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New York based artist, Kehinde Wiley provides an interesting twist on portrait painting with his images of ghetto kids in the kind of poses found in paintings from the renaissance. Whilst centuries old European nobles depicted in the portraits of the old masters and kids from the hood might seem polar opposites there are some interesting parallels: strip it down and the renaissance portraits were about showing off wealth and success in the same way as the average hip hop music video.
If you like doodling Sketchaway Thursday (in support of 1000 drawings event) takes place this week in Cape Town.
Just like spaces now have virtual layers of narrative added to them so to are objects. When I finally made it to Design Indaba (for the final day of the conference) this was one of the trends that leapt out at me. In particular as I did a post on location-based story telling earlier in the week. Of course this isn’t so new – objects often have stories attached (think Chinese vases or tables with carved scenes).
The best example perhaps was the work of Canadian graduate of Eindhoven, Jon Stam. His Curiosity Cabinet contains a mixture of physical objects and virtual ones via his use of RFID chips to store digital information. He also showed a rug with cut outs of Canadian lakes on it; tiny audio devices playing clips of his family reading out letters/memories related to the places mapped on it – you need to put your ear right up against it to activate and hear them.
Also a graduate (this time from the RCA in London), Revital Cohen has created a dark-humoured biological clock for women. The conceptual object spits out a white ball every so often based on data gathered from the owners analyst, banker and boss.
If I was commissioning some photos for an ad campaign my brief would be to make it look like it was shot by a 15 year old and found on flickr. I came across Eleanor Hardwick while idly wandering through Dazed Digital. Love the photos which have this hip without being hipster magic to them.
Visit her on Flickr for more recent shots.
Motorola have just announced that they’re launching a phone made from recycled water bottles. Great idea. Although they are opening themselves up to be challenged on the rest of their eco credentials (consumer electronics can produce nasty waste). It will be sold in the US in the next few months, no word on when or if it will make it to South Africa. Via MSNBC
If you know me you’ll know i’m a sucker for a good t-shirt. It’s basically the status update before status updates even existed. Even more so if you buy one of I Love Boxie’s Tees. Each t-shirt is a thought frozen in time picked up by label owner Moxie – who is apparently on a global hunt searching for people to tell her stories to put on the tees.
The Grand Daddy Hotel has recently opened in the centre of Cape Town, with a twist on the boutique hotel experience in the shape of a rooftop trailer park. The park consists of seven vintage Airstream trailers have been customised by local artists and are available for guests to stay in. Each of the polished chrome trailers sleep two people, and are embellished with design themes that include, among others, polka dots and The Three Bears. The customisation is worked in throughout all the facilities (including bathrooms) required for the hotel to earn a 4 Star hotel rating.
The Grand Daddy Hotel is owned by Daddy Long Legs Group who also run an art hotel on the same street (each room is also customised by a local artist). The video tour below features the work of Mark and Joe Stead who used the Three Bears (from Goldilocks) as inspiration. The level of detail even goes down to post-it notes, drawings and other personal objects “left behind” by the bears.
(Originally posted by me on PSFK)
