art

Like a moth to a rainbow flame, I’m drawn to anything brightly coloured. I only flirt with colour though, compliment it, give furtive glances, have gentle brushes with it, because I’m not ready to fully commit to a colour-drenched life. As a result my day-to-day life remains fairly grey and beige.

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When you look through this series, after signalling to your face to wrinkle your nose, the next thing your brain might do is remind you that “someone’s got to do it.” Derek Henderson’s portraits of slaughterhouse workers in New Zealand are inspired by his young friends in the 1970s working there to earn some extra cash, and the almost absurd nature of what they were doing as a Saturday job. Henderson has now taken the current employees out of the workplace – in some cases it seems, immediately after a shift – and photographed them as a friendly reminder to the world that this is actually someone’s day job.

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Tribal and robotic, are rarely two words that go hand-in-hand but somehow illustrator Raymond Lemstra manages to succeed in fusing the traditional with the futuristic in his mask and character designs. Soft, dulled colours blend with rounded squares and fine angles, these illustrations are subtle and steer clear of becoming paraodies of tiki wood carvings or totem poles rather they breathe new life into them. Throughout his work there’s a real sense of personality to each of his designs even when it’s a completely symmetrical, unmoving mask. It’s the detail and composition that enables Raymond to give them quirks and character, strengthening his pieces and making you dig that line work even more.

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Visual wizard is not a term used lightly, but it seems appropriate here as this guy is seriously raising the bar for young art directors and graphic designers right now. The Gerrit Rietveld Academie – which is pretty much an active volcano that vomits out hundreds of incredibly talented people every year – was the establishment that educated Killian, and taught him the art of making something look A) very cool and B) ahead of its time.

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People want different tinges from a haircut experience, over and above the fewer follicle fundamentals. I am a big fan of my barber because he’s quick and quiet, no small talk, no gaffing, in, chop, out (email me if you what his name). But I understand there are others who look for a little more atmosphere, for whom the choice of stylist is far more involved than mine. And so to Slovenia, where wonderfully-named duo Kitsch-Nitsch have overseen the interior decoration for the new YMS salon, a trendy offshoot of the Mič Styling chain. It’s an immersive wonderland of colour and vibrancy and I imagine will become quiet the destination for the hipster Slovene to be seen.

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Trucks are great, but they can be awfully clunky and ungraceful. If only someone were to completely alter their structure and make them delicate works of art… Oh wait, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has done just that and completely blown my mind in the process.

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We’re not able to give you much background history for Wroclaw’s Slawek Czajkowski, but who needs the finer details when you’ve got copulating aliens, Satanic voyeurs and entire epic tales to distract you? Czaijkowski is in an element of his own when it comes to filling a canvas with one-frame narratives featuring characters you’d be more likely to find in some of the weirder episodes of The X Files.

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We all appreciate someone who makes our world look a little brighter, and Berlin-based Matthias Heiderich does just that. The interesting thing about his knock-you-off-your-seat architectural photographs is not just the candy-striped colours of the buildings that he has a strong knack for picking out, but perhaps the dramatic change of tone as you switch from one of his projects to the next. In an almost comical fashion we are one minute admiring a set of artificially rainbowed warehouse structures and then, unnervingly, with one click we are then dropped into a misty and deserted basketball court, or beside a terrifyingly soviet concrete building. Three cheers for Matthias though, as with each set of photographs, no matter how disparate, they are all equally breathtaking, and we are big fans.

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I’ve been really into football since I was about five, but no matter what other interests I have developed since it’s the only thing some people relate with me (I get on average four football-themed birthday cards a year). So I can empathise with the people behind Cotton Project, a super hip São Paulo-based label aiming to show the world there’s more to Brazil than samba, bikini-clad beach babes and the beautiful game.

