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Tuesday , January 12, 2010

We're Obsessed: Nick Cave's Soundsuits, Now Invading L.A.

Lately I'm into costumes, like wearing facepaint or buying old seafoam-green floral-collared minidresses that make me look like a go-go dancer on her way to Sunday school. My dream costume, though, is the above piece from Nick Cave's "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" exhibition (on display now through May 30 at UCLA's Fowler Museum). It's one of the collection's 35 "soundsuits" - wearable sculptures made from materials like vintage toys, sequins, and bottle caps, and (as Kat explained a while back) worn for Cave's modern-dance performances. I went to the opening last Saturday night and wanted real bad but to jump right into the bird-branch soundsuit (which can be seen in full here), as well as the one at the bottom right (which shall henceforth be known as the "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" soundsuit, btw).

And I wonder if, given LJ's ornithophobia, it would totally bug her out if I wore the bird sculpture next time we get together? Would the kitty-cat mask offset her terror, or just intensify it all the more? These be the questions one must ask oneself, before slipping into a full-body suit made of pretend birds and beads and other beautiful objects.

So: the Fowler's open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and Thursday from noon to 8 p.m.; admission's free. Get there fast as you can, and check the Fowler's Twitter for times and locations for upcoming soundsuit dance performances.

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Tags: art, Barker loves the Beatles, birds, dance, L.A. goings-on, Nick Cave but not that Nick Cave, textiles

Wednesday , January 6, 2010

Random Picture Entry: Charley Harper

Why did no one tell me about Charley Harper earlier in my life?!!!! I confess that I don't know much about illustrators as I'd like, but I saw Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life at Barnes & Nobles and was floored by how bold and whimsical his work is. It's one of those things where you just have an instinctive reaction to it, and my particular instinctive reaction was pure happiness and joy. How can you not feel these emotions when you look at his stylized, utterly charming drawings and paintings of wildlife? I love the color sense of his illustrations, and the way they have both simplicity and complexity: the forms themselves are simple, but the arrangement of elements in the space has an intricacy that makes you feel like you are looking at the world's happiest puzzles. I'm especially fond of his illustrations of birds, and he must have been awfully fond of winged creatures as well, because he drew and painted many of them.

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Tags: birds, Charley Harper, illustration

Wednesday , November 4, 2009

Love: Envelop

This is one of those sites that makes me rue the fact that I don't live in Europe! Belgium-based Envelop takes artist- and member-created graphics and patterns and applies them to all sorts of sundry articles: aprons, place mats, tote bags, basically anything that is a textile. Normally, you'd get a bunch of "I'M WITH STUPID" logos plastered on coffee mugs, but not with Envelop -- they vet their patterns, so everything has a certain level of visual quality. I have to say, the results are pretty stunning, especially if you have a strange fixation with really cool aprons like me. The site's fairly new so the selection may not be super-extensive (yet), and I'm waiting anxiously for someone to design a really cool duvet. But the site's relative youth (they're still in beta) just means there's more room for all you artist, illustrator and graphic designer types out there to become a member and submit your work. I'm only sad that I have only dollars and not euros, but they do ship worldwide. Still, if only I could live in Europe...

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Tags: aprons, artists, Envelop

Tuesday , July 21, 2009

Yo, Toronto! Go See Sonja Ahlers' Installation at Magic Pony!

L TO R: Walruses! I love walruses!; Cool paper house things made out of Sweet Valley High books, The Female Eunuch, and Watership Down; Mountains! Mount Everest! I love Mount Everest!

Toronto-based artist/genius/all-around-awesome human being Sonja Elizabeth Ahlers has been one of my dream best friends (second only to Keith Moon!) since I was a wee bairn on a school-bus to the Stratford Festival, back in '01. I'd picked up one of Sonja's gorgeous, hand-sewn zines at Canzine, and it was the COOLEST THING IN THE WORLD. I sat alone, poring over it, listening to Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney and fantasizing about how awesome it would be to, like, not be sixteen.

Right now, Sonja has a crazy immensely gorgeous installation up at Magic Pony (694 Queen Street West, @ Manning), one of those stores that I am usually not allowed to go into because it makes me want to blow all my non-money on Japanese toys shaped like smiling squares of tofu and etc. I checked out Sonja's lovely window display, called "Skid," with my Mom, who thought it ruled. Even Moms love Sonja Ahlers!

PS: In addition to being crazy immensely talented, Sonja Ahlers is one of the most crazy immensely sweet and positive people I've ever met in my life. Also, Sonja made me Wrangler! Here is a picture of me and Wrangler. I am kissing Wrangler, but it kind of looks like I am eating Wrangler. But I'm not! I would never eat Wrangler!

