8oinks

The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, February 11 – June 13, 2010

The Darker Side of Light reveals the private worlds of late nineteenth-century Europe through prints and other works meant for quiet contemplation. The exhibition presents over one hundred prints, drawings, illustrated books, and small sculptures by artists such as Félix Bracquemond, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, James McNeill Whistler, Charles Meryon, and Anders Zorn, among others. The Darker Side of Light evokes shadowed interiors and private introspections to tell a far less familiar story of late nineteenth-century art. (read more)

Download selected images in High Resolution at smartmuseum.edu

Max Klinger, Abduction, 1881

Albert Besnard, Morphine Addicts, 1887

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897

Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with a Dead Child, 1903

Félix Bracquemond, The Moles, 1854

Odilon Redon, This Is the Devil from Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1888

Daniel K Sparkes Illustrations, paintings and photographs (via)

Ashley Reaks: it seemed a good idea when i started it…

see also: Reasons to Live, Rasons to Die by Ashley Reaks

Notes to a friend; silently listening

view more Collections by William Schaff

Roger Ballen: My photographs comment on the complex word that we loosely term as reality. Reality is ultimatley impossible to define with words, perhaps images will provide some clarity. It is my belief that the most challenging photographs are those that create a tension between what we refer to as the real and the imaginative . My images symbolize the chaos around us and our inability to ultimately control our fate. In contrast to this world, my aesthetic is expressed in a very formalistic manner. (via)

Find Interviews to read or watch on Lensculture and Euroalter

Brendan Danielsson: My work isn’t conceptual, personal, spiritual or political. And there’s no secret underlying message or point I’m trying to get across. I’m not trying to say much with it….at all. I simply create art that I would like to see if I were not the one making it. The process, as I develop a piece, is little more than a stream of consciousness without much forethought to what the end result will be. But I do try to incorporate a few elements of conflict to create a narrative for interest. These usually deal with man vs. beast, beauty vs. ugly, sensuality vs. violence, etc. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy much of the actual process of creating art. It’s a contant struggle for me and I’m my harshest critic, but the end result is what keeps me going. When I create something that I actually like, I’m a happy man. (via)

Ink on rice paper illustrations by 25yr old, British born Chinese Artist Tim Lee. (via)

Love Must Die Young (Never Old Enough)

You were born with a light between your eyes, I was born to answer to your Sun

Why do I, Still water flowers

A short video-series  called: Lucía, Luis y el lobo (Lucía, Luis and the Wolf)
The video was shot frame by frame with a digital photo camera. Materials: charcoal, dirt, flowers, found objects and cardboard.
by Niles Atallah, Cristobal Leon & Joaquin Cociña

Urszula Kluz-Knopek, Poland - a contribution for Bye Bye Blackbird on 8oinks!

Nollywood is said to be the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the home video market approximately 1 000 movies each year.
Such abundance is possible since films are realized in conditions that would make most of the western independent directors cringe. Movies are produced and marketed in the space of a week: low cost equipment, very basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, “real life” locations. Despite the improvised production process, they continue to fascinate audiences.

Welcome To the Terrordome. And Nollywood is scary shit, but not in a Hollywood way. Rather than employ the rituals of history, myth and mystery to seduce and then placate us, scare it all away — all the shit that’s not suppose to be scary but really is, Pieter throws it in our face.

What Nollywood seems to be suggesting is that it is not the “I” of the photographer or even the “I” of the viewer, but the eye of the camera. We’re thrown from “representation” (of something real) to “simulation” (with no secure reference to reality), the normal relation between sign and referent radically remixed so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. (via)

take a look at the complete Nollywood series on Pieter Hugo’s website or gallery

Illustrations and paintings by Aleksandra Waliszewska. Check out her Blog.

see also:
Inwazja/Worms/Atak by Aleksandra Waliszewska

Bye Bye Blackbird dancing in a traditional black kimono worn at funerals, with the eternal smile. Turn Off Lights When You Leave The Room by Shirin K. A. Winiger

view set on flickr

Alexander Binder was born in 1976 in the Black Forest/Germany. He is a self-taught photographer and has a degree in economics. Both – his photo and his film projects – are characterized by a fascination for the mystic, the spiritual and the occult.

