Artwork: Yoshitomo Nara, Peace of mind, 2019
Peace of mind.
Sit Still
This. A short dance work directed by Vincent René-Lortie in collaboration with Jacob Jonas The Company featuring seven-year-old Adeline, alone in a vacant school and her “intimate and exhaustive journey of self-expression as she navigates her emotions through Krump.” Krump is a free-form style of street dance with Afro-diasporic roots, popular in the United States. Adeline’s adaptation is quietly powerful, the film heart-wrenching and poetic.
This is amazing.
the acorn is happy to become an oak
Handwritten note by Vivienne Westwood, 2019
Beautiful and wise words from the iconic artist/designer/activist Vivienne Westwood:
“The acorn is happy to become an oak
— Aristotle.
He defines happiness as fulfilling your potential. Follow your deep interest (forget yourself) and become who you are.”
Griffon!!
Awrtork: paste-up of griffon by SONAC (@sonac.artwork), Paris, 2019
A mythical griffon photographed in the wilds of Paris!
Wonderful paste-up by SONAC (@sonac.artwork) of the fabled half-eagle, half-lion creature imagined and written about for centuries by authors such as Herodotus, Pliny, Marco Polo, Dante and Jorge Luis Borges.
And magically brought to life here.
El Dorado
Artwork: Choker, album Peak, 2017
Grand theft auto and love gone wrong—El Dorado, a brilliant song by Choker from his 2017 album Peak. Check it out!
words shape reality
Artwork: Christine Sun Kim billboard, Words Shape Reality, 2018
Artist Christine Sun Kim’s (@chrissunkim) billboard for For Freedoms Words Shape Reality (2018) is particularly relevant in the wake of heightened awareness of crimes and discrimination against Asians in America (and around the world) since Covid. Kim reposted an image of this billboard and this comment on IG of her life experience as a deaf Asian American:
“i grew up in an immigrant household and attended predominantly white deaf programs. i was taught that my asian american identity does not equal my deaf identity and should remain in the background. it took me years and years to recognize how erased our asian american experience is, let alone asian american deaf. the feeling of being unimportant still remains in me to this day and that is called a trauma. i grew up dealing with both casual and clear racism from classmates, neighbors, teachers, interpreters, church people, strangers, and even friends. back then, i didnt have the discourse (and social media) to justify nor explain what the fuck was going on, so instead i buried the pain and let my experiences fade into obscurity. because of white supremacy, the system is designed to socially condition us to think that asian americans have the closest proximity to whiteness (aka model minority) and how our experience should be understood compared to the black experience. the closer we are to whiteness, the more invisible we become. but of course, its all bullshit and very much part of how oppression operates. i'd like to revisit the billboard i designed for @forfreedoms in 2018, which was based on my two charcoal drawings from 2017. it shows how words can easily shape our reality. its the kind of reality that has resulted in the deaths of vincent chin, vichar ratanapakdee, christian hall, soon chung park, hyun jung grant, suncha kim, yong yue, delaina ashley yaun, paul andre michels, xiaojie tan, daoyou feng and many many more. #stopasianhate”
Godzilla VS OwlKitty
Something hilarious—for cat lovers at least! I’m a big fan of OwlKitty (aka Lizzie) @owl_kitty, and the latest parody of Godzilla VS Kong is freaking funny.
Enjoy! 😹😻
JR's Palazzo Strozzi
Artwork: Paste-up by JR (@jr), Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2021
Artist JR has created a magnificent trompe l’oeil paste-up creating a massive opening in the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, revealing significant artworks such as Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus, housed in museums that so many have been deprived of seeing because of the pandemic. The project is funded by the Palazzo Strozzi Future Arts Programme that supports contemporary art. Florence is one of my favourite cities in the world, so JR’s artwork and words resonate:
“They say the museums are closed. But it's up to us to open them. Here is Florence, the city of Boticelli, Donatello, Machiavelli and Dante, we opened the Palazzo Strozzi. These last few months, we have been deprived from the possibility to be together ... but we still have the freedom to dream, to create, to envision the future. Maybe, it's not much, but we have that!”
creation/lifework
Photo: Yohji Yamamoto (Getty Images)
Inspiring words from artist/designer Yohji Yamamoto:
"Creation is lifework, creation is how...you spend your life, you cannot divide life and the creation, it’s impossible. Shut your eyes, close your ears, don’t use your brain, use your heart, your soul."
