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Ink Bubble Drawings by Roland Flexner
The intricate ink bubble drawings by Roland Flexner are created by modifying a Japanese decorative art technique called suminagashi where paper is laid on top of ink floating on water. Flexner takes it one step further by blowing on or tilting the image right before the ink sets into the paper. His intended result is a nod to the seventeenth-century practice of collecting stones, polishing the cross-sections and then interpreting the emerging abstractions as landscapes. Some of the drawings from his series certianly accomplish that, but I enjoy the ones that lean more towards either the microbiological or galactic.
Take a look at all of his ink bubble drawings while listening to this track by Björk and you'll agree.
"Never Let Me Go" Exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery
"Art, artifice, and artificial life form the primary lines of inquiry stitched together in the exhibition “Never Let Me Go,” curated by Terry R. Myers. Borrowing its title from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed Dickensian science fiction novel from 2005, the show tracks the ways in which these three phenomena overlap; in so doing, it provokes questions that cut to the very core of art’s broader significance to society. In the case of Ishiguro’s novel, art is used as a type of “evidence” that cloned (or artificial) children may have souls. Myers’s exhibition alternately deals implicitly and explicitly with the themes of natural and artificial life found in the book.
Among the works included here, Rona Pondick’s Fukien Tea, 2003, hews close to the theme of cloning, with its miniature polished bronze heads growing from a bonsai-esque tree––a form of organ(ic) farming that alludes to the commodification of human subjectivity. Other standout pieces in the exhibition include Folkert de Jong’s The Sleeper, the Talker, and the Dancer, 2007. The sculpture, a nearly fourteen-foot-high multicolored Styrofoam birch tree, is littered with quotidian items and ghostly visages. To an extent, the work recalls the final denouement of the novel, in which the story’s narrator, Kathy, imagines a detritus-strewn landscape as a repository for the memories of her childhood. As with much of de Jong’s output, the tree skews what is represented through its material manifestation and is, by turns, creepy and fantastic due to its seemingly jubilant celebration of artificial nature. In André Butzer’s exuberant abstract painting of a spider, Nicht Fürchten! (2) (Don’t Be Scared! [2]), 2010, we are reminded that while art may reveal the soul, as Ishiguro suggests, it is also a zone where we can give form to our nightmares, which would otherwise remain repressed and unheeded."
Botanical Residue Series by Janet Laurence
A few pieces from the intriguing body of work by Janet Laurence. She often explores the relationship of architecture to the natural world and uses complex alchemical techniques to transfer translucent images and mediums to glass and metal.
Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections by Eric Ulrich
Assembled from found images on the web
Hot Water by Carrie Marill
"In 2006 I was traveling thru France and found brilliantly colored printed “visual aides” at a flea market. Originally these visual aides were didactic drawings used in classrooms in the late 1950’s to illustrate for children different aspects of the world (farming, industry, water tables the seashore, etc). I scanned, archived and reproduced these images on watercolor paper and updated them with specific current events which relate to the state of our environment and how humans anthropomorphize the planet."
via carriemarill.com
