the3rdrock.com

Binh Danh received his MFA from Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity in 2004 and has emerged as an artist of national import­ance with work that invest­ig­ates his Viet­namese her­it­age and our col­lect­ive memory of war, both in Viet Nam and Cambodia—work that, in his own words, deals with “mor­tal­ity, memory, his­tory, land­scape, justice, evid­ence, and spir­itu­al­ity.” His tech­nique incor­por­ates his inven­tion of the chloro­phyll print­ing pro­cess, in which pho­to­graphic images appear embed­ded in leaves through the action of pho­to­syn­thesis. His newer body of work focuses on the Daguerreotype process.

Binh Danh has been included in import­ant exhib­i­tions at museums across the coun­try, as well as the col­lec­tions of the Corcoran Art Gal­lery, The Phil­adelphia Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum, and the George East­man House, among many oth­ers. He received the 2010 Eureka Fel­low­ship from the Fleish­hacker Found­a­tion and is rep­res­en­ted by Haines Gal­lery in San Fran­cisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gal­lery in Scott­s­dale, AZ.

For those of you want the short and lay­man ver­sion, Binh has suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing picture-perfect art­works using flora as his substrate.

Photo neg­at­ives and the sub­strate are com­bined and left to develop in the sun over a num­ber of days.

Due to the tex­ture of the flora, an aver­age of four out of every five developed prints are dis­carded due to imperfections.

A num­ber of Binh’s prints have been pre­served in resin.

Now that’s push­ing art to the next level.

Visit Binh’s web­site at binhdanh.com

You can find his exhib­i­tion his­tory here.

Art. A word open to an infin­ite num­ber of inter­pret­a­tions, a word that delights, con­fuses and angers, and a word whose clear defin­i­tion defies accept­ance by any major­ity in favour of indi­vidual meaning.

As such, my opin­ion means abso­lutely sweet Fanny Adams — as is the case with yours, your mother’s and the local critic pen­ning his thoughts in the weekly rags.

…but really, the crux of the mat­ter is that some of it is ingeni­ous, some of it epic­ally stu­pid, some of it dull to all but the cre­at­ors and the rest, usu­ally ridicu­lously bizarre, leav­ing the pop­u­lous won­der­ing how so many ‘artists’ fund their lifestyles.

Focus­ing on recent “art­works”, let’s sample a few, shall we?

The first, titled “Walk The Line”, is a Lon­don install­a­tion by Kate Gilmore. The idea, it seems, was to mimic the daily grind of the nearby office work­ers. Fair enough you think, until you see the work…

Um, it’s a big red box…with women (pre­sum­ably paid) to walk around it in a circle all day long.

W. t. F.

OK, maybe I’m miss­ing the point of mod­ern art — let’s try another…

“Nexus Vomitus” is a col­lab­or­a­tion between vomit­ing artist Mil­lie Brown and opera sing­ers Patri­cia Ham­mond and Zita Syme. Yes, you read that right. Ms. Mil­lie Brown treats her fans to an emesis explo­sion of col­our with the present and accom­pa­ny­ing vocals from a pair of opera sing­ers in a logic fest that crushes all others.

For years I’ve been suf­fer­ing the illu­sion that in order to make a liv­ing and have a decent life, I need to study, work hard and make my way up the lad­der. Can you ima­gine the shock I endured fig­ur­ing out all I needed to do to achieve fame and for­tune was to vomit on a canvas?

I have a bril­liant plan though! No-one has cap­tured the bowel-originating art scene…there is a — dare I say it — gap with the poten­tial to gen­er­ate a fortune!

Fol­low the source link at the bot­tom to watch a ‘mak­ing of’ video.

Thank­fully there are some artists who seek to lighten life with pas­tels not derived from the innards of loons. Quite often their art­work can be seen adorn­ing the stark sur­faces dom­in­at­ing our con­crete jungles. Seen by some as a men­ace (the same some who value the afore­men­tioned still­born works), grafitti is a genre pop­u­lated by throngs of tal­en­ted young artists. Des­pite ongo­ing battles by wit­less author­it­ies, the art thrives — appre­ciably so.

Some though, have seen ways to take it to the next level — by ‘updat­ing’ staid yes­teryear rel­ics. Cast your peep­ers upon this old Soviet war memorial, in Sofia, Bulgaria…

Now that’s ingeni­ous. Bravo!

Sources: Walk The Line | Nexus Vomitus | Soviet war memorial

(more…)

There are many dif­fer­ent forms of art…painting, sculp­ture, the­at­rical, GPS, ori­gami — wait, what? GPS!?

(more…)

Prac­tice makes perfect.

Design by Chris Domino.

Just what you need to scare the beje­sus out of you in the mornings…

The steam should make for a really good effect though.