Destinations
bioephemera | October 21, 2009
According to reader Milde, L.A. Burdick's is a "serious chocolate experience." Little did I know she was right - this place even has coffin-shaped chocolate boxes for Halloween. And little chocolate ghosts. Adorable!
Of course, if you really want to impress a Goth girl, there's always Valerie Confections' Mori Ex Cacao gift set. . . or a 1-lb chocolate heart at Pushing Daisies. But personally, I'm going to get me some cute little ghosts.
bioephemera | October 17, 2009
NPS Photo/Dan Stahler
This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops.
And what do Montana authorities have to say about this?
"Members of…
bioephemera | September 25, 2009
Artist Liz Hickok makes your Friday complete with a Jell-O San Francisco, from this jiggly Palace of Fine Arts to a melting Marina. Melding the blurry, children's book perspective of tilt-shift photography with the saturated, translucent colors that define the California dream, Hickok has hit on something remarkably luscious (and fruit-flavored).
Hickok says,
I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous…
bioephemera | September 24, 2009
football gamepattagon's flickrstream
Inspiredology offers 40 tilt-shift images of urban landscapes. Some of them are truly hard to credit with reality. They're certainly better than my attempts at faux tilt-shift!
Previously on BioE: Alan Dragulin's toyscapes.
bioephemera | September 15, 2009
An enigmatic photo from Morbid Anatomy's review of the Quay Brothers show at Parsons in NYC. Read all about it here.
bioephemera | September 12, 2009According to Reuters, Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds fame is going to create an entire exhibit showing plastinated cadavers in sexual poses. He already includes two "copulating cadavers" in his current show:
German politicians called the current "Cycle of Life" show charting conception to old age "revolting" and "unacceptable" when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should…
bioephemera | July 16, 2009
Check out these remarkable photos of patterns grown in Japanese rice fields using different strains of pigmented rice. A number of commenters on the thread at funster have suggested the photos are faked, so I found this Japanese news clip on YouTube. I like the art in the video clip even better! :)
bioephemera | July 6, 2009
Wandering around the Chattanooga waterfront at night, we encountered this charming random artwork. It's sort of Greek Temple x [Tesla + Buckminster Fuller]. And the wire hemisphere was full of tiny insects!
It was only one of many artworks scattered around the Aquarium, Hunter Museum, and pedestrian bridge. Chattanooga has really done a lovely job revitalizing their downtown. I have to return to sometime and spend a day or two walking, art-spotting, and drinking fresh lemonade.
bioephemera | July 5, 2009
Kurt Peterson
Artomatic just wouldn't be complete without a sinister cephalopod, and luckily Kurt Peterson stepped up to make it happen. At least I think that's a cephalopod. Unfortunately, Peterson's another one of these off-the-grid, website-free artists, but you can read a little about him at his Artomatic user page.
bioephemera | July 3, 2009Millennia, 2009
aluminumMichael Sirvet
Michael Sirvet's aluminum shell, three feet in diameter, is a porous excuse for a bowl (heh heh), but all those edges make lovely sifted patterns of light. Millennia makes me think of a cell membrane, a hollowed-out moon, or the Death Star. I'm not sure which resemblance is cooler. See it at Sirvet's website, or at Artomatic.
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Ornament(al) Skull
Noah Scalin
Anatomophiles alert: tomorrow, Noah Scalin, proprietor of the Skull-A-Day blog and author of Skulls, opens a new show at the Quirk Gallery in Richmond, VA.
