Bed designed by Kristina Kozak on Home & Garden website.

Bed designed by Kristina Kozak on Home & Garden website.

Awesome Daily Show News Promos

These are so great! (by way of motionographer.com).

New Issue of XXMagazine launched!

Issue No. 2 features:
Avantika Bawa
Elasticbrand
Faye Driscoll
Johnson

Lars and the Real Girl

Check out the website accompanying Lars and the Real Girl. I was asked to contribute art direction and animation to this Mammoth Advertising project.

Tom's Shoes wins Peoples Design Award at the Cooper-Hewitt

I attended the party last night and was (along with everyone else present) really moved buy this entrepreneurs story.

After traveling to Argentina and seeing so many children without shoes, Blake Mycoskie decided to design a shoe that could be sold for $40 and give away one pair of shoes for each pair sold until all those kids had shoes.

It was an amazing success, he sold 10,000 pairs out if his apartment in the first 4 months.

You can buy your pair today at
http://www.tomsshoes.com







From The Cooper-Hewitt press release:
The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum presented its second People's Design Award to TOMS Shoes on Thursday, Oct. 18th, at its eighth annual National Design Awards gala in New York. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi announced the winning design and presented the award to TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie. National Design Week and the National Design Awards are sponsored by Target.

After thousands of votes were cast during the course of one month on Cooper-Hewitt's website, TOMS Shoes—a company which matches every pair of shoes purchased with a donation of a pair to a child in need—emerged as the public's favorite design. It was a close race until the midnight hour (the online voting was extended until 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 16, due to high visitor traffic) between TOMS and the Floating Pool, a 20,000 square-foot floating pool complex built within a steel deck barge, commissioned by Ann Buttenwieser of the Neptune Foundation and designed by architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld. The Floating Pool was docked last summer at the Brooklyn Bridge Park Beach in Brooklyn, New York.

TOMS, slip-on shoes available in vibrant colors and prints, are inspired by the traditional, rope-soled Argentine "alpargata." Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS in 2006 following a trip to Argentina, where he was struck by the poverty and health issues of the country. During the first year of business alone, TOMS sold 10,000 pairs of shoes and Mycoskie returned to Argentina to lead the company's first shoe drop. In November, Mycoskie will travel to Africa, where he will be delivering more than 50,000 pairs of TOMS.

"I'm delighted that for the second year in a row, the public has chosen a socially conscious design that not only looks great, but helps the lives of less fortunate people around the world," said Cooper-Hewitt director Paul Warwick Thompson.

Marianne Cusato, designer of the Katrina Cottage, was selected as the first People's Design Award winner.

Mycoskie, an entrepreneur, founded TOMS Shoes following a string of successful ventures, including a collegiate laundry service, a 24/7 reality TV network and a stint on "The Amazing Race: Season Two." Mycoskie has spent the past year traveling across the U.S. in an Airstream trailer, thanking TOMS customers and supporters and spreading awareness about the cause.

Irma Boom article on The New York Times website.

From the New York Times:
..."Winning prizes is nothing new for Irma Boom. Working with a single assistant in her Amsterdam studio, she is also accustomed to struggling — in one way or another — to make each of her books as inspiring and surprising as possible. Over the years, she has experimented with everything from elaborate color-codes and hidden motifs to scented bindings, printing on filter coffee paper, producing a 2,136-page book with no page numbers or index,

and hacking page edges with a circular saw.

"...

Read the article.



Irma Boom's website.

1000 Journals Movie

The new film about the legendary 1000 Journals project will be premiering at the AFI Film Festival.
Sunday, 11/4, at 9:15PM at the ArcLight Cinemas
Monday, 11/5, at 3:15PM at the ArcLight Cinemas

"Inside 1000 Journals"



From the official website:
1000 Journals is a film about people whose lives are touched by 1000 traveling journals. These blank journals were released into the world in the summer of 2000, by Someguy, a San Francisco based artist. Some people found a journal, or got it from a friend or stranger. Some signed up on the web and received it in the mail. Some wrote in them, others doodled, pasted in photographs, or added artworks. Some kept them. Some passed them on. There are no rules, and no one really monitors these journals and their movements. And yet, they are connecting tens of thousands of people worldwide, provoking and inspiring them.

In September 2003, one of the 1000, number 526, returned to Someguy, filled. What happened to the other 999? This film tells their stories. 1000 Journals shares the experience of their worldwide journeys, and chronicles the self-governed collaboration of thousands of random people who have added to this global "message in a bottle".

Trailer:

On Procession: Street Spectacular

Want to be in a spectacular art parade in Indianapolis? On Procession: Street Spectacular, is organized by the IMA, Indianapolis Museum of Art. Major artists are involved and the "Street Spectacular" parade accompanies the gallery exhibition "On Procession". You can download the request for proposal at onprocession.org and submit your proposal there as well.

My studio Elasticbrand, has received the honor to develop the graphic identity and all marketing materials, along with an exhibition catalogue, due out in the middle of next year.

Thomas Müller presents: Flower

Date: October 13th – November 9th, 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 13th, 6pm - 9pm

Cost: Free and open to the public

Location:
Spacecraft Gallery
2865 North Park Way (Behind the North Park Theater)
San Diego, Ca 92104
http://www.spacecraftgallery.com

Gallery Hours: by appointment

Spacecraft Gallery 2007 monthly exhibitions continue
with a new installation by Los Angeles artist Thomas Müller.

