Universal Shapes and Forms

There are "universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond." ~ Henry Moore

Fashion Projects: Fashion and Memory film screening & reception

Film still from Boudicca's "Couture 3"

The M.A. Fashion Studies At Parsons The New School for Design presents:

A screening to celebrate the new issue of Fashion Projects, non-profit journal on fashion, art and visual culture. The screening features a range of short experimental films on the topic of fashion and memory–the topic of the new issue. They include films by the British-based fashion design duo Boudicca, Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, designer Shelley Fox, and fashion photographer Laura Sciacovelli. The screening is curated by Tamsen Schwartzman and Francesca Granata.

The screening will take place Friday the 23rd of April at 6 pm in the Wollman Hall, 65 West 12th Street. (PS: It will start promptly!). A reception will follow the screening.

The event is free and open to the public.

Soot and Saliva: The Art of James Castle

Gabled building in vertical segments 

Using scraps of paper, string, soot, and saliva, James Castle (1899-1977) spent a lifetime creating art from a little bit of this and a little bit of that while living on farms in Boise, Idaho. The world of silence for a man who couldn't hear, speak, or read, burst with images, forms, and lettering that created their own unique sound.

Woman in red coat and boater hat,
collection of Susan and Alvin Chereskin

For almost 70 years, Castle found beauty in the most intimate of materials: siblings' schoolwork, reused flyers, brochures, envelopes, news clippings, paper containers, cardboard of any type. He'd make three-dimensional pieces of people, animals, or objects like chairs by layering and sculpting diverse types of paper and securing them with string, thread or ribbon.

Five dolls on top of piano 

His tonal images of landscapes and interiors, were drawn with a homemade paste made from soot and saliva that looked like charcoal when applied to paper using sticks or tissue. Castle paid attention to how things worked and examined objects like doors, locks, and even illustrated building schematics.

 

But for a man who couldn't read, the beauty of words were always present, whether through examining the mechanical construction of lettering or in the many small books he created. And in many ways, it are these that are the most poignant.

The Scent of Spring

"Float" by tamsen ellen, 2007

"It is spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating adrift."

-- Tu Fu (eighth century Chinese poet)

Living in Nature

I'm drooling.  It must be time to get out of dodge! 

Shell House, designed by Artechnic, is in the woods of Karuizawa, Japan

 

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The Modern weeHouse is a Prefab Home designed by Alchemy Architects.

Billions and billions of stars

Nature and Culture

the things of this world, 2009 - Herbert Pfostl

Whatever the rift that separates their regimes, nature and culture have at least this much in common: both compel the living to serve the interests of the unborn. Yet they differ in their strategies in one decisive respect: culture perpetuates itself through the power of the dead, while nature, as far as we know, makes no use of this resource except in a strictly organic sense. In the human realm the dead and the unborn are native allies, so much so that from their posthumous abode--wherever it be--the former hound the living with guilt, dread, and a sense of responsibility, obliging us, by whatever means necessary, to take the unborn into our care and to keep the story going, even if we never quite figure out what the story is about, what our part in it is, the end toward which it's progressing, or the moral it contains. One day the science of genetics may decode the secrets of this custodianship, but meanwhile we may rest assured that there exists an allegiance between the dead the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.
~ The Dominion of the Dead ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

Fetal Trapping in Northern California, 2006 - Mark Rydan