Tags: art, loveliness, Magic Pony, Sonja Ahlers, Toronto, Wrangler

Tuesday , February 24, 2009

Something Awesome You Wish You'd Thought Of: Facebook Status Updates in Cartoon Form!

Dudes, I'm squealing with joy at having been included in "Everyone We Know: Portraits of Facebook Status Updates," Marissa Falco's contribution to The Sketchbook Project. Marissa made brilliantly daffy cartoons out of status updates from 32 of her friends, including me and our very own Meggy Wang, plus nogoodforme buddy-pals like Thara Harris, Amanda Wheeler, Teri V., Laura Fisher, and Anke Weckmann. Apparently the Sketchbook Project's going on tour very soon (like, this week), so if you live in Atlanta, D.C., Philly, Boston, St. Louis, or Brooklyn, definitely check out the homepage for info - and lemme know if you'd be interested in having me fashion a cardboard likeness of myself for you to take along to the show and fulfill Marissa's wish of getting photos of all her subjects flanked by their cartoons.

P.S. My update references a lyric from "The Mummy" by Benji Hughes, whom I love mostly because Emily Richmond told me I had to (and also because he makes really great songs). Listen now! Listen forever!

Tags: Benji Hughes, cartoons, Facebook, genius art projects, Liz Barker, Marissa Falco, Meggy Wang, mummies

Wednesday , February 4, 2009

Random Picture Entry: The Art of Alice Neel

Lately I have been way into the artwork of Alice Neel, not only as fashion inspiration but as inspiration in general. Neel had a crazy life, full of lots of intense, volatile marriages, political activism, a nervous breakdown, and of course some stunning art-making: her portraiture -- of everyone from neighbors to lovers to celebrities -- is arresting, focused, psychologically acute and unsparing in its honesty. She kept to her style no matter what was happening in the art world, and she made art for a long, long time until her death in 1984.

Every detail in her paintings served to amplify her sense of who the sitter was, and when I look at her work, I'm amazed at how much interiority -- and how much sociopolitical detail -- she is able to evoke with such small details. Even though clothes are not the "point" of her work, I do love the way they amplify character in her paintings, and it would be fascinating for a fashion historian to look at the clothes of each subject in her paintings in context of interpreting the work. I like the severe lines of the shift dress in Priscilla Johnson -- they speak to the subject's aspirational sense of womanhood, but there's a look in her eye that is kinda proto-riot grrrl:

And I love this youthful quirkiness of the green tights and black-and-white dress next to the super-serious faces of Swedish Girls -- for some reason, this feels very Northern European to me, this juxtaposition of pattern and color against a seemingly innate melancholy:

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Tags: Alice Neel, art, feminism, inspiration, paintings

Thursday , January 15, 2009

To Go: Nick Cave (Not THAT Nick Cave) at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC

Sorry dudes, it's not the epically Goth, lanky Australian Nick Cave that we all know and love. This particular Nick Cave is an artist and professor in Chicago, and he makes pretty astonishing art, which you can catch RIGHT THIS MINUTE at Jack Shainman Gallery in Nueva York. Anyone with an interest in textiles, crafts, dance and even African/Caribbean art would find Cave's work fascinating: he makes what he calls "soundsuits" out of basically anything that can be sewn onto something: plants, twigs, tchotchkes, fabrics, sequins, bric-brac, etc. They're worn as costumes for his modern dance performances, but seeing them in person, they work on you as sculpture -- the scale of them (BIG) makes them fascinating and even a bit fearsome. (To paraphrase my friend Megan at the opening, things without faces are a little freaky, no?) I was at the opening and didn't stay long enough to take a look at them closely, but I returned a few days later and was super-impressed with their detail, their craftsmanship and their sense of color and texture. I also have the urge to break into the gallery to glue giant googly-eyes onto them, but that's just me. Anyway, if you can brave the cold snap in NYC, I highly recommend checking it out.

Here's a video of Nick Cave talking about his work -- plus you can see the soundsuits in motion, which is pretty dope (PLUS you can see the adorable Thelma Golden, chief curator of the AWESOME Studio Museum of Harlem):

Tags: art, New York City, Nick Cave but not that Nick Cave, textiles

Tuesday , November 11, 2008

Random Picture Entry: Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois is my hero for a lot of reasons. There's her work as an artist -- a highly varied milieu of sculpture, drawing, installation and painting that is surreal, mischievous, audacious, personal and oddly secretive in its form and content. There's the fact that she's been making art for so long -- she had her first exhibition in 1947 and worked in relative obscurity through the 50s and 60s until achieving mainstream success in the 1970s. And at age 96, she's still making work, some of which was recently shown at her full-career retrospective at the Guggenheim here in New York this fall. (If still making interesting work as a nonagenarian isn't awesome and awe-inspiring, I have no idea what is.)

