Francesca Pastine’s Artforum Excavations Is a beautiful series of works where the artist cuts away at various issues of art forum literally excavating the art away and rearranging the pages and layers of the iconic art publication.
source: beautifuldecay
After a slow start to the season there has be a veritable feast of excellent photography exhibitions in Melbourne over the last month or so, including John Gollings and Jane Brown at Edmund Pearce Gallery, the Fred Kruger and Light Works exhibitions (at NGVA and NGVI respectively), Littoral by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory (the next local review after this one) and this exhibition, The Quiet Wildby Jacqui Stockdale at Helen Gory Galerie.
This is a very strong exhibition by Jacqui Stockdale, the metre tall colour prints (printed by the Colour Factory) displaying magnificently in the large gallery at Helen Gory. The photographs remind me of a perverse take on the ethnographic Cartes de visite that were produced during the colonial Victorian era in Australia, images of native peoples taken in studios with painted backdrops together with their cultural artefacts (which, coincidentally, can be seen in great detail and sadness in the Fred Kruger exhibition at NGVA). Drawing on personal places and stories, Mexican carnival and wrestlers masks, Indian masks, Aboriginal names and locations, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the ghost of Frida Kahlo, rituals, gods (such as Rama) and deities, Australian scenery, performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creations “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorization and assimilation.
Created by Björn Johansson Garamond Corpus is a typographic study based on Geoffroy Tory’s book Champ Fleury from 1529. In his book he makes remarkable comparisons with typography and the human proportions.
I’ve made two posters containing various studies of the twenty-three Latin letters, their proportions and function in an anthropomorphic form. My purpose was to examine the individual letter, its shape and typographic qualities. Our letters have many characteristics comparable to the human: there’s big and small letters, thin and fat, there’s an indication of movement in the italic letter and every upper-case letter has a younger sibling, the lower-case. Further there’s in every typeface something we call families, and typographic styles can be seen as races with different qualities and history. Within the field of typography we have a definition for the different parts of the letter which is called the anatomy of the typeface and partly reminds of our own anatomy: the letters have arms and legs, eyes and ears, spines et cetera.
The title of this project, Garamond Corpus has a double definition and besides its Latin meaning, “Body of Garamond”, corpus is also a typographic measurement that is equivalent to ten points. Garamond was Tory’s greatest pupil and was therefore chosen to be the foundation for my research.
The work can also be seen as a deconstruction of the letters roll as a representative of the language and places the letter in a new context, as something organic and alive.
source:StreetAnatomy
Respond, a mechanical coat rack from Nicole Schindelholz. The interactive coat rack moves when a coat is hung.
Find out more about Respond from Nicole Schindelholz.
source:NOTCOT
