The slow motion moves me The monologue means nothing to me Bored in the role, but he can't stop Standing up to sit back down Or lose the one thing found Spinning the world like a toy top Til there's a ghost in every town.. (elliott smith) --------- The slow motion moves me The monologue means nothing to me Bored in the role, but he can't stop Standing up to sit back down Or lose... Read more » 8:22 PM
Sweet ghost of light. When you appear You fall around me. Everywhere I see your face As you pass by, as fragile as a dragonfly (Robyn Hitchock)Sam Gilliam, Out, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 113.5 x 152.5 x 2 inches"David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation with Sam Gilliam at Frieze New York, featuring a selection of beveled-edge paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s. These historic works will reintroduce viewers to the signal formal innovations of a revolutionary figure in postwar American art. In 1967, preparing for his first solo museum exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Gilliam started radically experimenting with the application of his acrylic paint and its material support. Breaking from his previous hard-edge paintings, as well as the flatness and pure opticality of his local Color School peers, he began crumpling and folding his canvases while staining and splattering them with paint. In the resulting brushless abstractions, colors bleed together and overlap in chance encounters, forms mirror each other rhythmically over structuring creases, and the picture plane becomes as much evidence of a sculptural process as a visual field of Gilliam's characteristically bold palette. As if to further emphasize the physicality of these images and their handwrought development, Gilliam started stretching the finished canvases over a frame with beveled contours. Each installed work appears at once to slope into the surrounding wall and burst forth from it, foregrounding the painting as an object in space with an active relationship to its site. The first beveled-edge paintings are important precursors for the iconic drape paintings Gilliam would begin to create soon afterward, and a prime example of his treatment of painting as an installation-based, if not also social phenomenon. Representing pioneering steps in expanding the medium's sculptural and architectural potential, Gilliam's beveled-edge paintings are a powerful and prescient antecedent for recent non-representational and non-objective art."via here..Frieze New York here.------------ Sweet ghost of light. When you appear You fall around me. Everywhere I see your face As you pass by, as fragile as a dragonfly (Robyn Hitc... Read more » 1:28 PM
Why not take paintings out of doors,where one may sit and watch the changing play of sunshine on the glazes, and thus have changes of mood during the day? - Doyle Lane "On Thursday, May 1st, the Landing—the fine art gallery housed within the rare furniture gallery Reform—will launch its new exhibition, DOYLE LANE: CLAY PAINTINGS, which features two pieces on loan from the California African American Museum (CAAM). "Doyle Lane's ceramic works are in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian and LACMA. Most active in the 1950s-1970s, L.A.-based Lane made clay paintings, pots, jewelry and murals that are vivid expressions of California Modernism. He used clay as a vehicle for his groundbreaking innovations in glazing, building surfaces that highlight and celebrate the natural irregularities in the materials he used. This exhibition will feature several of Lane's pieces--including large murals--that have never been publicly shown, plus a host of Lane ephemera, including original show programs and catalogues. This new show focuses on Lane’s clay paintings, murals and mosaics—those bright, arresting pieces Lane made to be suited for either inside or outside installation. Lane meant these larger works—especially the murals and mosaics—to interact with the natural world. Said Lane, “Why not take paintings out of doors where one may sit and watch the changing play of sunshine on the glazes, and thus have changes of mood during the day?" go to Reform Gallery here.--------- Why not take paintings out of doors, where one may sit and watch the changing play of sunshine on the glazes, and thus have changes of moo... Read more » 9:08 PM
