guess who

| November 2, 2009

For the past month, we’ve been working on pages  for a zine. This time, we want to use other means of reproduction like woodcuts, but here’s a sneak peak of one of my pieces. Can you guess who?

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I’m hoping we can have all 10 completed before next month, but everything has been hectic around here! This project has helped me destress, so it has already been worth it.  And we’ve been brainstorming about the next Riley zine. I think it’s going to be pretty sweet.

My five musicians

  1. ________
  2. Cat Power
  3. Bon Iver
  4. David Bowie
  5. Bob Dylan

BJ’s five (newly feminized)

  1. Townes Van Zandt
  2. Lil Wayne
  3. Lou Reed Althea & Donna
  4. John Coltrane M.I.A.
  5. Neil Young Debbie Harry

some of the best things to receive

| October 19, 2009

lena_corwin_print

Lena Corwin’s Travel Poster from BJ. The mail gods were interfering with our plans to get this poster in our hands, but Lena persevered, and it finally got to us! The poster is basically a tour of European architecture—italicized!

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Some of the best things to receive, buy, share are Mike Perry‘s printed works. I snagged Issue #2 (Swimsuit Edition) of Untitled, a zine devoted to his shifting interests. I admire how each element of it—the pictures, clothes, drawings, etc.—belongs to a collaborative effort and one does not outshine the other. Anna’s poetic black-and-white photographs and Mike’s innocent injections of color are the perfect complements.

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Untitled Issue # 3 One Photo Shoot

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This poster was tucked among the zines as a nice surprise. It looks like a dog-pile of monsters made out of sherbet. I think it’ll go perfectly in my classroom!

side projects

| October 10, 2009

console
Table design by Geoffrey Keating
pebbles_web

Snippets of a few side projects I’m starting to work on. And tonight, we’re eating at Feast! And there’s a cold front in Houston and we got to wear jackets. And there’s a student holiday on Monday so I get to work in a quiet room. And…I love weekends.

We did it!

| October 6, 2009

for a rainy day zine

So what do you do after logging so many hours in the art studio for four years? There’s definitely a struggle to continue to create even when the desire is there. I think what we all needed was an assignment. Thank you to everyone who contributed. Hopefully this is only the beginning.

coloringbook_handOne of my coloring book pages.

bj_colorBJ’s page.

More pictures of the zine can be seen. There are four two extras available here. Get em while they’re hot!

I cursed these legs I walked on

| October 2, 2009

We are fans of Department of Eagles (featuring Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen). We are also both fans of Marcel Dzama, who, with Patrick Daughters (the brain behind the Two Weeks video) directed the video for Department of Eagles’s song “No One Does It Like You.”

The new work, which premiered recently at the Museum of Modern Art, is animated by Dzama’s alternately sweet and dark preoccupations.  A clash between Eastern Front snowman infantry and ninja ballerina terrorists, bearing AK-47s and baring thighs, forms the centerpiece of the video. All the visuals are familiar: the uniforms, the flags, the skirts and stockings, the rifles, the leafless clawlike trees, the bedsheet ghosts, amputations and arterial sprays. Steeped in a palette of blood red and cloudy root-beer neutrals, the frame full of eerie blurs and grainy textures, the whole thing feels pitched halfway between reverie and nightmare. A skewed meditation on death. An apocalyptic fairy-tale that, in weaving a childish innocence with tokens of the past and images of violence, stands up as quintessential Dzama.

Meet the soft-spoken artist. Below, you can catch some behind-the-scenes glances at the choreography and costumes. Blue-screen tricks and handmade props abound.