Thursday, January 31, 2013

Arte Poética - Jorge Luis Borges

Poem & Voice: Jorge Luis Borges
Director / Editor / Colorist : Neels CASTILLON

Arte poética - Poema de Jorge Luis Borges
Mirar el río hecho de tiempo y agua
y recordar que el tiempo es otro río,
saber que nos perdemos como el río
y que los rostros pasan como el agua.
Sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño
que sueña no soñar y que la muerte
que teme nuestra carne es esa muerte
de cada noche, que se llama sueño.
Ver en el día o en el año un símbolo
de los días del hombre y de sus años,
convertir el ultraje de los años
en una música, un rumor y un símbolo,
ver en la muerte el sueño, en el ocaso
un triste oro, tal es la poesía
que es inmortal y pobre. La poesía
vuelve como la aurora y el ocaso.
A veces en las tardes una cara
nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;
el arte debe ser como ese espejo
que nos revela nuestra propia cara.
Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios,
lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca
verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca
de verde eternidad, no de prodigios.
También es como el río interminable
que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo
Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo
y es otro, como el río interminable.

ENG.
The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.
To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes in the evening there's a face
that sees us from the depths of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

ashes to ashes





Tuesday, January 29, 2013

WELCOME


This movie hasn't left me.  It's just sitting on my chest - heavy.  Welcome humanizes the realities of immigration and highlights the many injustices within laws surrounding it.

Ann Hamilton


Everything I have seen of Ann Hamilton's "The event of a thread" instillation leaves me in awe.  But I would have to say most of her work does that to me.  She works mainly with grants and does the most interesting projects that take her so much time and research- but the end result is always an amazing experience.





Monday, January 28, 2013

L'ECUME DES JOURS - Mood Indigo


A love story directed by Michel Gondry with Audrey Tautou. Oui, s'il vous plaît
I'm already teary eyed.  I can't wait till this opens in theaters!

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Saturday, January 26, 2013

oh, please





Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg







I love Nathalie Djerberg's candidness about her experience in art school. Super funny.  I first saw her work at the Venice Biennale a couple years ago.  It was surprising to see claymation in that context at first- for some reason.  But it was a really great show with her gooey colors and gritty figures.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was

 
interior view of Remember When Tomorrow Came (with Audio by Superspirit), 2011. Discarded lottery tickets, wood, plexiglass, speakers, and mirror 96" x 102" x 54"




Dream Car 2008 $39,000 worth of discarded lottery tickets, cardboard, cast plastic, wood, steel, and mirror

Dream Home 2009 102" high x variable dimensions, $70,000 worth of discarded lottery tickets, cardboard, foam, wood, and steel

Money Mania 2008-present, 16” x 6” x 14” remote control yacht and discarded lottery tickets.  Floated in pools and fountains in an ongoing roving exhibition/performance around Art Basil Miami, (in this photo) among other art fairs. The photo documentation is then printed as a 24" x 30" c-print.

 
one life to live 2012 mixed media installation with 37 looped clips of "I love you" from OLTL 98" x 100" x 120"

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Monday, January 21, 2013

Romantic's Anonymous - Les émotifs anonymes


Just finished watching this... such a sweet and well done movie about an awkward love.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The Weeping Women of Picasso








A subject that I have artistically pursued myself, I was intrigued to find out that Pablo Picasso has also done a series of Weeping Women.  They are said to be a continuation of his ideas from his amazing Guernica, but these paintings are less about the Spanish civil war and more about the universal idea of suffering.
It is said they are modelled after Picasso's long time mistress French photographer, Dora Maar.  He was in a relationship with for about nine years.
"For me she's the weeping woman. For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one."
"Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman....And it's important, because women are suffering machines." Picasso

THEESatisfaction - QueenS


whatever you do...

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Namsa Leuba



Namsa Leuba grew up in Switzerland.  Her mother is Guinean and her father is Swiss.  She has been exploring "African identity though Western eyes" the past two years since she graduated from the photography department at ECAL/University of art and design Lausanne.  I love these figures and how they are wrapped up and tied in the middle of nature.  Her color palette and patterns are incredible.

Gustav Klimt





His work The Kiss can usually be seen on the walls in every female freshman's dorm room in college. Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter who was best known for his golden phase (1899-1910), which  is what garnered him the most success.  His paintings were influenced by Art Nouveau with his ornamental paterns and gold embelishment on top of piles of color.  His pieces are seductive, openly sexual, but at times also carry tragedy which is said to be inspired by the sudden death of his father and brother in 1892. His Adele Bloch-Bauer I portrait (the image directly above) was sold for 135 million dollars in 2007 making it the highest price ever paid for a painting beating out Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe, which sold for 104 million dollars.
   One of the few quotes gather from his letters after he passed stated "I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Whoever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures."
  

Egon Schiele






I loved Egon Schiele deeply through out my undergrad.  His dry brush paintings of figures with harsh black line and crooked hands are unsettling and overtly sexual.  The intense energy one feels with his work really attracted me.  Klimt generously took him in as a student and mentored him while buying some of his peices, traded with him, introduced him to many of his patrons, and invited him to show his work at his first major exhibitions.  Schiele died at the age of 28.  He and his then pregnant wife fell ill to the Spanish flu.  His wife died three days before him.  He drew her in the three days that separated their deaths.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Marc Chagall


Marc Chagall is a Russian Jewish multi-media artist. During the early 1900s in Russia a Jewish artist had two options: they could deny all connection to their Jewish roots or they could publicly cherish and express their heritage.  Chagall chose the latter and for that reason has been regarded as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century." You can see the influence of his childhood village,Vitebsk through out his work during his whole life time.  His fiddlers, wooden houses, mists of color, and floating lovers-his paintings carry such vivid emotion. "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is."- What a beautiful statement!

 An equally beautiful quote I found  is from one of his obituaries:
 "A curly-haired man with sparkling eyes and an incandescent smile, Chagall was a survivor. When he died at 97 in 1985, he’d outlived Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and other Modernists active during the first half of the 20th century.  He also outlived the American abstractionists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis, who rose to prominence in the century’s second half. Like both groups of artists, he loved combining expressive colors with fragmented and/or forceful shapes. But unlike them, he peppered his work with religious, specifically Jewish, themes. In a career that spanned eight decades, he defied Judaism’s taboo and created graven yet glorious images." Obit

Frida Kahlo's Closet is Opened 58 years After Her Death



Oh how I wish I could visit this exhibition!

Artists for Social Change! Migration is Beautiful - Favianna Rodriguez





Amazing Documentary (just came out today) put together by the inspiring Oakland based artist, Favianna Rodriguez.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Migration is Beautiful

"Documentary web series "Voice of Art” releases episode, "Migration is Beautiful", highlighting the growing movement of artists, designers, performers and musicians working for migrant justice, featuring activist and artist Favianna Rodriguez. The episode also features actor and activist Rosario Dawson and Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Undocumented Activist Jose Antonio Vargas."

Francisco Goya





 

 Francisco Goya is noted as the "first modern artist," leaving his old classical techniques behind he spoke of his era in Spain where he witnessed rape, murder, torture, madness, and other horrific atrocities.  His etching series called "Caprichos" and "Disasters of War" are nightmare like and what led him to his Black paintings, which were not commissioned or sold. There are arguments whether they were even shown.
 Kenneth Clark, art historian, has said the above painting The Shootings of May Third 1808 , " is the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject and in intention."  His work definitely stays with you on many different levels. Yard with Lunatics scares me more for than anything else I've seen of his because of that little smiling figure in the corner.  very unsettling.