Truth.
rainbows
Artwork: Painting by @kennyrandom
“…because we are made of colours.”
Wonderful wall by Italian artist Kennyrandom (@kennyrandom).
Cloud Piece
Artwork: Yoko Ono, Cloud Piece, 1963/2019, MOT, Tokyo (photo: Keizo Kioku)
For anyone who loves clouds…
Yoko Ono’s Cloud Piece (1963), exhibited in 2019 at MOT, Tokyo—
CLOUD PIECE
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
1963 spring
Do It Yourself
Artwork: paste-up by WRDSMTH, Los Angeles, 2019
Daily Reminder 😊
Infinite Circle
Artwork: Marco Godhino, Infinite Circle, 2021 (@marcogodhino24)
A visual Haiku by artist Marco Godhino, Infinite Circle (2021).
Beautiful.
Check out a recent art story I wrote on Godhino’s work, Home is no longer warm (2017).
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Artwork: Yoshitomo Nara, recent sketch, 2021
Yep—feel like hiding from the world in my hoodie today…
Poetic Cosmos of the Breath
At the heart of Tomas Saraceno’s art is the questioning and reorientation of human beings and their experience of the earth, its atmosphere, environments, and non-human species. Saraceno’s practice connects art with life sciences and social sciences to create immersive projects that reimagine a world free from carbon, extractivism, capitalism, patriarchy and fossil fuels.
Saraceno’s participative installation at the Artist Airshow in Gunpowder Park London, 2007, titled Poetic Cosmos of the Breath brought his utopian vision of designing spaces such as cities that float in the air and change forms like clouds, to earth. This beautiful work involved creating a synesthetic experience using a giant dome made from iridescent foil weighted by sandbags that gradually inflated with increasing hot air as the sun rose. It invited people to interact with the natural rhythms of the sun, air, clouds, sky and a shifting rainbow of colours as the foil reflected and refracted light; to explore the boundaries of their perceptions with the natural elements of the earth and its atmosphere; to dream and imagine life lived in a cloud.
don't judge me
FKA twigs, Headie One and Fred again have teamed up to produce this powerful and stunning song and video, Don’t Judge Me, which is about being Black and British and having to deal with an “invisible oppressor”, namely cultural and institutional systemic racism, forces that are hard to see and act against.
What contributes to the impact of the video is the backdrop of American artist Kara Walker’s installation at the Tate Turbine Hall last year, Fons Americanus, a 13-metre tall fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. The installation subverts the celebration of British Empire and instead parodies the use of such memorials to elevate a narrative built on the hidden histories of the victor’s fortunes built on the transatlantic slave trade, exploitation, racism, and tragedy. Water is a key theme in the sculpture referring to this movement of slaves between Africa, Europe and America. And the figures Walker has sculpted in this faux-triumphal work are grotesque often bloated, throat’s slit, in shark-infested water, lives imperilled, anguished—making visible black children, women and men whose lives have been exploited and erased using the visual language of the perpetrators.
Walker is best known for her black cut-out silhouette wall installations depicting narratives of atrocities committed in the American South, and has said: “I’m gonna take everything I do about power and desire – and use the tropes of the slave narrative or the slave romance, like the antebellum romance, as the way to talk about these themes because this is something that clearly won’t go away. It will just keep being an unaddressed bugaboo in American culture.”
hope
What a gorgeous soul! Arlo Parks. She’s a poet/artist and her new track Hope from her upcoming album Collapsed in Sunbeams (Jan 29) hits the heart, as does the video which I posted here. Just beautiful.
remember
It’s critical to remember what can happen when fascism is unchecked. January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. So I thought I’d share this, Italian artist Eron’s poetic tribute to a beautiful soul, writer Anne Frank, who died in Auschwitz, and whose diary has been read by countless people the world over.
Remember, because we can’t afford to forget.
(www.eron.it; @eron_artist)
Poetry Matters
Poetry matters.
And THIS. Listen to poet Amanda Gorman’s performance of her poem, The Hill We Climb, at the 2021 US Presidential Inauguration.
I got the chills listening to it. She nailed it.
On writing the poem, Gorman said this:
“America is messy. It’s still in its early development of all that we can become. And I have to recognise that in the poem. I can’t ignore that or erase it. And so, I crafted an inaugural poem that recognises these scars and these wounds. Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them.”
Chill
Trying to chill (and ignore the crazy news cycle coming from the US!), and I’ve got this on repeat, PawPaw Rod’s track HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS. Love it. Check it out.