When looking at the work of South Korea’s 최수앙 (Choi Xoo-Ang — or Choi Soo-Ang, if you are to use a more typical romanization), one might envision creepily realistic human forms life-sized enough to hug and share sympathies with. It turns out that Choi’s figures are actually tiny resin sculptures worked over meticulously with oil paints, to a degree so remarkable there might be a painting milestone in there somewhere.

Though you will not find much in the way of English articles about Choi’s works, rest assured that they are commentary on human empathy and lack thereof, selfishness and presence of, and the contradictions present everywhere around us, in modern “civilized” society.

Please visit DalJin to see more photos of Choi’s works.
Please visit Slash to read a great English language article, entitled A Shaman of Our Time, Choi Xooang.

The prayer flags in this image are wind horses; they are called རླུང་རྟ་ — or lungta. They serve as an allegory for the human soul, and now ritually used as a symbol of well-being and good fortune in Tibet.

The mountain range of Mount Ti Se (གངས་ཏེ་སེའི་རི་རྒྱུད or gangs te se’i ri rgyud/ gangté serigyü). Also called the Kailash Mountain Range.

If your name is Jeff Diteman, you might be a Portland artist that has spent two years secretly crafting a series of oil paintings, waiting patiently until the opportune time and place to debut the complete collection of works. Now ready to be unveiled is Diteman’s The Fabbri Series; it will soon find displayed and celebrated with — not one, but four — events at GalleryHOMELAND.

The Fabbri Series references T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste Land. Diteman describes the idea behind its title:

The Fabbri Series takes its name from the dedication appended to the beginning of Eliot’s The Waste Land: “To Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro.” The most literal translation is “the better smith,” but when Pound had translated the phrase in the poem Eliot was quoting, he had rendered it as “the better craftsman”. Thus, the title of this series, pluralizing fabbro to fabbri, is intended to convey my respect for the skills of the craftspeople herein depicted.

The Fabbri Series squeezes well-known faces around Portland into scenarios and situations that are just a little bit unexpected, uncomfortable, and unusual. Included in the mix are musicians (Adam Baz and Patrick Phillips of BRAINSTORM; Kathy Foster of The Thermals; John Niekrasz and Seth Brown of Why I Must Be Careful; Brian Mumford of Dragging An Ox Through Water; Daniel Menche), dancers (Lucy Yim and Jim Camou; Linda Austin), and a lone poet (James Yeary).

With such a star-studded list — star-studded by Portland standards, in any case — the four events related to the Series are curatorial experiments which seem to make perfect sense. Below the next image, you’ll find a loose schedule of the events that have been planned so far (keep in mind they’re bound to change).

Events Related To The Fabbri Series

Friday, February 3rd: Opening reception curated by James Victor Yeary, and featuring Leo Daedalus, Anna Daedalus, Mack McFarland, David Weinberg and Mark Owens. A night of theatrical poetry in the Fluxus tradition, culminating in the ambient disaster Everything Must Go.

Friday, February 17th: Dance and music performance curated by Jin Camou, featuring Lucy Yim, Thicket, and Linda Austin.

Friday, March 2nd: Video dance performance featuring Jeff Diteman and Grace Nowakoski, other performers TBD.

Friday, March 23rd: Blowout closing party, performers TBD.

UK companies may have invented a earplug for you to shine directly into your brain to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder, but in Seattle, an exciting group show (featuring some REDEFINE favorites like Mandy Greer and No Touching Ground) is here to create warm fuzzies and give Seattlites a place to bathe in the energizing light of one another. The impressive gathering will be curated by Susan Robb, Sierra Stinson and Jim Demetre, with a focus on light, installation, and banishing the wintry blues.

Here are some sample images of what you might expect on January 28th and 29th!
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS; LOGO BY DANIEL CARRILLO AND SUSAN ROBB

Shaun Kardinal

Shaun Kardinal sews patterns and geometries into found materials, like a collage artist coming face to face with a weaver. The concept is certainly not mind-blowing, in retrospect, but no one else is doing it, and as such, Shaun’s works are little postcards of satisfaction. (Stay tuned for a more in-depth post about Shaun’s work, in isolation!)

Justin Lytle

Justin Lytle self-describes himself as being “interested in the deconstruction and re-evaluation of the found and familiar to reveal the beauty that lies within individuals that comprise a whole.” It’s no wonder, then, that this still image from one of his videos feels like a fractal web — though it is not — and shows the many iterations similar forms can take on within a singular composition. Like cotton candy, like clouds, like cell membranes… they all follow those same rules. (Editor’s Note: Correction, brought to our attention by Mr. Lytyle himself. This still is not from a video, but from a relief sculpture. Even better.)

Zack Bent

Mmm, lard hardening from oil into a white, creamy solid, condensed into a tasty morsel for your easy enjoyment. Says Zack Bent: “This past summer I was making lard for the first time and was inspired by aesthetic transformation that occurred. The process requires you to render pig’s fat by heating it until it becomes liquid. It is then strained off into jars where it slowly transforms from a clear golden liquid to a thickened cottony white substance. As a video this occurrence may go unnoticed or seem too slow for comprehension. However, I am interested in how this phenomenon contrasts our typical interaction with video, which has increasingly become more and more frenetic. In terms of the content, the slowness of the transformation also provides a mediation on change and growth. What might be perceived as stagnant may in fact be developing before our eyes.” (A similar approach was taken to this Eric Chenaux video I posted earlier this week.)

Graham Downing

Visit the website for a full schedule and more details!

Artists! The secret is out now, for everyone to actually see. A recent influx of works have certainly inferred that mirroring an image is satisfying to the mind’s eye, and that mirroring it and reversing it is arguably even more satisfying. Something about symmetry just fits in snugly into compartments of the brain, like a file cabinet of matching images. Well, Geographer is really, really exploiting this with his new track, “Kaleidoscope,” which comes with a phone app and website that takes the aforementioned satisfying image-creation clauses and executes them.

Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical when I first saw that the track was named “Kaleidoscope.” It seems a bit too overt. And am still skeptical, considering you get your image on the website if you hash-tag an image on Flickr or Twitter with #geographer (social media genius or a bit too overt?). Still, though, the point remains that this is just good wholesome fun. Here’s a miniature gallery below, which seriously proves that just about any photo dragged through this filter is immediately satisfying. It’s a love it or hate it thing, but I imagine that it will encourage artists who manually do a lot of this kind of work will soon find it too mainstream and look towards alternative patterns of art-making…

You can view the rest of this application at myth.geographermusic.com… where you can also listen to your record, if you don’t get overly distracted by the endlessly entertaining app.

Oh right, and about the music… I guess all there is to say is that there is an upcoming Modern Art tour, which begins March 1st, with Geographer, Miniature Tigers, The Chain Gang of 1974, Pretty & Nice and SPEAK…

MODERN ART TOUR DATES
3/1/12 Tractor Tavern Seattle, WA
3/2/12 Branx Portland, OR
3/3/12 The Independent San Francisco, CA
3/4/12 Troubadour Los Angeles(West Hollywood), CA
3/6/12 The Casbah San Diego, CA
3/7/12 Club Congress Tucson, AZ
3/8/12 The Crescent Ballroom Phoenix, AZ
3/16/12 The Prophet Bar Dallas, TX
3/17/12 Fitzgerald’s Houston, TX
3/19/12 The Social Orlando, FL
3/20/12 The Masquerade-Purgatory Atlanta, GA
3/21/12 Nightlight Chapel Hill, NC
3/22/12 DC9 Washington D.C.
3/23/12 Milkboy Philadelphia, PA
3/24/12 Brighton Music Hall Boston(Bridgton), MA
3/25/12 Bowery Ballroom New York, NY
3/27/12 Club AE Pittsburg, PA
3/28/12 Grog Shop Cleveland Heights, OH
3/29/12 The Intersection Grand Rapids, MI
3/30/12 Schubas Tavern Chicago, IL
3/31/12 Off Broadway St. Louis, CO
4/2/12 The Black Sheep Colorado Springs, CO
4/3/12 Marquis Theatre Denver, CO
4/5/12 Beauty Bar Las Vegas, NV

Sometimes there are images that speak volumes despite their complexity of form, or even of concept. It seems photographer Eric Cahan gets around — and his minimal photographs of the sky, which document sunsets on the East Coast, West Coast, and locations in-between, present a spectrum of natural variety that defies expectation. Surely everyone knows that sunsets can be breath-taking, but when isolated sunsets are viewed with an entire collection of same-but-different relatives, they daintily scratch an itch you may have never noticed before.

Flying Point Beach, Southampton, NY
Sunset 7:51pm

Sea Cliff, San Francisco, CA
Sunrise 6:57am

Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, NY
Sunset 8:10pm

Palm Beach, FL
Sunrise 6:33am

San Paulo, Brazil
Sunrise 6:55am

Bridgehampton, NY
Sunset 7:48pm

World-renowned Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere makes sculptures that challenge the idea of bodily form, of becoming and unbecoming. Using organic and inorganic materials, she creates mangled figures that truly should never be — headless, eyeless, and sexless forms that speak novels of pain by way of contortion.

Her sculptures from The Black Horse series were crafted in 2003 from polyurethane foam, horse hide, wood, and iron. Each horse’s lack of eyes and sex stresses the importance of the “body” as a complete whole. “The glossiness of their skin underscores all of the things that are covered and hidden, a sensual, almost tender casing for these uncomfortable shapes,” describes Saatchi Gallery.

(Don’t worry; all skins and hides were sourced from horses that died of natural deaths.)

From there, she has moved onto more human works that, though comprised of less organic materials like wax, epoxy, metal, wood and glass, illicit the same sense of discomfort. About the image below, Marthe, she describes the importance, again, of ingesting the whole being: “It is not because you never see a head that it looks like it has been cut off. It is, rather, that I no longer think the presence of a head is necessary. The figure as a whole is a mental state. The presence or absence of a head is irrelevant.”

These unsettling images below are from a recent show in Montreal, at DHC-ART.

Showing in the back room, Michelle Devereux is similarly doing a love-it or hate-it job with her well-rendered images of dudes skateboarding on pizza. I don’t know, man.