via: designelements
Opens Tonight, Apr 22, 6-8p:
Jade Townsend
Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard St., NYC
“I’m not sure how Jade Townsend’s mind works but it’s a marvelous thing to behold. His imagery is steeped in a form of 19th C. fantasia that includes a strong spirit of invention, but there is also a gruesomeness here that makes his objects emotionally charged and abstract. Make sure if you’re anywhere near this show you check it out.” - Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian
nyu department of philosophy/steven holl
via: laboheme
cabbagerose:
fab environment for open-thinking and exchange of ideas…
Opens Tonight, Feb 2nd, 6-8p:
Zimoun
”Volume”
bitforms gallery, 529 W20th St., NYC (2nd & 6th Floors)
the first solo exhibition in New York by Swiss artist Zimoun. On view will be an immersive, site-specific sound installation based on prepared dc-motors and cardboard boxes.
The installation emphasizes the grid as a method of visual organization. Precariously balanced rows of cardboard boxes form an architectural space containing a rumbling din produced by mechanical motors humming in unison.
Pulsing rhythmically, each unit in the system reverberates with its own sense of purpose and timing. Temporal microstructures emerge and shift, made visible by collective behavior. With minimalist and low-tech means, Zimoun constructs a blank zone of play utilizing repetition and the physical pressure of vibration.
As an author, Zimoun uses scale and tools of amplification to transform our associations with commonplace industrial objects. Tuned into kinetic and acoustic detail, his obsessive displays of collected materials unlock emotional potential in otherwise banal and chaotic gestures. In his work static volume permeates a space, yielding reductive clocklike operas of the everyday.
For the duration of the show, the gallery’s project room on the 6th floor will also feature four mechanical works by the artist and a video.
(Source: nycartscene, via nycartscene)
via: plastolux
“Welcome to the cockeyed world of artist-photographer Lori Nix, as she takes us behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum. Nix’s diminutive dioramas unfold as microcosms—where the world of science collides with an overactive imagination, with amusing results. Nix fabricates these elaborate miniature scenes in her Brooklyn studio, forgoing any kind of digital intervention. Nix: “I’m greatly enamored with the Natural History Museum, and visit it as often as I can. My series Unnatural History is a look at the inner workings of the museum. The images feature animals and situations where the science and/or facts they represent are a little confused.”
Description from Rebecca Horne’s (rather excellent) Discover magazine blog “Visual Science”
These are great! And now I want to be friends with both Lori Nix and Rebecca Horne.
I know these aren’t exactly what the blog’s about, but they’re too cool to pass up! Read the entire article over at Discover Magazine.
Dermestidae of Germany, including larvae and morphological details
Dermestids (specifically Dermestes lardarius) are a favorite beetle of museums and those who prepare bone specimens on a moderate-to-large scale. When maintained as a large enough colony, they’re an invaluable resource in cleaning the last of the flesh and fat from animal bones, and produce a much better final specimen than boiling or bleaching bones does (as boiling causes fat to be absorbed into the bones and bleaching is both dangerous and ineffective).
They’re also used in forensic entomology, as they’re scavengers, and they only appear when (and if) the flesh of a cadaver begins to dry out. They refuse to eat rotting flesh, and they refuse to live in a wet environment, so the weather and climate plays a significant role in determining the amount of time that would have passed before the beetles would have arrived.
Fauna Germanica: Die Käfer des deutschen Reiches, Vol III. Edmund Reitter, 1911.
From Das thierleben in Schönbrunn, Martin Gerlach Verlag (1904).
Photography by A. Karl Schuster.Found here.
I have the Carnivora plate and the Reptile/Amphibian plate from this book, but I love Caprinae too much not to reblog this - the goat-antelopes (caprids) are some of my favorite ruminants.
I don’t have the labels, but from what I can recall, it looks like the top plate has (among others) the Barbary sheep (bottom left), an alpine or Siberian ibex, a mouflon, an Arabian tahr, a bighorn sheep, a bharal, and, um, something else.
Anyway, it’s a bunch of cool horns, go marvel at them…and think about the Carnivora right below hunting them down :D
Audrey Kawasaki
(Source: lorilynn15)
turner street/threefold architects
via: flodeau
In the Mist
Long is the night to the sleepless;long is the league to the weary. Long is worldly existence to foolswho know not the Sublime Truth.
— Dhammapada, chapter 5, The Fool
富士山という自分の信ずるものに賭けた今となっては、命を捨ててもやりぬく自分でなければ、このあといくら生き延びても自分を信ずることができなくなるのではないか。
不安やためらい、逃避心と戦いながら、決意は固まった。すべての努力が本物であれば、あとは神が運命という形で教えてくれる。
—三浦雄一郎『75歳のエヴェレスト』
Rhythm
もしそれが継続するならば、われわれは、的確には表現しがたい何かを待ち望むことになる。リズムはその〈何か〉が到来したときにのみ鎮められるであろうような心理状態を、われわれの内にかもし出すのである。それはわれわれを、待ち望む状態に置く。われわれはリズムとは、それが何であるか半然とはしないが、とにかく何かに向かって行くことであると感じる。あらゆるリズムは何らかの方向であり、意味である。つまり、リズムとはただ単に空疎な拍というだけではなく、ひとつの方向であり、意味なのである。
リズムは測定値ではないし、われわれの外にある何かでもない。そうではなくて、リズムのなかに流れこみ、〈何か〉に向かって自らを投げ出すのが、われわれ自身なのである。リズムは意味であり、〈何か〉を語る。
—Octavio Paz, “The Bow and The Lyre”
