image via Cinco Design
Trunk show of Nixon watches designed by Portland’s Cinco Design tonight, Tuesday December 16 from 6-8 PM at OFFICE (2204 NE Alberta). Cinco will be presenting color/finishes/materials and doing a special presentation on all things Nixon and design, including insight on how they keep the product fresh; plus 15% off all Nixon watches that night.
“Beats are not created by me. I am beats.”
Viewed first on idnworld.com, this beautiful vid of Chinese beatboxers, YB Box trailer by Wieden + Kennedy China, made my day. I will never tire of beatboxing (Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew changed my life), but what makes this extra is the kind of cross-cultural pollination that this exemplifies. We may lament that the French love Jerry Lewis, but how can you not love Chinese kids embracing hiphop culture and feeding it back to the West. May the circle be unbroken, dog.
Perhaps this doesn’t happen to you: getting completely overwhelmed to the point of paralysis at the video store, music store…at Powell’s or a restaurant with a killer (and lengthy) menu. There’s so much! It’s all so good. How. Can. You. Ever. Make. A. Decision. ?!?
But if it does, the riches awaiting you at Crafty Wonderland’s Super Colossal Holiday Sale tomorrow, Sunday, December 14th from 11 AM to 7 PM at The Oregon Convention Center (777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd) may be almost too much. The fact that it’s at the Convention Center should tip you off that it’s going to be gigantic.
Here’s a little guide to some highlights that should make your visit more manageable and visit you will because you’ll be able to find gifts for many on your list while supporting local makers. You’ll find apparel, art, lots of soft goods and jewelry, lots of screenprinting, sewn things and in general, you can expect handmade goods that skew cute/sweet like the Woolie above, made from recycled wool knits, who is going to be a present for a certain little someone we know.
This vase by Phebe Miller of 5 PM Studio would love to be on my bureau, but I’m going to give it to a friend. The midnight blue knit bandana from Machete Designs is for me…everything midnight blue right now).
Okay and if I’m honest, this handprinted linen pincushion from Chet and Dot (because I have linen on the brain…out of season, I know) would also be for me, but luckily, I know lots of girls who could also use somewhere to stick a pin so I’ll enjoy your enjoyment ladies.
Tender Loving Empire (NW 1720 NW Lovejoy #109) represents with graphic t’s for girls and boys and likely music and book projects as well. See also t’s from Monsieur T and Sam Trout.
And Fernworks jewelry will likely be the most sublime work you’ll see at Wonderland. Lovely. Truly.
There are, I think, more than a hundred vendors at the sale. Bring your list, check it twice. See you there.
God this sounds good: “Using science fiction more as a point of departure than a rigid formula for making, the work in [IMPOSSIBLE INSTRUMENTS / FUTURE FLAGS, "organized" by Nathaniel T. Price] is uncanny, as it challenges how the strange manifests in the human experience and ways the future is seen.” I don’t even care if it proves to be a slushy armature for a show, I’m all for more sci fi, esp. as divorced from its usually context, AND I’m a devoted futurist (in every sense of the word…from F.T. Marinetti to R. Buckminster Fuller). So I’ll be seeing this show at Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd) opening tonight, Friday, December 12, with a reception from 6-9 PM, not least because of the lineup of artists including Jo Jackson, Kristan Kennedy, Chris Johanson, M Blash, plus Alex Felton, Corey Lunn, Dana Dart-McLean, Rob Halverson, Steven Wirth, Nathaniel T. Price, Arnold J. Kemp and Bobo.
More from the press release below:
Alex Felton creates sculpture, drawings, and videos that he says resist facile identification with an end or product, underscoring instead the multitude of in-betweens of the studio. With nods to minimalism, architecture, and pop culture, Felton’s sculpture is an exploration of information and how it is processed. Chris Johanson uses mostly scavenged materials to create paintings and sculptures that speak about the beauty and the beastly sides of human existence. Humorous and often harshly frank, Johanson’s work is one part social critique and one part spiritual experimentation. Dana Dart-McLean describes the focus of her painting and drawing as historical textures and atypical history, concerning the personal life in a particular time versus representations of power purporting to be truth.
Artist, writer and curator Arnold J. Kemp’s paintings in this exhibition carry a distinct web-like abstraction, inspired by episode 309 of Star Trek, featuring a menacing galactic web made of shining filaments. Steven Wirth has created photographs that explore the relationships between the cosmos and man, the physical and incorporeal, the representational and the abstract. M Blash describes his obsessive pen and ink drawings as reactions to the perpetual failure of film language, a re-unification of the abstract narratives that dwell within him via the psychedelic landscape.
Bobo originally began as a performance art band, started by Nick Payne, Phil Cote, and Drew Gillespie. The current sculptural work of Bobo is derived from their interest in how the human mind is steadily cracking codes at the base of the natural internet, and the exposure of technology as nature and nature as a fully moldable interface. In her drawings, paintings, sculpture, and animations, Jo Jackson addresses the dualities of the human experience through a visual language culled from both appropriated and personal mythologies. Rob Halverson creates drawings, paintings, prints, and printed matter that are extremely reductive, cursorily detailed, yet expressively vigorous.
Nathaniel T. Price makes paintings and drawings of socially sensitive allegories. Often working from a list of freely associated objects, settings, and actions, Price carefully generates distinct personalities for the characters that work as the main communicative powers in the work. Referring to her own work as both view-scapes of the future and representing a re-ordering of the world by the way of the mark, Kristan Kennedy makes paintings and drawings of bulbous and visceral forms that are both alien and familiar. Corey Lunn’s obsessively articulated drawings and sculptures depict surreal landscapes, hybrid animals and the foibles of the common man. Lunn’s worlds are made up with equal parts dark comedy and social commentary.
You are the president I have been waiting for my whole life. Science lectures in the White House. Poetry readings in the White House. Music in the White House. Yes, when hard times are upon us we are well to remember what makes us great…we make great art, we innovate, we discover, we synthesize, and we swing. And this is the first time I’ve ever invoked any semblance of the trickle down theory…let art, culture, real science and the engaged intellect be ways that we enage our city as well…and ways our city engages citizen.
This transcript fragment from an interview of President Elect Barack (OMG) Obama by Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Meet the Press…”in 44 days, Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the United States…”
MR. BROKAW: Who are the kinds of artists that you would like to bring to the White House?
PRES.-ELECT OBAMA: …part of what we want to do is to open up the White House and, and remind people this is, this is the people’s house. There is an incredible bully pulpit to be used when it comes to, for example, education. Yes, we’re going to have an education policy. Yes, we’re going to be putting more money into school construction. But, ultimately, we want to talk about parents reading to their kids. We want to invite kids from local schools into the White House. When it comes to science, elevating science once again, and having lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars or breaking down atoms, inspiring our youth to get a sense of what discovery is all about. Thinking about the diversity of our culture and, and inviting jazz musicians and classical musicians and poetry readings in the White House so that, once again, we appreciate this incredible tapestry that’s America. I–you know, that, I think, is, is going to be incredibly important, particularly because we’re going through hard times. And, historically, what has always brought us through hard times is that national character, that sense of optimism, that willingness to look forward, that, that sense that better days are ahead. I think that our art and our culture, our science, you know, that’s the essence of what makes America special, and, and we want to project that as much as possible in the White House.