* * * * * * *
688 South Santa Fe Avenue #112
Los Angeles, CA 90021

Dove's "Onslaught" Campaign

I'm a little on the fence about the question "is this hypocritical or not", but it is daring nonetheless, for a beauty industry giant, to take a look in the mirror, ask the hard questions, and just to put it out there. They could just have pretty actresses rub lotion on themselves ofcourse, and didn't have to take this lead. Marketing wise, it is very transparent, but brilliant nonetheless.



By way of motionographer.com .

Aesop Rock: None Shall Pass

Enough said. Aesop's the Greatest. Buy Aesop Rock: None shall pass.

Small Steps: Creating the High School for Contemporary Arts DVD

I had the great opportunity to contribute title graphics -stop motion animated chalkboard drawings- to this inspiring documentary, directed by David Becker of Cabin Creek Films.

You can buy the DVD from PBS directly.

Pay special attention to the amazing score, composed by Skooby Laposky.

OASIS at Flushing Town Hall

Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - Sunday, November 11, 2007, 12:00 PM

An oasis is an isolated area of vegetation, a small bit of relief, a green area in an otherwise barren landscape. As our lives become more and more scheduled, busy, and fragmented, artists are responding by looking to nature.

Nancy Blum’s work represents the duality of life; at once hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Inscribing pattern and color, she is able to combine nature and culture in clever and imaginative ways. Portia Munson is interested in the fleeting lives of flowers and the healing nature of the mandala shape while also exploring “artificial” nature – man made objects marketed to resemble the color of nature. Jon Rappleye invents a nature that is inspired by fairy tales, imagination, and extreme representations of the natural world. It is surreal and fantastic. Raymond Saa creates gestural drawings and paintings that explore tropical imagery, used as a metaphor for the cultural displacement many immigrants experience in their new homes.

Margaret Murphy, guest curator

CURATOR'S TALK:
Sunday, October 21, 2007 @ 2:00pm

Ian Burns at the Spencer Bownstone gallery

Ian Burns 'Himalaya', 2007. Digital Photographic Print, 16 x 40"


Check out Ian Burns' engaging work at Spence Brownstone, opening Wednesday September 12th. 6-8 pm.

Press Release:

IAN BURNS
THE MANNER OF WORK

September 12th - October 20th, 2007
Opening Wednesday September 12th, 6-8pm

Spencer Brownstone Gallery launches its Fall program with our second one-person exhibition by Ian Burns. Burns’ acclaimed kinetic dioramas and ‘trompe l’oeil’ video works have engaged with subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq, TV culture, colonialism, and art history, and have been featured in important group and solo exhibitions worldwide. For ‘The Manner Of Work’ the artist summons the spirit of William Morris with a series of major new works that further Burns’ unique formulation of the hi-tech and the handcrafted.

The main gallery will be set up as a kind of fallen Victorian drawing room, replete with large chandelier, sublime mountainous landscape, and patterned wallpaper design. In ‘Himalyas’, a wall projection of misty mountaintops is rendered by a teetering stack of tables absurdly suspended from the wall. ‘The End of an Era’ is a chandelier of sixteen small monitors hanging from the ceiling, all displaying an image of a light bulb created by the perversely archaic method of a camera obscura. And in ‘Sanitary Gesture – Grey’, an abstract projected ‘wallpaper’ fills one wall with the patterns thrown by hand sanitizer smeared on the surface of an overhead projector.

All of these pieces develop, in varying ways, the artist’s signature ‘trompe l’oeil’ video work, where elaborate mechanized constructions created out of small motors and primitive electronics suddenly coalesce into a realistic image when fed to a monitor via a small camera and live video feed.

Also included will be a new series of large format photographs of (apparently) mountain, sea, and cloud landscapes, whose monumentality is undermined by accompanying small studio shots that reveal the often abject nature of the images’ construction. And the gallery’s back space will include multiple riffs on contemporary art, including three new live video feed works that re-imagine the classic land art projects of Christo and Jean Claude, Smithson, and De Maria from a mixed array of household plumbing and kitchen materials.

At the heart of the artist’s new work lies a concern with the gap between how images are constructed and how their end product is consumed. Noting the contradictory forces at play in the contemporary art world, where the ever more fragmentary art object of a contextual or ‘situational’ art practice coexists alongside a return to highly crafted drawings and paintings, Burns demonstrates how everything can ultimately boil down to a set of signs whose origin often seems arbitrary. We have clearly fallen some distance from Morris’ ideal of an integration of social and aesthetic agendas, and yet, through the ingenuity of his manipulation of materials and the acuity of his vision, Burns ultimately offers an upbeat assessment of the transformative potential of art.


Born in Newcastle, Australia, Ian Burns has been living and working in New York since completing his MFA degree at Hunter College in 2003. The artist had his first solo show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in 2005 and, since then, has featured in major exhibitions including ‘Greater New York’ at PS1; The Turin Triennial, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; ‘Stereovision’ at South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; and ‘New York State of Mind’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Ian will have his first one-person museum show at Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, which will be accompanied by the publication of a major catalog.



Spencer Brownstone Gallery
39 Wooster Street (Broome/Grand),
New York, NY 10013
T: 212-334-3455
info@spencerbrownstonegallery.com
www.spencerbrownstonegallery.com

Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm