Remarkable Kinesthetics of Artist Heather Hansen

Image credits: She Stretches And Twists Her Body On A White Canvas. Slowly, I Realized What She Was Doing...

The Meta-Creativity of Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, she selects a topic and then paints it--literally. She covers everything in a scene--people, chairs, food, you name it--in a mask of paint that mimics what's below it. In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of the more outlandish results, and shares a new project involving people, paint and milk.

Reference: Alexa Meade: Your body is my canvas.

Alexa Meade’s portraits spring from a long-term fascination with the illusions inherent in representational media. Rather than paint on canvas, she applies paint directly to her subjects -- the people, as well as the objects surrounding them and the background. She then photographs the ephemeral installation/painting. The resulting optically treacherous portraits collapse the subject, foreground and background into one continuous plane, challenging the perceptual boundaries between 2D and 3D.

Reference: Alexa Meade: Visual Artist.

A couple of years ago, I began a poetry collection that I came to call `Canvas of the Body.  It was inspired by Arezu Karoobi's curious, remarkable photography: Arezu and the Intentionally Obscured Object of Autobiography.  That collection is very much alive, even though it is dormant on that proverbial shelf.

I think an artist can be a paradigm on a concept I call meta-innovation.  Innovation gets to be so staid, it seems, that people in organizations need to innovate the very notion and process of innovation itself.  Simply, an artist, by nature, is creative.  But can he or she engage in meta-creativity?  Alexa Meade can, and does, and her work adds life to my poetry collection.

Liu Bolin and the Theme of Invisibility

Can a person disappear in plain sight? That's the question Liu Bolin's remarkable work seems to ask. The Beijing-based artist is sometimes called "The Invisible Man" because in nearly all his art, Bolin is front and center — and completely unseen. He aims to draw attention to social and political issues by dissolving into the background.

Reference: Liu Bolin: The invisible man.

Artist Liu Bolin began his "Hiding in the City" series in 2005, after Chinese police destroyed Suo Jia Cun, the Beijing artists' village in which he'd been working, because the government did not want artists working and living together. With the help of assistants, he painstakingly painted his clothes, face, and hair to blend into the background of a demolished studio. 

Since then, the so-called "Invisible Man" has photographed himself fading into a variety of backgrounds all over Beijing. Spot him embedded in a Cultural Revolution slogan painted on a wall, or spy him within tiers of supermarket shelves stocked with soft drinks. Just as with Bolin himself, the contradictions and confusing narratives of China's post-Cultural Revolution society are often hiding in plain sight.

Reference: Liu Bolin: Artist.

From these remarkable works by Bolin, I associate to very different notions of invisibility.  First, Invisible Man, a novel by Ralph Ellison, speaks to the struggle for group and individual identity, in the midst of discrimination and disavowal.

Second, in the Wall Street Journal article Behold the Appearance of the Invisibility Cloak, we learn how things appear or become visible: that is, through the bouncing of light from those things to our eyes.  But physicists, based on General Theory of Relativity, can bend light around things, essentially making them invisible.

Third, the film Hollow Man tells the story of young scientists playing around in the lab and coming up with an invisibility serum.  What happens is the stuff of boyhood fantasy and crime novels.

So where does Bolin and this theme of invisibility take me?

Let's see.

Pauvre Coeur, by Jillette Johnson

Pauvre Coeur, by Jillette Johnson

For this week, I ask you to read these lyrics for two reasons.  One, something handwritten is a call to remember a time when the very medium on which we spoke to each other was, in and of itself, special and personal.  So read in that spirit.  Two, words printed as such have music in them.  Listen for it, listen to it.

Jillette Johnson

Torpedo, by Jillette Johnson

Torpedo, by Jillette Johnson

For this week, I ask you to read these lyrics for two reasons.  One, something handwritten is a call to remember a time when the very medium on which we spoke to each other was, in and of itself, special and personal.  So read in that spirit.  Two, words printed as such have music in them.  Listen for it, listen to it.

Jillette Johnson

Cameron, by Jillette Johnson

Cameron, by Jillette Johnson

For this week, I ask you to read these lyrics for two reasons.  One, something handwritten is a call to remember a time when the very medium on which we spoke to each other was, in and of itself, special and personal.  So read in that spirit.  Two, words printed as such have music in them.  Listen for it, listen to it.  

Jillette Johnson

Dance with your Face

Reference: 55 Just Gorgeous Dance Photo Manipulation Artworks (And Tutorials!).

Language of Dance Inspires

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Dance Photography, by Nico Socha

Dance is sensual and athletic.  Dance is expressive and erotic.  Dance is graceful and grueling.    

Photography, by Nico Socha.