Life summarized in 4 bottles

Sent by a friend suggesting we are already at the third!

Nicolas Guilbert Animals and Company

The eye of the photographer Nicolas Guilbert takes us on a journey. In some shots, it summarizes the relationship between animals: homo sapiens, that is placed on top of the pyramid of the food chain and intelligence, and others, those he meets, he deals often lovingly, sometimes cruellyThe exhibition coincides with the ‘Open’, during which all the exhibition spaces of the village of Mougins are celebrating.For the occasion, music, theater, dance and performance are part of the program.

Human history is intimately linked to that of animals.The development of societies in the Neolithic age was a leap forward from the time when domestication began. The hunter became farmer, he began to accumulate wealth. Well before urban legend, the myth was strongly present in all civilizations.How many animals have inhabited the imagination of our ancestors with these creatures half men, half horses (centaurs), half man, half bull (the Minotaur was captured with Picasso), and Horus Falcon head up King Kong in our modern mythology.

The meeting between animal and human
Illustration: Nicolas Guilbert Prix d’Amérique, Hippodrome de Vincennes, 2007

Also, the different animals there between countries and often characterizes them. The cow is sacred and untouchable in India, it provides good steaks elsewhere.The same goes for the dog, the subject of attention hovering ridicule care and psychological care, beauty, accessories out of prices and services are regularly incongruous menu emissions sensational. In fact, dogs are also on the menu of some Asian restaurants. What is unbearable for some delicious becomes for others: a question of latitude, history, need also … latitudes, Nicolas Guilbert has traveled more than one. Its purpose is primarily to observe the moment of the encounter between animality and humanity: the man with the animal when the animal with human achievement.

Birds against a background of architecture
Monuments define new areas of development which animals adapt.They are also the structures of the image of the photographer who knows exploit their lines of force.Observe the city is often looked up and often watch the Waltz of volatile agility which contrasts with the architectural hieratic. Nicolas Guilbert shows how the animal is rooted in each of us is part of our daily lives, sharpen our curiosity and feeds our fascination.It also shows the black and white, how humanity can transcribe through each animal and gives this simple fact, new colors to our eyes.

The brilliant work of Nicolas Guilbert.

The Happiness Realization Party of Japan Introduces Its New President

Ryuho Okawa, Leader of the Religious Organization Happy Science, Becomes President of the Party

TOKYO–(Marketwire – July 30, 2009) – The Happiness Realization Party of Japan, formed May 27th this year, announced that it held an executive committee meeting on July 22nd and appointed Ryuho Okawa, the founder of both Happy Science and the Happiness Realization Party (HRP), as their new president. Okawa will run in the next general election as the party’s first ranking candidate of the Tokyo Proportional Representation bloc.

In May this year, Okawa decided to launch the HRP in his aim to bring forth substantial change in Japan’s political scene. At his public seminar held in Tokyo on July 22nd, Okawa himself announced that he has decided to run in the election as the president of the HRP in order to strengthen the party’s unification and the ability to hold the reins of government. He stated, “The HRP is building its policies based on where we would like the country to stand 20 to 30 years from now. The people of the nation may not understand us immediately but I plan to say what needs to be said.”

Since the late 1980s, Okawa had voiced countless suggestions directly and indirectly to politicians in Japan from his intention to nurture Japan to become an independent and more reliable country. His decision to establish HRP and run as president was made to enable this effort to yield a more direct and concrete result through the party’s involvement in politics.

The HRP has 345 candidates in all constituencies and Proportional Representation Blocs in Japan and is currently the largest political party within the country. The party says it aims to be the primary party of Japan through the next general election.

While Ryuho Okawa will be responsible for the policy makings of the party, Kyoko Okawa, his wife and former party leader has taken the position of Chief Advertising Officer of the party and will run as the first ranking candidate of the Tohoku (North-Eastern) Proportional Representation bloc.

For more information see www.hr-party.info

Editor’s note: Ok this definitely caught my eye. Snappy title, don’t you think? GG

Bitchbrandsbetter a new site for bitchin’ about brands

Basically it’s a place you can go to get a personal story about a brand behaving badly towards you, off your chest. If you’ve had a genuine negative brand experience, bitchbrandsbetter will give you the chance to tell the whole world about it and hopefully help improve the brand’s behaviour. So any bad brand story, big or small, they want to hear it. The current site is in minimised form as we are still building the full version. You can enter your story in the input field at the base of the current site and it will become pre-loaded content for the full site once it’s launched.

So go on – have a bitch. It’s positive! And please pass on the link to anyone else who may need this kind of therapy.

bitchbrandsbetter.com

Covering the Mirrors, roadside memorials project

Covering the Mirrors documents a resistance, a reversal; where each ‘roadside memorial’ undermines the (non-) nature of the motorway space.

The proliferation of non-space seems perversely natural; airports, freeways, shopping centres, stations and hubs appear at each turn and beyond every turn off. These vast areas designed for functionality, supposed progress, in fact programmatically efface ‘the local’ with its community interests and historical presence; this leaves empty meaningless space in abundance.

Contrary to intent the ‘universal network’ actually isolates the individual by atomizing the community. It does this through an expanding ‘grid’ of interstitial non-spaces that affects all aspects of daily life – from our environment through to our emotions. No longer are these in-between zones mere links; they are fast-forming generic centres, places in and of themselves – that control and re-order the social experience.