“The overall style of my work derives from the self made lenses i use.The photos are blurred, diffuse and they give a lot of space for your peronal imagination. But it’s not only the style of my photographs - it’s also the subjects i deal with. Most of my projects move between two extremes: On one side the naive ideal of a romanticised, virgin nature in which light unfolds it’s primordial power, as the basic energy of life. And on the other side, the disenchanted monochrome works, that reflect the dystopian living circumstances of modern society.” (via)

What do you want? ”The simple things in life: family, good friends, a beer and a camera.” What do you need? ”The simple things in life: family, good friends, a beer and a camera.”

Tamishir on flickr and 8oinks

Trained taxidermist Polly Morgan began working as an artist in 2005. Her work exploits her taxidermy skills in still life arrangements. She plays with conventions of both: the interaction of the wild subjects within the peculiar context of the civilised still life pose; the conceit of the dead animal frozen in a living pose. (via)

Clusters of quail chicks are often used in Morgan’s work to represent moss on the side of a derelict coffin, a swarm of maggots or a chorus of voices from a telephone receiver. Here she calls them Dead Heads; a term used to describe the decapitation of spent flowers, which can be read as a metaphor for the chicks’ own short lives.

Polly Morgan’s flickr

Randolph Harmes, Born Omaha, Nebraska, 1944. Served in Vietnam, Army.

My masks mark a change in my interest from the appearance of Indian art to the purposes for which it was used. They show little physical resemblence to Indian masks, but they represent, to a degree, the assimilation of Indian liturgical mask-making traditions. They deal more with feelings than with specific experiences. Dulce Bellum Inexpertis translates as “war is sweet to those who have not experienced it.” the title is taken directly from a sixteenth-century poem by George Gascoigne. It compares the realities of war with the myths of war. I also think of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decoru, Est“. It is concerned with anger and rage: anger at being used, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of Litton Industries, Honeywell, and Bankamerica.

The Ritual Suicide Mask deals more woth guilt: guilt over surviving, guilt over having participated, in any manner, in the war. Making the masks was a way for me to put some of this behind me—kind of primal screams whose purpose is to expose, examine, and then expunge or exorcize these old ghosts. A focus these works share with traditional masks is transformation: transformation of the maker/wearer, transformation of the mundane to the mystical and vice versa.

Stephen J Shanabrook is a New York and Moscow-based artist who uses food both as medium and metaphor. Using commonplace materials and forms generally seen as benign indulgences— sweets, chocolate, and cotton candy — he brings about disturbing new meanings, exploring the intersections of desire, violence, permanence, and death.

In the 1990s, Shanabrook, who spent his youth working at a chocolate factory, went to morgues in Russia and the US and made molds from the fatal wounds of anonymous people, cast dark chocolate pieces, placing them into luxury chocolate boxes. The series of works, which Shanabrook described as “very close to the edge, the forbidden place for artists,” are essentially representations of death or what one critic called “bonbons of mortality.” (Read more at eat me daily)

We love our shapeshifters - as long as they stay trapped in that box.

Gon: “assume it: we all have a dark side which always want to fly high. like a vulture. a crow. the ancient rituals and specially rites in all the cultures of the world recreated somehow the dark flights of these black birds with special meanings. some as exorcism. some others as calling or preys. pagan or religious, human or spiritual. black birds flights always had impose some human fascination. symbol of death for many cultures because their behaviour. dreaming with crows use to symbolise that death is coming. a vulture’s flight over death fields is an intense mix of beauty and of fear. if exorcism, we want that black bird will fly away, and this is most used in rites: “bye bye black bird”, let it go, free your own, dare your own. with respect.
“bye bye black bird” is a title suggested by our dear 8oink’s member Annie.

let’s fly, bye bye black bird. here you may post your own interpretations of the black birds rites in another 8oink’s collaboration. let’s be pagan. let’s free our own black bird. let’s do this rite all together. now join your own wings… in the name of death!”

