Artists & Art
bioephemera | April 7, 2008Untitled (labrador), 1995
Stuffed labrador, polyester
Merijn Bolink
Reader Jan-Maarten kindly directed me to the artwork of Dutch sculptor Merijn Bolink:
In Untitled (labrador) from 1995, a stuffed female dog is followed by a bevy of small plastic dogs -at first glance the host of little ones appears to be puppies, but close inspection reveals each to be a dog-shaped replica of the large dog's internal organs. (Charlene Roth, New Art Examiner)
Untitled (Mondriaan branch), 2005
wood
Merijn Bolink
Bolink also grafts twigs to create branching patterns that combine the organic and the geometric…
bioephemera | April 2, 2008Silvio, 2005
turtle shell, brass hardware, beads, bone, antique vestment trim, leather, glass eyes Jessica Joslin
I sat down on the Metro this morning and read a most inauspicious horoscope:
"Your interest in things unusual, unexplained, bizarre and at times tasteless is likely to make it difficult for you to find a friend."
Hey! That's not nice!
But then I realized that next up on my blogging to-do list was the new book by artist Jessica Joslin, Strange Nature. Joslin makes incredible sculptures fusing dead animals, scrap metal, and eerie staring glass eyes. And I began to wonder if my…
bioephemera | April 1, 2008Untitled (Everything at once, or one thing at a time?), 2004
oil, paper, and printed matter on board
Robert Van Vranken
Commissioned by the National Academy of Science
This is my favorite artwork at the National Academy of Science - a trompe l'oeil window of reclaimed architectural elements, peering into a scientist's study. Artist Robert Van Vranken includes books, globe, tools, diagrams, a light bulb, a comfy chair, and a panoramic view - this is a cluttered mind as much as a laboratory/studio, and to think about "everything at once or one thing at a time" is the eternal dilemma of the…
bioephemera | March 28, 2008histoire(s) naturelle(s)
Petra Werle
Petra Werle's sculptures are fantasy, not science - nevertheless, she pins them in display cases like a butterfly collection. Their faces are molded breadcrumbs, and their bodies are made of feathers, beetles, moths, butterflies, shells, and moss.
histoire(s) naturelle(s)
Petra Werle
Like the work of Tessa Farmer or Brian Froud's Pressed Fairy Book, these are fairies and gnomes as pseudo-scientific specimens, their bodies offered as evidence of a fantastic, unseen world. But unlike Farmer's savage, wolflike packs of fairies, Werle's fairies are…
bioephemera | March 27, 2008
Vitamin C crystals
Spike Walker
Crystals of oxidised vitamin C (dehydroascorbic acid). Vitamin C itself (ascorbic acid) is a good antioxidant as it is reacts easily with oxygen to form the stable and unreactive dehydroascorbic acid seen here.
Of the 2008 Wellcome Image Award winners, I like this one best. It shows that even prosaic Vitamin C can be beautiful - like a collection of rare golden corals in a display box.
Zoologist-turned-photographer Spike Walker modestly describes himself as a "found object artist who walks around the pavement looking at things that have been spilled on it."…
bioephemera | March 26, 2008I am normally the last person to find the wanton demolition of art amusing. But I just discovered that early this year, when a windstorm hit my alma mater, Whitman College, a falling tree broke this large metal sculpture by Ed Humpherys, known to generations of Whitties as "The Giant Paper Clip" (or some variation thereof):
The Paper Clip, in Happier Days
The Fallen Paper Clip. Alas!
To add insult to injury, I learned from the alumni magazine that the actual title of the Paper Clip was "Joined Together, Let No Man Split Asunder." Whoops! It's asunder now. (Apparently a tree doing so was…
bioephemera | March 23, 2008Landing, 2005
Ralph Helmic and Stuart Schechter
Me + iPhone + 3 hour layover = tour of the random art of SeaTac!
