roomofshelves

The Swing (After Fragonard) by Yinka Shonibare

2009-09-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

A facing angle would better illustrate the perfect position of the kicked-away shoe, hanging in mid-air like a butterfly.

Vince Contarino

2009-09-16T13:30:00.001-07:00

from butdoesitfloat.com: Vince Contarino is a Brooklyn-based artist who explores the possibilities of abstraction through drawing, painting and collage. He's interested in developing a visual language through ambiguous gestures and informed decision-making.

Rilke

2009-09-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

everything that has been wrestled from doubt
I welcome--the mouths that burst open after
long knowledge of what it is to be mute.

Do we know this, my friends, or don't we know this?
Both are formed by the hesitant hour
in the deep calm of the human face.

Rosmarie Waldrop

2009-08-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

Much work still to be done. And the smell of ripe peaches. And Long-Jing tea. And lungs full of words. And being an opaque body that intercepts the rays of the sun.

Orlando

2009-08-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

Orlando is at its heart a story of loss—the loss of time as it passes—a meditation on the impermanence of love, power, and politics. I simply carried that logic through to include Orlando’s loss of property and status in the 20^th century. Whilst the loss of property in the story is a symptom of the second class status of women, there is also an aspect which is worthy of celebration: the loss of privilege and status based on an outdated English class system.

Finally, the ending of the film needed to be brought into the present in order to remain true to Virginia Woolf’s use of real-time at the end of the novel (where the story finishes just as she puts down her pen to finish the book). Coming up to the present day meant acknowledging some key events of the 20^th century--the two world wars, the electronic revolution—the contraction of space through time reinvented by speed. But the film ends somewhere between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.

-Sally Potter on her adaptation of Woolf's novel

Continuous Monument by Superstudio

2009-08-26T11:34:00.001-07:00

With these intense exaggerations of form and city, they were commentaries on contemporary conditions, almost as a science fiction writer will almost inevitably write about today when depicting visions of tomorrow

Superstudio was founded by five architects in Florence in 1966, and became the most poetic and incisive group to come out of Italy in the ensuing decade. Their purely theoretical drawings from The Continuous Monument series illustrate their conviction that by extending a single piece of architecture over the entire world they could "put cosmic order on earth." In the urban context, The New York Extrusion extends the city's profile over a section of Manhattan, and grafts nature to it by reflecting the blue sky in tops of the buildings. In the other drawings, there are white, gridded, monolithic structures that span the natural landscape to assert rational order upon it. Superstudio saw this singular unifying act, unlike many modern utopian schemes, as nurturing rather than obliterating the natural world.

text via City of Sound and MOMA

Church of Solitude

2009-08-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

Gaetano Pesce’s Church of Solitude was conceived in reaction to his experience of New York in the 1970s, where he saw people living together, “helter-skelter in crowds.” To provide a serene place for introspection and contemplation, he buried the church beneath a vacant lot amid the towers of the city. The silent sanctuary incorporated small individual cells, a further retreat from the city’s corporate and institutional culture. An excavated landscape was, for Pesce, an overlooked space that could provide for people’s future needs

via MOMA

Emma Kunz

2009-08-21T23:13:00.001-07:00

Born into a family of Swiss weavers in 1892, visionary artist Emma Kunz created pulsing, mandala-like grids which she regularly used as instruments of healing. Abstract, lush, enigmatic and illusionistic, each diagram was reportedly drawn by Kunz in a single sitting. The Emma Kunz Center hosts an online gallery of her astonishing work.

"The time will come when my pictures will be understood," said Kunz. "[They] are destined for the 21st century."

via Tomorrowland, butdoestifloat.com & The Catalyst

Sileuta series by Ana Mendieta

2009-08-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

Magic Realism/Surrealism

2009-08-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

Leonora Carrington

2009-08-17T22:08:00.001-07:00

Petah Coyne

2009-08-14T21:57:00.001-07:00

Condensation Cube

2009-08-14T21:50:00.001-07:00

...make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable...
...make something indeterminate, that always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely...
...make something that cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment...
...make something sensitive to light and temperature changes, that is subject to air currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity...
...make something the spectator handles, an object to be played with and thus animated...
...make something that lives in time and makes the “spectator” experience time...
...articulate something natural...

-Hans Haacke, 1965

Edith Sitwell by Wyndham Lewis

2009-08-11T01:22:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Bishop

2009-08-11T01:13:00.000-07:00

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Anna Akhmatova

2009-08-11T01:09:00.000-07:00

Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?

Environmental factors

2009-08-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

Architects Jarmund/Vignaes

Elina Brotherus

2009-08-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

elinabrotherus.com

Jenny Kristina Nilsson

2009-08-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

jennykristina.com

Sustainable Minimalism

2009-08-10T19:22:00.001-07:00

Brendeland and Kristoffersen
via lifeiscarbon

More Bergman

2009-08-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

I am so 100 percent Swedish... Someone has said a Swede is like a bottle of ketchup — nothing and nothing and then all at once — splat. I think I'm a little like that. And I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish — I don't dislike to be alone.

En Passion

2009-08-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

Winter Light

2009-08-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

I love everything Ingmar Bergman did

She came to rest at a green place in the dark woods

2009-08-08T01:15:00.000-07:00

Kay Nielsen, East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Kay Sage

2009-08-08T01:03:00.001-07:00

Deluge

2009-08-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

Climate change has produced a succession of very wet summers in the UK with widespread flooding. Building higher flood defensives is increasingly considered uneconomical and results in homes that can no longer be insured or sold. Tomorrow's poor will live by the scenic water's edge.

John Goto - High Summer

Wandering Turtle by Brodsky & Utin

2009-08-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

Via Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Ryan Browning

2009-08-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

Here

dumb angel paper dress / dark

2009-08-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Tracciamenti

Anna Akhmatova by Nathan Altman

2009-08-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Marina Tsvetaeva

2009-08-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

I – am. You – will be. An abyss between us.
I drink. You thirst. In vain, we try to agree.
Ten years between us, a hundred thousand
Years between us. – God builds no bridges.

Be! – that’s my commandment! Let me pass,
So that my breath doesn’t hinder your growth.
I – am. You – will be. Ten springs from now,
You’ll say: - I am! – and I will say: - once was...

Swoon will arrive at the Venice Biennale on a boat made from NYC trash

2009-06-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

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