an upcoming project by DISC Interiors "We shape our homes and then our homes shape us." (via here) (From left to right and top to bottom mirror by Casa Midy, console by Egg Collective, fabric swatch from Ralph Lauren fabric swatch by Zak+Fox, sconce by Billy Cotton, lamp by Aerin Lauder)We are currently working on an incredible Spanish home in the Silver Lake Hills with a dream client. One evening last month, I discovered she had a blog, and she posted the most incredible post along with some very kind words, as well as this image board of some of the items we have purchased for her home. It is an amazing experience to work with someone so creative and trusting. We have been able to incorporate so many beautiful works into this home by designers we admire, such as Casamidy, Egg Collective, Billy Cotton, Zak+Fox and Apparatus! We are looking forward to sharing photographs in the upcoming months as the home is completed!!Thank you Debra! Read the full post here... an upcoming project by DISC Interiors "We shape our homes and then our homes shape us." (via here) (From left to right and t... Read more » 8:34 PM
Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard When I woke up this morning It put the Sun into my life It cut my heartbeat with a knife It was like no other morning ("dream attack")"I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting – the humanistic values they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the object-ness of whatever it is that he’s doing. He is making a thing. All that should be taken for granted." ~ Frank Stella " It Really Is An Object. " 1. Frank Stella2. T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings cabinet, model 1671 Widdicomb United Kingdom/USA, c. 1950 bleached mahogany 54 w x 20.5 d x 69 h inches estimate $10,000–15,000 Cabinet features four doors concealing fixed storage and nine shelves. Signed with applied manufacturer's label to drawer. (via Wright)---------------- Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard When I woke up this morning It put the Sun into my life It cut my heartbeat with a... Read more » 8:14 PM
"The Chamber of Curiosity" by Gestalten, Apartment Design and the New Elegance"These collage-like interiors are not dull, utilitarian residential units but true chambers of curiosities.. Anything goes: muted colors are set against geometric patterns, antiques against ultra-modern lights...."DISC Interiors is included in a fantastic new book focusing on bold interiors, published by Berlin based, Gestalten Press! Available in the U.S. in May, and Europe in April 2014. While I crawl into the unknown Cover me, I'm going hunting for mysteries Cover me: I'm going to prove the possible really exists. (here) "Like the living spaces of modernist designers and architects, these collage-like interiors are not dull, utilitarian residential units but true chambers of curiosities. The acquisition of rare, weird, and often exotic articles has less to do with money spent and more to do with the fantasy and life path of its occupant and creator. Thus we are presented with interiors reminiscent of movies by Kubrick, Fincher, or Lynch—sometimes with an ambiance that is cool and detached, sometimes glamorous, often enigmatic, and always engagingly different. Apartments like these contain a conglomeration of objects and features that underscore the personalities of their occupants. Modern classics meet personal acquisitions and unconventional items with their own backstory. In these out-of-the-ordinary rooms, uniformity is avoided and the historical consorts with the futuristic. Anything goes: muted colors are set against geometric patterns, antiques against ultra-modern lights, an industrial lamp hovers over an oriental carpet, dark wood paneling offsets a Carl Auböck design, and paisley is a backdrop to onyx. The list of contrasts goes on."This book also provides portraits and complementing features on the work of trailblazing interior designers, including Jean-Christophe Aumas from Voici-Voilà, Pietro Russo, Dimore Studio, Autoban, and the Harmony Club. artwork by Jason Koharik with a custom Lawson Fenning sofa, vintage coffee table, custom burlap linen window coverings.Los Feliz Residence'The interior of this residence in Los Feliz, a refuge of the creative class in Los Angeles, is defined by expressive and bespoke contemporary materials or hand-picked vintage objects, furnishings, and artwork. DISC Interiors, for example, dressed the walls of the powder room with custom drapery paired with a hyper-graphic wallpaper made by British wallcoverings workshop Cole & Son. In the master bath, the designers fashioned vanities from a combination of white oak, brass, and Carrara marble and tiled the floor with hexagonal Carrara tiles." -Visit Gestalten here.."Gestalten specializes in developing content for aficionados of cutting-edge visual culture worldwide. For us, visual culture is the output resulting from the interrelationship of design, art, architecture, photography, and other visual disciplines with each other as well as other areas such as popular culture and music. In drawing from a variety of influences and combining them in ways not yet seen before, this work is pushing contemporary creative expression to new frontiers. Always working directly with talented contemporary designers and artists, we bring a deep understanding of visual culture on a global level to whatever we do and remain firmly committed to presenting visual trends with timeless substance. With approximately 30 staff members, the company has offices in Berlin, London, New York, and Tokyo."------------------- "The Chamber of Curiosity" by Gestalten, Apartment Design and the New Elegance "These collage-like interiors are not dull, ut... Read more » 6:47 AM
