Passerines (Chicago)

Living Room Sounds: Passerines from Jack Lawrence Mayer on Vimeo.

Perked up by these gorgeous sounds from a living room in Chicago.

Film: Wood Green Jazz Club (1956)

Video: Henning Strassburger's "I like my style."

Henning Strassburger is a cool dude. This is hilarious.

His show with Wendy White, "So Athletic," just opened in Berlin. Check it.

New News: Updates from January 2012

Recent and fun things include:

* Photos from the excellent London Artifice / ILK reading are up here.

* Some really exciting print and publishing projects are in the works for my return to Chicago this summer.

* I now have two author WorldCat library entries, which is pretty neat.

* A review of mine was published in the newest edition of Art in Print, on Richard Deacon's prints from Paragon Press.

* My 2011 poetry collection, Grow No Moss, was recently accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection.

* I've been invited to be the juror for the 2012 Mid-America Print Council exhibition, to be held this spring at Spudnik Press. Quite looking forward to seeing lots of new printmedia work!

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Madame Cézanne with striped skirt, c.1877, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

I've been researching a bunch for school, and after thinking so much about Picasso's 1912 use of printed paper collage last term, I've become very interested in the use of printed, painted wallpaper in early modernist painting and portraiture. I'm starting to realize just how bizarre it looks. This is especially after seeing the Cézanne et Paris exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg (Paris) a month ago—an excellent show.

Wallpaper: it was everywhere for a long time! And now it is nowhere! I'm headed to the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Art Library for more explorations later this week. Very exciting.

Art in Print (Issue 5) Review: Richard Deacon at Paragon Press

British sculptor Richard Deacon’s newest prints from Paragon Press are, at first glance, linear and flat in the Greenbergian sense of the word, refusing illusion and emphasizing the frontal surface of the picture plane. Based on a series of drawings Deacon completed in 2008 while on a trip to Mali, these monochrome, fractured polygons in metallic red, blue, silver, and gold reference the African patterns and architecture of the capital Bamako, a city in which maps have little function and buildings serve as the main points of reference. The angular lines of the Bamako prints echo the nesting loops of Deacon’s twisting geodesic sculptures, but set against flat white paper rather than within the spatial context of a surrounding environment. The Bamako prints become cross sections, laser-thin dissections of Deacon’s three-dimensional work. Yet despite this deceptive flatness, without a trace of relief embossing the ink stands heavy, with a velvet surface subtly mottled by the pull of the paper from the block.

The plates have been subtly rotated and layered, forcing depth in the diamond-shapes where color overlaps—the metallic ink forces you to move around the prints, to look from many angles, to consider them spatially, and it is this bodily effect that returns Deacon’s line to sculpture.

—Julia V. Hendrickson, for Art in Print, vol. 1, no. 5

Music: Lianne La Havas / No Room For Doubt

She is lovely. Has a nice range, and sounds a bit like Feist.