This is an important thing to know about life.
(Source: think-different-think-freely)
In 沈少民 Shen Shaomin’s “Bonsai” series, he has created a group of sculptures using the techniques of cultivating bonsai. Inspired by foot-binding, this work speaks about violence, control, deformation, artificial transformation of nature and the body for aesthetic purposes. Shen contorts and manipulates his miniature trees through the use of metal grips, vices, braces, clamps, metal meshes and armatures, trapping the plants and inhibiting their growth, while being contained in ceramic pots labeled with poetic terms/phrases and decorated with peaceful and heavenly landscape imagery.
Wu Hung writes: “Shen Shaomin turns invisible violence into tangible forms in his Bonsai series. Bonsai makes us reconsider the brutality in daily life, particularly that which has been transformed into kinds of aesthetic perception or concealed within nature itself. This group of works achieves its efficacy not because it displays the results of these man-made transformations, but makes apparent the process of transformation itself. Shen Shaomin uses two means for achieving this. First, the bonsais themselves display a sudden halt in the “process” like a freeze-frame in a movie, where all the small trees have been imprisoned in ironware, and hang like prisoners chained and shackled. Shen Shaomin calls these works “living installations. Collectors can choose to let them return to their original state or maintain this process. Even when the bonsai dies, these installations will still record the process and mechanisms behind their transformation. The second means is through texts: every bonsai is accompanied by a meticulously designed course of study. Dense passages and illustrations record how bonsais are made, and the procedures and matters needing attention.”
Artist’s website: Shen Shaomin
Sources: Art Practical, ArtSlant
Uhhh. someone handed me this comic book earlier and I don’t know, I think something is wrong with it.
Pyramids.
Digital Collages of People Climbing Stairs by Jiyen Lee via MMM
Korean artist Jiyen Lee has created a series of hypnotizing digital collages that present people going up and down stairs, as seen from a bird’s eye view. Each puzzling assemblage features an unidentifiable traffic of pedestrians on an endless journey. It also remains unclear whether they are actually ascending or descending the steps in front of them, as Lee has taken the artistic liberty of reconfiguring images in unimaginable compositions. Like an M. C. Escher painting, the artist’s digitally manipulated images present a saturation of staircases with no perceivable beginning or end.
(Source: cineraria)
Hollywood Hospital, Wednesday 12 August 1959
Before the hippies discovered LSD, an eccentric and enigmatic millionaire, “Doctor” Al Hubbard, was giving it out like candy to influential people, including Aldous Huxley, local Catholic church big wigs, and researchers. Hubbard believed the psychedelic drug had enormous therapeutic and spiritual potential, and he set up Dr J Ross MacLean to use it for treatment at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster. MacLean found the drug effective in treating alcoholism, but less so for treating homosexuality. Some high profile patients rumoured to have received LSD treatment at Hollywood Hospital before it shut down the program in the early 70s include BC Socred cabinet ministers and Cary Grant. For the full story, see “Acid Al.”
Source: Todd Brendan Fahey, “Captain Tripps,” via declarepeace.org.uk
I turn 29 on January 4th but I think I’ll still feel like I’m 11.
Trust me, Stamgirl, 43 still feels like 11 too.
(Source: aseaofquotes)
GPOY
the incredible Folies Bergère tracking shot in William A Wellman’s Wings
Work by Jason Padgett, a man with Acquired Savant Syndrome who now sees all of reality as mathematical fractals describable by equations.
About:
The beauty of numbers and their connection to the pure geometry of space time and the universe is shown in his fractal diagrams…He is currently studying how all fractals arise from limits and how E=MC2 is itself a fractal. When he first started drawing he had no traditional math training and could only draw what he saw as math. Eventually a physicist saw his drawings and helped him get traditional mathematics training to be able to describe in equations the complex geometry of his drawings. He is currently a student studying mathematics in Washington state where he is learning traditional mathematics so he can better describe what he sees in a more traditional form. Many of the captions were written before he had any traditional math training. His drawing of E=MC^2 is based on the structure of space time at the quantum level and is based on the concept that there is a physical limit to observation which is the Planck length. It shows how at the smallest level, the structure of space time is a fractal…So sit back and enjoy the beauty of naturally occuring mathematics in pure geometric form connecting E=MC2 (energy) to art. All are HAND DRAWN using only a pencil, ruler and compass.
Mesmerizing.
(Source: solar-fever)