I was stranded in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for three hours Friday with nothing to do, so I went on a little treasure hunt and catalogued as many of SeaTac's random art pieces as I could find. It was pure, childish fun. When you stop dead in the center of an atrium, stare straight up or down, and start snapping photos, a number of people follow suit - and notice the art for the first time. It's like leaving a wake of art appreciation behind you. You should try it the…
bioephemera | March 20, 2008Dodo, Mauritius, last seen in the wild 1690
33" X 16" X 27"
mixed media and chicken bones
Christy Rupp
One of my favorite art blogs, Hungry Hyaena, recently reviewed the work of Christy Rupp. Her last show at Frederieke Taylor, "Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans (From the Brink of Extinction to the Supermarket)", is a clever twist on a curiosity cabinet: each of the life-size skeletons, representing a smorgasbord of extinct birds from the auk to the dodo, is a fake made of fast-food chicken bones.
2 Moas, New Zealand, last unverified account of wild sighting 1838
58" X 58" X 26"…
bioephemera | March 6, 2008Zooillogix posted this video of an elephant that paints "realistic paintings of other elephants:"
It's a fluff piece, granted, but it gestures towards credibility by bringing in an "art expert" (and, I'm guessing, cutting 98% of her comments). The genial narrator, anticipating our astonishment that an elephant could learn to paint portraits, reassures us that it is indeed possible, and that "what makes it possible is the trunk." Uh, no. The trunk is what makes it possible for the elephant to grasp a human-style brush and execute fine motor movements. The brain is what makes any artist an…
bioephemera | February 25, 2008
Ron Pippin at Obsolete
One of my favorite mixed-media artists, Ron Pippin, just completed a stunning wonder cabinet of a show at Obsolete Gallery. Browsing the interactive panoramas on his website is like tiptoeing through the workshop of a slightly unbalanced Victorian scientist.
Book #8
Ron Pippin
In his latest work, Pippin creates altered notebooks worthy of some jungle-crazed alternate-history Darwin, ominous glass specimen boxes, and flying half-biological automata of uncertain purpose. If you're in the Laguna Beach area, you can see his work in person at Trove.
Ron Pippin's website…
bioephemera | February 25, 2008Well, this is funny. A new illustrated book about wax anatomical models - long one of my favorite topics - is about to be released. It's called "Ephemeral Bodies." Hey, did I write this book? I don't remember doing it. . . but who knows, it's been a crazy year.
The blurb:
The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since…
bioephemera | February 23, 2008I first saw these anatomical letters at Street Anatomy:
Typeface AnatomyBjorn Johansson
Unfortunately artist Bjorn Johansson doesn't seem to have completed the alphabet; these three specimens are all we find in the fossil record. But you can view another typeface, Handwritten, based on photos of hands, in his portfolio.
bioephemera | February 19, 2008The following is my most popular post, by far, from the "old" bioephemera (originally published Jan 5, 2007). I'll do a repost each week for the next few weeks to give new readers a taste of the blog. . .
Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman
Stephan Zick, 1639-1715
Wood and ivory
Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the "wonder cabinets" (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a…
bioephemera | February 13, 2008
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
From Paluzzi et al., Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007
For a few years, Nature Reviews Neuroscience stuck to a humorous theme in its cover art: everyday objects that mimic brains. A dandelion, spilled wine, a rock, a cave painting: if you know what features to look for, a surprising number of things resemble brains. We are a species that sees faces on the Martian surface and the Moon; we're very good at pattern recognition, and it's probably evolutionarily better for our brains to err on the side of "recognizing" something that isn't there, than…
bioephemera | February 13, 2008One of the questions an artist hates most is what is your artwork worth? Price is a subjective, unsatisfactory proxy for emotional angst, frustration, eyestrain, and time. Sometimes I find that NO (reasonable) value can compensate for the emotional investment I've made - in which case I either keep the thing myself, give it away, or throw a tantrum and rip it up. Other variables also influence price - the artist's fame and skill, obviously, but also whether the work has been copied. People are willing to pay a premium to own original art, even if a reproduction is virtually identical in…
bioephemera | February 10, 2008
Artist unknown (National Zoo)
Today I visited the Invertebrate House at the National Zoo, where I saw this remarkable churning, twisting portrait of an octopus. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the name of the artist. The painting looks like acrylic or oil, and is about six feet tall - very impressive, but not as impressive as the real giant octopus across the room!
bioephemera | February 7, 2008Tragopogon pratensis
Edvard KoinbergHerbarium Amoris
Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe.
This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking.
Tulipa; Dryopteris…
sb admin | February 7, 2008Tragopogon pratensis
Edvard KoinbergHerbarium Amoris
Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe.
This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking.
Tulipa; Dryopteris…