Contributions in all media are welcome. Tag: oink

GBenard a vulture’s dance

Foxe ready to let it out

fenk Bye Bye Blackbird

Shirin K. A. Turn off lights when you leave the room

Alexander Binder Bye Bye Blackbird

Leo Dakar Bye Bye Blackbird

Urszula Kluz-Knopek Bye Bye Blackbird

Zach Manchester Bye Bye Blackbird

Dessa/1911 Bye Bye Blackbird

Michel Lentz NO EXIT

red nails; wrong city Bye Bye Blackbird

I think that many of my works can be described as an advertising campaign coming from possible parallel realities. They’re conceived as actual advertisements, just without the claim of a product, slogans, and of course the pay I would receive upon completion. What they sell is rather the real value upon which our society is based, without any sort of lie or hypocrisy hidden within them. (Read more)

Laurie Lipton was born in New York and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honours). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany and France and has made her home in London since 1986.

Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA. Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 17th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort”.

The system of belief or not; that is not the problem of yours ;
Jo Seub’s World of Disbelief

Jo Seub (1975, Born in South Korea), has developed a distinct system of disbelief, the centerpiece of which is a fluctuating of self-identity. By putting the symbolism of contemporary symptoms of scepticism into the artificially controlled images, he has taken disbelief as one main subject in his art. Irrationality and the distortion of one’s internal life have been common paradigm for postmodern system of reasoning and acting. This self-betrayal produced by the tension between the superficial belief and the internal disbelief are continuously knocking on our belief system of which we thought it could guide us to imagine and advance our own perspective of ’sensus communis’. From the perspective of a ‘pictorial ideology’, Jo Seub questions that why our living has to be determined in a trivial way. (via)

Who wants to live forever // Do not question

Trevor Brown aka Babyart made an installation at the Hotel Dare in second life. Mescaline Tammas made an explosive little clip as a document of the SL installation; a tribute to Trevor Brown’s work. Music by Venetian Snares.

Jon Kyle - Erased / 20Frames

Shane Acker holed up and spent nearly five years making his 11-minute animated shortfilm 9 , which snagged him a 2005 Oscar nomination and attracted the backing of fantasy auteur Tim Burton.  Read Review

Chris Anthony is an internationally recognized photographer who was awarded the 2007 Grand Prize in American Photo’s Images of the Year Competition for his “Victims & Avengers” series. Born and raised in Stockholm, Anthony also lived and studied in Florence. In his teens, he worked as a rock photographer and went on to direct music videos and commercials. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

“I’m the most normal person in know”

deconstruction and regeneration… Gonzalo Bènard belongs to a very special category of humans; those whose lives are comprised of many storylines. “Reborn” in various occasions, Bènard began as an art history, fine arts and computer science student, he went on to pursue a career as editorial coordinator in the Cultural Centre of Belen in Lisbon, gained notoriety as the editorial coordinator of the Pavilion of Portugal in the 1995 Venice Biennial, left everything for a three-year residence in the painting school of a Tibetan monastery, came back, became a painter, finally ending up an emerging photographer. (via)

G. Bènard mixes cultures, rites and rituals, life and death. Encompassing everything human his work speaks of faith, sex, spirit and what it is to be alive and trying to make sense of a world that cannot make sense of itself.

Take a look at GBenards Video-Projects and visit him on flickr and 8oinks.

Tricia Anders “Everybody needs a little monster in their life”

Stephen and Timothy Quay (born June 17, 1947) are American identical twin brothers better known as the Quay Brothers. Most of their films feature dolls, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is Street of Crocodiles, based on the short novel of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time.

Full 20min Shortfilm: LINK1 / LINK2

also take a look at this interview with the Quay Brothers: part1 / part2

The Bacteria Magnet from Nurse With Wound. “I thought the films of Jiri Barta would make an excellent illustration for this incredible track.” videomashup by opalsongs.