Yet the presence of roadside memorials somehow resists this deterritorialization. As the visual markers carry with them a sacred significance and a small piece of history, which once situated in monotonous space they activate a subversion of the spatial homogenization. Suddenly these non-spaces are filled with meaning. These shrines with their folk rituals and cult following hint at a growing social dissent – as an emergent material culture they tap into an underlying collective impulse to reclaim lost space.

Taking the roadside memorial as his starting point, Neuman uses a variety of lens-based media, and techniques that span from appropriation to documentary to the staged, to critically respond to physical and cultural changes in the Australian landscape.

Host:
Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
From – Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:00pm til  Saturday, July 25, 2009
Location:  Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
Street:  419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney, NSW (426/428/445 bus)
Phone:  0401152434
Web: http://www.myspace.com/dontlookgallery
Email:  dontlookgallery@gmail.com

Fallen Princesses

Dina Goldstein aka Honey is developing a substantial portfolio of artwork that places Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios.

“In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The ‘…happily ever after’ is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.

The project was inspired by my observation of three-year-old girls, who were developing an interest in Disney’s Fairy tales. As a new mother I have been able to get a close up look at the phenomenon of young girls fascinated with Princesses and their desire to dress up like them. The Disney versions almost always have sad beginning, with an overbearing female villain, and the end is predictably a happy one. The Prince usually saves the day and makes the victimized young beauty into a Princess”.

Source: http://www.jpgmag.com/stories/11918

Street Art revolution in Iran

Check out the following sites to get a taste of street art revolution in Iran

Sources:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/irangraffiti/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinxit/sets/72157611086130133/
http://www.famouswhendead.com.au/

Also in July FamousWhen Dead Art Gallery Melbourne presents Ralf Kempken a new body hand-cut screens for his second solo show titled Now Screening. Ralf is exploring the process of perception: “As we rely on our perceptions to make sense of our world we realise that we can exert control to adjust the perceptive process. But by doing so we find that the perceptive process is open to illusion – and delusion. What are we really seeing? Seeing is not an act of perception but one of creation.”

If you haven’t seen Ralf’s recent works at ArtMelbourne, C3 art space or SmithGallery do not miss this amazing showcase. Exhibition opens Friday, 17 July and runs to 2 August. Preview Thursday, 16 July 6 – 7 pm.

FWD
207 Victoria Street
West Melbourne 3003 Australia
Check website for gallery opening hours.
Gallery: http://www.famouswhendead.com.au/

Long Live Whoever

IF you didn’t know where to look, you might never notice the 100-square-foot storefront gallery on East 88th Street near Second Avenue, (new York) even though it has been there for a decade. In the window lies a diminutive homemade coffin bearing an enormous artillery shell and a tombstone inscribed with the word ‘Whoever.’ The walls of the space, which is called Gallery 221, are papered with scores of laminated obituaries, which have been clipped from The Economist magazine.

‘They’re precise,’ said Michael Brod, the gallery’s owner and the creator of the installation. ‘I like the uniformity of them. To be able to encapsulate a life in a thousand words, and to do such an eloquent job, it’s very democratic.’

Mr. Brod, a tall, dark-haired 67-year-old, was until last spring a man of high finance on Wall Street. In the early 1980s, he left his life as a potter and a poet in California after receiving a phone call from his weeping father in New York, whose fifth wife had just died.

Mr. Brod had not set eyes on the man since his parents separated when he was an infant, yet he traveled east to see him. Seduced by the life of Wall Street, Mr. Brod spent 10 years at his father’s stock brokerage firm. Art was relegated to Plan B.

During that time, father and son shared an office, seated at opposite ends of a long walnut conference table. Mr. Brod also discovered that he, like his father, was good at finance, and in 1986, his father handed him the reins of the firm. He left in 1992 to work first at a brokerage company, then as an independent consultant.

‘What I liked about Wall Street,’ Mr. Brod said, ‘was that it’s full of manic-depressives. There are a lot of artists who are manic-depressive. And there’s a lot of creative people in Wall Street.’

It was not the downward spiral of the economy that drove Mr. Brod a year ago to go back to work full time at the gallery he owned and where he had occasionally worked in the evening. Instead, it was a recent birthday, along with his growing collection of obituaries and a desire to lead a life that seemed to have more value than one devoted to crunching numbers.

‘The point of the Street wasn’t me trying to get rich,’ Mr. Brod said. ‘It was me trying to figure out who I was.’

The other day, Mr. Brod stood at the window of the gallery, assembling the words of a poem in crisp, adhesive letters on the glass in preparation for the opening of his funereal installation on May 12.

‘Whoever on the road,’ the poem reads. ‘Whoever still traveling. Whoever says whatever. Whoever is dead. Long live whoever.’

http://www.whoeveremerges.com/
Gallery 221
Upper East Side
221 East 81 Street, New York
USA

Change Your Online Status – Support Refugee Week

Look beyond the label
The best way you can show your support is by changing your online status and profile during Refugee Week. This will identifty you as a supporter and encourage others to acknowledge the important issue of refugee identity. Simply download the status pack or packs you want and follow the instructions. It only takes a moment to change your status and make a lasting contribution to the lives of refugees in the UK.

Despair Wear presents Social Media Venn Diagram

This tee-shirt is a hoot and you’ll want to order one for your ‘inter-connected’ social media pals.

http://www.despair.com/somevedi.html