The works of Janette Laverrière @ Silberkuppe, Berlin, and TWAAS, New York"Poignantly the Fauteuil Cognac was in fact to be Laverrière’s very last furniture design drawn up especially for production by Silberkuppe and completed before she passed away in her sleep on January 1, 2011 just after her 101st birthday celebrated with champagne, family and friends." "Janette Laverrière - Fauteuil Cognac (2010) solid oak, orange and pale blue leather and suede, available in an ‘artist’s edition’ of 8 produced by SILBERKUPPE Berlin pursuant to an exclusive license direct from the designer""Janette Laverrière - Fauteuil Cognac Combining an exquisitely crafted oiled oak frame with duotone, reversible suede and leather cushions, Janette Laverrière’s iconic Fauteuil Cognac (Cognac Chair, 2010) also has aesthetic roots in the designer’s earliest beginnings. In the 1930s, she was already an apprentice in the studio of legendary, luxury modernist furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann. There the young interior architect and designer - herself the daughter of a distinguished Swiss architect Alphonse Laverrière - was trained in the well-drawn curve and the application of fine craftsmanship using quality materials. Subsequently in the pre-War years collaborative works with her first husband also evidenced her dexterity, foresight and originality – for instance, with her design low-lying seating-and-object-display dias for the circumference of a living room. After going it alone, as a radical designer in early postwar-Paris Laverrière’s design language matured and flourished against the odds as one of very few women alongside her near contemporaries such as Charlotte Perriand, or earlier Eileen Gray both of whom have reentered the canon only recently. "In the same period Laverrière made her own a name for herself through the creative use of what were then unorthodox poor materials such as plywood and wrought iron, and her allowance of idiosyncratic decorative features implicitly questioning the then pervasive strictures of modernist design. But also because of her egalitarian social-political and feminist convictions which she brought directly to all of her work. Among hundreds of designs, in the 1960s she designed and produced the Whiskey chair, a piece which very late in life she confessed was an intentionally ambiguous homage to the habits of one of her former husbands. Nearly half a Century later, holding court to a loyal group of supporters and fans in her Marais apartment, surrounded by her work and plans (the majority of which are now on permanent loan to the Centre Pompidou), this grande dame of French design never stopped working. Sustenance in the form of delicate macaroons and port wine were on offer to the well-liked. From around 93 years of age Laverrière devoted herself for the last 8 years of her life to a series of ‘useless things’ – namely mirror objects titled Evocations intentionally on the cusp of art and design which entail a reflection back on the literary and political inspirations of her life. "text taken from here... Read a past interview on You Have Been Here Sometime on the work of Janette Laverrière Janette Laverrière: Bibliothèque Tournante An Exhibition Curated by Fionn Meade in cooperation with Nairy Baghramian and Silberkuppe with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. as part of ART2 Hosted by: Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services 114 Greene Street, Fl. 2 New York, NY 10012 April 2 – 24, 2014, hours ."The exhibition will present the work of Janette Laverrière (1909–2011), an interior architect and designer who lived and worked in Paris for the majority of her life. Exploring Laverrière’s role in crucial shifts in the history of 20th-century design, the exhibition will use her work as the starting point for a conversation around the politics of value as expressed by the aesthetics of architecture and design. The exhibition is the first presentation of her work in the U.S."Bibliothèque Tournante revisits an exhibition originally conceived by Laverrière with artist Nairy Baghramian for the Schinkel Pavilion as part of the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008) entitled La lampe dans l’horloge. The exhibition will exhibit Laverrière’s prototypes, design multiples, and scenography, in particular her Evocations, a late grouping of mirrors that form part of what she termed her “useless objects series.” Producing commissioned mirror objects starting in 1936, Laverrière’s Evocations privileges allegorical content over utility. La Commune, hommage à Louise Michel (2001), for