Danse Serpentine - Loie Fuller

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world

I love watching this full screen it allows me to just marvel and relax.

Alone with my giant soap bubbles...

Radiolab and NPR Present Words

I love how each everything connects so beautifully.

Baboons attack a car with roof luggage

completely mesmerizing.

Marja Pirla

These are beautiful photographs from Marja Pirila. She specialized on camera obscura and pinhole techniques the last 20 years. I love the use of projections.

Betsy Walton

Betsy Walton is an illustrative painter and Portland artist that I have seen all over the "blog world." Her color palate definitely attracts me.

Paul Gauguin

While I was traveling I saw an exhibition of Paul Gauguin's work and fell back in love with him. A fact I was not aware of until further researching him is that though he was born in Paris, France his mother was half Peruvian. He also lived 4 years in Peru when his father passed away and then he and his family returned to France.

Dana Schutz

In Bomb Magazine, conceptual artist Mel Chin wrote that"dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz's work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor. Among other things, she has created a race of people who eat themselves; a guy called Frank who is the last man on Earth; a gravity-phobic person who has tied herself to the ground; and a variety of characters that are spliced, for different reasons, on operating tables. Schutz loves to give her characters life and then cut them up. Yet hers is a blithe cruelty, the curiosity of a child playing at being a creator. Even when she hates, she does it with whimsy."

Nicole Eisenman

Read more about Nicole Eisenman here.

ANDREW MAZOROL and TYNAN KERR

Andrew Mazorol and Tynan Kerr's painting really captured me. I love the rough looseness with the amazing color palate. The crowded images actually make me want to spend more time with them to discover new things. After looking at these I'm ready to experiment a little in my studio with paint.

Huang Qingjun and Ma Hongjie

Huang Qingjun and Ma Hongjie decided to collaborate on this photo series ‘Family Stuff’ in 2005. "Huang and Ma work as independent partners, Huang covering the North, Ma the South of the country. Convincing families to expose themselves to their cameras is the major challenge that both face on their respective expeditions. Building trust and laying the groundwork for the shoot can take months, again and again Huang and Ma have to explain why they want the families to empty their houses and let the artists decoratively arrange their belongings outside. Once they have agreed to participate, most families are happy to display their possessions, even more so since they receive financial compensation. In some cases, not all belongings are permitted to be shown, in others not all furniture fits through the doorways; but generally, the artists confirm, their portraits depict average Chinese reality as it is today: simple, unpretentious and compared to 20 years ago, strikingly void of political paraphernalia."

Waste Land Festival Trailer.mov

This looks good! I love art activism more than anything.

JR for Patrice - Ain't Got No (I Got Life)

Mika Rottenberg

Ever since I saw Mika Rottenberg's video instillation "Mary's Cherries" in PS1 in 2004, I've tried to follow her work. Rottenberg's art explores the relationship between women's bodies and systems of production. Rottenberg is best known for her videos featuring working women, cast for their distinguishing physical characteristics, performing a kind of modern-day alchemy; tears are farmed as the secret ingredient for bread, and acrylic fingernails are made into maraschino cherries through elaborate zigzag assembly-line processes. With her use of humor and seductively disorienting spaces, Rottenberg opens up a funhouse mirror dimension for us to peer into–one that is at once zany and eerily true to life.

Theo Jansen

Theo Jansen was the first person I had seen on TED talks a couple years ago. His work is incredible, alive, and magical. This is one the most beautiful examples of the inspiration of nature and science in art. The second I saw his pieces walk... it's just so hard to stop watching- and the technical and engineering aspects of it just blows my mind...Man, so good.

Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen was a huge inspiration for me when I was studying fashion design years back, and continued to be even when I found my work to lend itself more to sculpture and installation. He died very recently this past February after the death of his mother. His work always just stunned me. The fashion world will not be the same without his presence.

Jan Svankmajer

(This Alice clip is not with the original music)

Little Otik and Alice (an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland) are incredible stop motion animated movies created by the great Czech filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer. He was born in 1934 in Prague where he still lives. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (Department of Puppetry). There are many examples of Jan Svankmajer's shorts on youtube if you are interested in seeing his other work. My favorite part of one of his films is "where the socks go" which is a clip from Alice before she meets the caterpillar.

Celestial Navigations - Al Jarnow

I just put this film on my Netflix queue. As I was watching the trailer I was wondering why some of the clips look so familiar and it's because Al Jarnow was an early contributor to Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact. ...can't wait to check it out in full.

The Price of Milk - Harry Sinclair

"A symphony of magic... A not so simple story about two people in love."

The Price of Milk written and directed by Harry Sinclair--This movie is surreal in the most beautifully simplistic ways. When I first saw this I thought that if I were to ever direct a movie I would do it just like this.

The Beast Pageant - Albert Birney and Jon Moses

The Beast Pageant - Trailer from Albert Birney on Vimeo.

The Beast Pageant is a feature film written and directed by Albert Birney and Jon Moses in Rochester, New York. Check out the super cool trailer above. You can support them as well on their kickstarter page.

Death to the Tinman- Ray Tintori

"Lovely Awesomeness" best describes Ray Tintori's short film above. The 24 year old recently made a name for himself after creating MGMT’s Time to Pretend.

Are Mokkelbost

These are some of the best collages I have seen in a while!! Norwegian artist, Are Mokkelbost's Entity series was commissioned by a school in Norway for a permanent installation. Mokkelbost explains he created the"images cut directly out of children educational books, choosing only the illustrations that were originally hand drawn or painted. The transformation was simple -- the bits and pieces of pedagogic images cluster and form living creatures, where anything that defines a living entity, such as eyes and limbs, originally depicted something else." There is such a delicacy and humor to them that mesmerizes me- and makes me wish I could stand in front of them and just stare. Check out Mokkelbost's other collage series called ION that is also pretty amazing.