I just typed "Richmoaned". Does that qualify as a Freudian slip? Or something else?
bioephemera | July 1, 2009
mushroom paintings, oil on panel, 2008Amy Ordoveza
This series of three paintings by Amy Ordoveza works as abstraction from a distance, but close up, they're luminous golden woodland fungi - the quintessence of bioephemera! See more at her website/blog.
bioephemera | June 30, 2009TheatreBen Tolman
Like Hieronymus Bosch paintings, Ben Tolman's intricate, epic drawings can hold your attention for a long, long time. Although the poor lighting at Artomatic makes poring over the minute detail a little frustrating, it's impressive to see the scale of Tolman's works in person. Alternatively, view the high-res version here, or watch video of Theatre's creation (it took over a year) here, at Ben's blog. I think he may be single-handedly supporting the whole Micron pen industry, at least in the DC Metro area! Awesome work.
bioephemera | June 29, 2009The Age of the Drowning of Sorrows and the miracle of Soju and Etha
oil on canvasTracey Clarke
Tracey Clarke has taken nearly every little girl's habit of doodling horses, turned it into startlingly realistic animal portraiture, and then added a frisson of creepiness. Her wild horses, blank-eyed and leaking stuffing, remind me of the Skin Horse from Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit:
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.""Does…
bioephemera | June 28, 2009
nmohan of the collaborative artists group Robot Disorder just contacted me to let me know they've launched the Robot Disorder 2.0 website, with more robot hordes (and easier navigation). He says they have literally thousands of robot drawings to clean up and post in the coming weeks, so if you haven't yet seen your personal robot, never fear - it's on its way.
And it's not too late to contribute your own robot to the project - just visit the top floor at Artomatic in Washington DC before July 5!
bioephemera | June 24, 2009
The "gastronomical cocktail" called "sex on a drip" is just one reason to hop a plane to Singapore and visit The Clinic, a theme restaurant that's probably not for the squeamish.
Their website boasts, "Clinic's unique alfresco is easily identified by its hospital whites, colourful pills, syringes, drips, test-tubes, and paraphernalia in all manner of the clinical, all in tribute to the tongue in cheek pop art of Damien Hirst." I don't know about Hirst - rotting, half-preserved sharks don't make me hungry - but their website is definitely fun in a trippy, pharma-chic way, complete with…
bioephemera | June 22, 2009
Artomatic is one of my favorite things about DC: a cooperative unjuried art gallery in a vacant high-rise, staffed by artists, with live performances and mini-bars on every other floor. It's free (except for the bars). What's not to like? The icing on the top (floor) this year is Draw A Robot - a collective crowdsourced fundraising experiment by the team at RobotDisorder.com.
Draw A Robot is a deliciously haphazard mashup of new tech and low tech. Starting at the low tech end of the process, you sit down with the pens and paper provided at the Draw A Robot booth, and you - wait for it - draw…
bioephemera | June 16, 2009
Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)Fritz Kahn, 1926
Pintura/Anatomias, SintonizandoFernando Vicente, 2000
The suddenly blogospherically ubiquitous pinup-artist turned anatomical illustrator Fernando Vicente is clearly influenced by German artist Fritz Kahn. If this is your cup of tea, you'll probably also like "An Iconography of the Industrial Body: Fritz Kahn, Popular Medical Illustration and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity," a talk by Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine, curator of Dream Anatomy and author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and…
bioephemera | June 15, 2009
Dahmen Art Barn, Uniontown, WA
While I was growing up, we used to drive past the Dahmen farm every few months. I would always look up from whatever book I was devouring at the time and intently try to count the iron wheels in the fences (there are over a thousand).
The barn, which lies just outside Uniontown, WA, about 16 miles from the Idaho border, was built in 1935 for Jack Dahmen and was part of a commercial dairy for several decades. Its distinctive wheel fence began accumulating sometime after 1952, when Jack's nephew Steve Dahmen and his wife Junette purchased the barn.
Says…
bioephemera | June 14, 2009
Curious Expeditions has a great interview with Jennifer Angus, the artist who recently redecorated the Newark Museum's Victorian Ballentine House with dead insects in an installation called "Insecta Fantasia." Wow!
The Museum restored the elegant abode to its original dark wood and horror vaccui (fear of empty space) style. This fear of empty space is often seen in Victorian homes - pictures covering every inch of wall, furniture and carpets covering all available floor space, murals and moulding on the ceilings, objects crowding every surface, elaborate window coverings and stained glass in…