instance, with bullet holes perforating its lid, echoes the violence of the Paris Commune of 1871, while also performing an elegy to one of its key figures, the anarchist and proto-feminist Louise Michel. Within the exhibition Bibliothèque Tournante, the mirrors on the walls do not play according to the conventional rules of identification and refuse to return a stable representation. Instead, they offer subjective deportations into history, literature, and innuendo. Bibliothèque Tournante will further consider the subjective positions and conceptualizing of value as it is proposed by Laverrière’s work in interior design, including through the gaps and resistances which arise from her own life and the historiography of her work. Born in 1909 in Switzerland, Janette Laverrière studied in Basel at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, where she learned the fundamentals of drawing and decoration. After training in her father’s architecture practice, she designed her first pieces of furniture in the late 1920s, and until 1945 collaborated on designs with Maurice Pré. Having for a short time joined the Communist Party in 1945, Laverrière’s professional life spanned crucial shifts in design thinking and politics in the postwar period and beyond. Having helped found the Front National des decorateurs (National Front for Decorators) and the Union des artistes decorateurs et createurs d’ensembles (Decorators Trade Union), both in 1944, Laverrière’s career continued to impact art, design, and social movements until her death in 2011.text taken from here...-------------- The works of Janette Laverrière @ Silberkuppe, Berlin, and TWAAS, New York " Poignantly the Fauteuil Cognac was in fact to be Laverrièr... Read more » 7:36 AM
"Do We Design for Likes, Loves or Living?"Upcoming panel for LCDQ at Lee Stanton, May 9,2014Looking forward to this upcoming panel for LCDQ moderated by Alison Clare Steingold, Design Editor of C Magazine and the recently launched C Home. C Home's inaugural issue is out now, an inspiring look at California design, interiors, and architecture. For those that have followed my personal path from design writer to interior designer, and my instagram fascination, they know this panel is one that speaks to my heart: communication. As Marshall Mcluhan once declared, "the medium is the m(e)assage!" See you there! - David John LCDQ: La Cienega Design Quarter's 6th Annual Legends of La CienegaKeynote: Express Yourselfie: Do We Design for Likes, Loves or Living? Friday, May 9 11:00 - 12:00 PM Lee Stanton Antiques 769 N La Cienega Blvd Moderator: Alison Clare Steingold, Design Editor, C magazine and C Home Panelists: Todd Nickey, interior designer Nickey Kehoe and author of The Inspired Home (Rizzoli); David John Dick interior designer, DISC Interiors and author of blog, Youhavebeenheresometime; and Shiva Rose, author of blog, The Local Rose . This moderated panel explores whether online and social media like Instagram and Pinterest are playing into or even creating a new style of interiors. What are the pros and cons of documenting design? What is the ultimate reality on display? Followed by a book signing for Todd Nickey.go here for more info....------------ "Do We Design for Likes, Loves or Living?" Upcoming panel for LCDQ at Lee Stanton, May 9,2014 Looking forward to this upcoming pan... Read more » 5:25 PM
Ceramics by Gustavo Pérez "Pure in form, with a significant structure, completely abstract and without specific associations, his language of line, the bending of forms, and the definition of the vessel mark his work as a distinctive voice. The form is not just a container or a receptacle; it is architecture.""Mexican ceramist Gustavo Pérez makes vessels that are simple, smooth and symmetrical. Their elegance is due to the precision of the incised lines and other markings on the pots. While using the same clay body—sand colored stoneware—throughout his work, the artist achieves a wide range of form and pattern and includes slowly undulating walls beneath the subtly incised surfaces. Part architecture, part mathematical pattern, and part lyrical movement, the sleek ceramic constructions were the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. Gustavo Pérez is constantly moving, and with each stage of his work he advances and investigates. His works are incessantly experimental. There have been parallel lines, calligraphic traces, geometric cuts into the surface, minimalist vessels, recollections of pre-Hispanic vases and references to other ancient cultures. “There is something distinct about all of these – coherence and synthesis. Material, texture, color and design all correspond in Perez’s works,” writes Alfonso Colorado."All text taken from here.. --------------------- Ceramics by Gustavo Pérez "Pure in form, with a significant structure, completely abstract and without specific associations, his lang... Read more » 9:50 PM