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Most model car kits come with a sheet of stickers that can be applied to the side of a shabbily-glued “super” car. Their space-saving arrangement is incidentally aesthetic, even more so when it’s just the sticky net that always ends up on the back of your jumper. Channelling this abstract recall of childhood imagery is Blair Thurman who has created, from neon, the outlines of these random compositions at their most simple. Strange, still, that they look “go-faster” even when hung on the gallery wall. The almost tribalistic quality of it has all sorts of allusions to underground and popular American culture and Thurman’s re-appropriation of a graphic vernacular hardly seen in a gallery space and craft is undeniable.

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The Cannes Film Festival seems like the most glamorous event on the film calendar – you pretty much have to be either super-cool or super-rich to go, and as I am neither (yet) I instead try to recreate the feeling of being there at home. I tan-up, wear white (for some riviera chic) and surround myself with popcorn and croissants (gotta keep it French) while re-watching the trailers again and again. The novelty wears off after about nine and a half minutes, because I’m in my living room not the south of France but still.

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Now, there are some publications that can’t be whimsical in their copy, they must stick to the facts and be rationally straightforward. I’m talking about the science, financial and business magazine guys who have to communicate ideas in an orderly fashion so as not to end up making things up. Once in a while though they like to jazz those articles up a bit with some fun illustrations and here I usher in the work of Mitch Blunt who’s done a lot of this type of work for clients such as Bloomsburg Businessweek, Modus Magazine and FT Weekend as well as whole host of other publications both the factual and culturally creative.

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‪‬The Guggenheim Museum announces mid-career retrospective of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra to open June 29–October 28, 2012. The exhibition spans 20 years of work, featuring over 70 color photographs and five video installations, and is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art, which displayed the show in February, 2012 Click here for the Guggenheim [...]

Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language at New York’s Museum of Modern Art has brought together 12 contemporary practitioners and an estimable spectrum of key 20th Century artists who do as the Dadaists do and eschew rational structures of language, form, sound – taking language, in particular typography, and “freeing it from its communicative and descriptive duties.”

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Putting shopping-precinct-lurking kids in designer clothes is by no means revolutionary, but have you seen these photos? Jamie Hawkesworth, part of the treasure trove that is M.A.P photographers agency, has a unique portfolio of work that primarily documents the quintessential parts of Britain we all know and love, but don’t necessarily shout about. Cue repetitive town-centres, drizzly seasides and the ever ungraceful, dirty-laundy-on-show activity of moving house.

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Few books have seeped into our collective cultural consciousness more than The Wizard of Oz so it takes some effort to breathe new life into it. However Dublin-based duo Sadhbh Doherty and Clare Geraghty, aka Harmless Creatures, have done just that with these costumes for the Dorothy’s three companions, The Lion, The Tin Man and The Scarecrow. It’s definitely the Lion made out of old VHS tape (perhaps a comment on the popularity of the film version?) that floats our boat the most but the others are interesting too, nicely unsettling and flawlessly executed. We’re certainly not in Kansas any more.

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‪‬Mike Kelley‘s Artangel project, ‘Mobile Homestead’ to be screened at the Whitney Museum May 16–20. The video portion consists of three different hour-long videos documenting the replica of his childhood home traveling through Detroit Click here for the Whitney Museum website

When something looks like it’s been done on a computer but it’s actually been created by hand I’m instantly impressed and it’s even better when that work is actually really good (rather than just those weird painted replicas of Johnny Depp or David Beckham you see on the market sometimes).

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I don’t know about you but I’ve never really got cruises – the idea of spending a couple of weeks cooped up with some people you’ve never met just doesn’t appeal no matter how many amenities/buffets there are. It appears that Argentine-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Emiliano Granado shares my bewilderment, but unlike me he’s done something about it and spent five days aboard the Explorer of the Seas shooting the ship and its curious inhabitants.

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Clash Magazine called him “a well-dressed spaghetti strand” and The Fly referred to him as a “willfully mysterious cocktail-quaffer”, but you can be sure that after this remarkable video hits the general public, Adam Bainbridge (or Kindness when he’s feeling musical) will be forever regarded as “the man who had that sweet video with the amazing kid and the drum machine.” All hail the work of internet-anonymous Adam and Dan Bereton who have constructed one of the finest and most original music videos of 2012.

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