one piece

"How To Wrap Five Eggs"

“We have come a long, long way from the kind of thing so beautifully presented in this book. To suit the needs of super mass production, the traditional natural materials are too obstreperous . . . and one by one we have replaced them with the docile, predictable synthetics . . . What we have gained from these [new] materials and wonderfully complicated processes to make up for the general pollution, rush, crowding, noise, sickness, and slickness is a subject for other forums. But what we have lost for sure is what this book is all about: a once-common sense of fitness in the relationships between hand, material, use, and shape, and above all, a sense of delight in the look and feel of very ordinary, humble things. This book is thus . . . a totally unexpected monument to a culture, a way of life, a universal sensibility carried through all objects down to the smallest, most inconsequential, and ephemeral things.”

George Nelson

via:The Parallax View

How To Wrap Five Eggs  By Hideyuki Oka

" At first I thought, "That's it -

now I will die from this."

After that, many people encouraged me to get medications to take. With health, I can still live with my wife and my son. I can still live with my wife and my son and my parents. But if I die, I don't know what my wife and child will do. How will they live? If they are infected, they won't know how to get the medications and take them. They'll die just like me. So I try to live."

__Duong Van Tutyen (Thai Nguyen Province), shortly before he died in December 2007.

Quote from the book "Access to Life" in which eight of the world’s leading photojournalists, all members of Magnum Photos, follow 30 individuals in nine countries before and four months after they began the antiretroviral treatment, documenting the transformative effect on their bodies, their lives, and the lives of their families. Here are the faces, voices, and stories representing millions of people who would otherwise  be dead if not for access to free life-saving drugs.But there are also the stories of those individuals for whom treatment came too late—showing how the fight to bring access to AIDS treatment is still a difficult one. The Access to Life campaign which includes an international traveling exhibition functions as an axis for artistic, educational, and political responses to AIDS treatment. The exhibition will travel to Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, and Rome in 2009 and 2010.

"Play Pause"

First shown at the Whitney in the 1993 Biennial, Sadie Benning now presents her latest video installation Play Pause (2006) as part of the Whitney’s Contemporary Series. Recognized for her experimental narrative videos, which she started making in the late 1980s, Benning’s two-channel, thirtyminute video departs from her earlier work, cutting together hundreds of the artist’s gouache drawings of urban landscapes, figures, and abstractions. This is Benning’s first solo museum exhibition in New York. Play Pause opens April 22 and runs through summer. 

Gestures

Choreographer Trisha Brown's dance company is presenting a career spanning season at the BAM Opera House, including her 1979 work Glacial Decoy and 2004'sO Zlozony/O Composite. A collection of Brown's drawings opens at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea on May 9.

Listen to Trisha Brown on

The Leonard Lopate Show.

Berlin, Dank and Raw.

Not a tourist tale but rather a raw and grainy, black and white portrait, in which photographer Henrik Vering's project takes the viewer to the heart of the city of Berlin. Like a shadow he shows us his deep fascination of the city that found rapid change from the nineties onwards, and which was then, as now, still struggling with its identity. 

Berlin. Die Stadt und die Beute. Photographs by Henrik Vering

"Unica Zürn: Dark Spring"

The Drawing Center scores again with this exhibit of unnerving dream visions inked in the 1950s and '60s by Unica Zürn, when the German poet and artist was battling depression. Companion of surrealist Hans Bellmer, who'd become infamous years earlier for his freakish doll-mutants, Zürn, too, was creating strange new forms of life. Her exquisite creatures—drawn with delicate, almost ephemeral lines—meld elements of birds, fish, and amoebas. They swim across the paper like hallucinations from Zürn's fragile psyche; tragically, in 1970, she leaped from Bellmer's apartment window to her death. 

link:"Unica Zürn: Dark Spring" 

The Village Voice

Chairman

“This exhibition consists of 21 chairs, one for each year I have been designing them, and the idea is to line them up and let people sit on them. Partly to avoid the trap of exhibiting functional things with the usual”Please don’t touch“instruction, and partly to let people experience the diversity of the subject both visually and physically. They’re part of everyday life to such an extent that we hardly notice them, but most of us spend more time sitting than we do standing or sleeping, and that fact alone is enough reason to keep designing chairs.” 

Jasper Morrison.

Jasper Morrison : take a seat ! 

5 March - 24 May 2009

Les Arts Decoratifs

If you can dream-and not make dreams your master;

If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

and treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

Excerpt from: "If-"

('Brother Square-Toes' -Rewards and Fairies)

By Rudyard Kipling

Summer Illustration Class in Venice Italy

I'll be teaching a concept illustration class at

The Associazione Culturale Teatrio

 July 10-15, 2009.

This class is open to college students and anyone entering the practice of illustration and communication design.

Please visit  The Associazione Culturale Teatrio

website for more detailed information concerning the class and application deadline.

You may also send me an email with any questions.

Ciao! 

 

The Sale of Manhattan for $24.00

The main attraction of the Rijkmuseum's exhibition Return to Manhattan - 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage is a letter from Pieter Schaghen a representative of the Dutch States General. The letter, dated 1626, documents the sale of Manhattan which was "valued at 60 guilders". It is the only evidence of the historical event as the actual purchase contract for Manhattan no longer exists.

Manhattan was discovered in 1609 by Henry Hudson, who sailed from Amsterdam on the ship The Half Moon in search of quick passage to the Orient for the Dutch East India Company. Five months later, he sailed up the river which would later bear his name. In 1624, New Netherlands was established on Manhattan. A year later the Dutch trading post was renamed New Amsterdam. Eventually, the city changed its name again to New York.

The exhibition, which runs until 1 June, includes the oldest map of Manhattan as an island in 1614 and a famous seascape of New Amsterdam by Johannes Vingboons from around 1665. Return to Manhattan marks 400 years of relations between the Netherlands and New York. It will travel to New York in September.

link: Rijksmuseum displays New York's 'birth certificate'