It was great seeing her monumental sculpture work as part of the Guggenheim exhibition -- she was one of the few female sculptors working in such 'dude' materials as bronze and marble for awhile, using them to render these strangely sexy biomorphic forms -- but I never fully appreciated her connection to textiles till the Guggenheim exhibition. She grew up in a family of tapestry makers, and because her work is so much about personal memory, clothes play a prominent role in a lot of her installation work. (She's also returned to working with fabric in her latest creations as a result of her advanced years -- she made the best lil' baby spider sculpture out of tapestry fabrics!) I've been really intrigued and inspired by these vintage clothes -- careworn muslims, touches of handmade lace, a very 1940s sense of delicacy and propriety. It's both sober, yet very beautiful in its simplicity -- the same of which can be said about pictures of the young Bourgeois herself. Check my newest fashion inspiration:

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Saturday , October 11, 2008

To Go: "Beautifully Worn" Fashion Photo Show, Opening Reception Oct. 15, 2008

The rock keeps on rolling at nogoodforme.com. No sooner than we recovered from the bliztkrieg of fun known as Spirit Animal House than we got on the proverbial ball to curate and organize our very first art show! We are super-stoked and very proud to announce that BEAUTIFULLY WORN is going up next Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at NYC boutique Clarabella. And we graciously invite all of you lovely people to come to the opening reception that very same day from 6-9pm, where there will be refreshments and two of the nogoodforme troika in attendance! We are truly amped to show you all the photos we collected from various good souls who sent in images and words responding to our question "What do you love to wear?" The results will charm the pants off of you, we guarantee it. If you can't make the opening, the show will continue to grace Clarabella's walls until November 30, when we take down the photos and the apocalypse comes. Or something like that.

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Tags: art, Beautifully Worn, invitation, opening reception

Monday , September 22, 2008

Love, Love, Love: Gunta Stolzl Tapestries/The Textile Blog

Dude! I have been waiting impatiently for good-quality images of Gunta Stolzl's tapestries to make their way onto the Internet since I first found out she existed, which occurred at approximately 9:30 in the morning sometime during the spring of 2005. I remember this because it happened when I took a Feminist Art & Design elective at Parsons School of Design, and you, or I, can never forget which classes began at 9 AM- so many memories! Running out the door in pyjamas and unbrushed teeth; sleeping through Powerpoint presentations; waking up at dawn to finish term papers; etc. FA&D was one of maybe four classes I took over the course of my entire career as a Parsons student that wasn't completely corrupt Normie white-kkkollar garbage. Whoopsie daisies! WHY DID I NOT MAJOR IN BURNING DOWN CHURCHES??

In addition to being a Bavarian-born Pisces, Gunta Stolzl was most notably the Bauhaus' weaving master. Something I learned a lot about in Feminist Art & Design is how the Bauhaus was totally fuckedly sexist for pretty much forcing its female students to be weaving/textiles majors. Obviously yes, I grasp why this was messed-up, but seriously? The girls won in the end. Gunta Stolzl was ten trillion times the genius that dumbass Walter "I Heart the Patriarchy" Gropius was, I mean, wasn't.

The textiles seen above were created between the years 1926 and 1927, and are uncannily proto-psychedelic! Gunta Stolzl should have designed record covers for the Great! Society (or maybe Blood is the New Black t-shirts HA HA HA). I really wish I could resurrect Gunta Stolzl and make her design my entire life (right down to the toothbrushes!); I also wish that little girls were encouraged to decorate their seven-year-old bedrooms in fabrics and fibers that look like those pictured above as opposed to polyester Unicorn Fairy Barbie bedspreads and Bratz-brand plastic makeup mirrors. Oh, well. If I don't let these things go, they will destroy me.

It is very important to note that these images were grabbed from The Textile Blog, my third-favorite blog on the entire Internet after nogoodforme.com and Emily's Tumblr. It is one of the most intelligent, informative and (SCORE!!!) frequently-updated blogs around this town (this town= the entire Internet); I personally check it so much that I often get paranoid that the dude who runs it checks out his sitetracker and thinks, "This girl from Toronto should probably expand her blogospheric horizons instead of consistently checking mine fifty times daily." It is also thanks to The Textile Blog that my UFC Updates look so fly every week. Almost every single background image is ripped from The Textile Blog.

PS: The Textile Blog has an even more comprehensive Flickr page which is like the Dylan's Candy Bar of textiles.

PPS: One last thing on the Gunta Stolzl tip: she was Anni Albers' mentor. Anni Albers is my favorite person of all time who wasn't in the Beatles: SEE?????

Tags: Anni Albers, Bauhaus, girl-positive, Gunta Stolzl, I hate school, textiles, The Textile Blog

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