60s and 70s."