Josh Keyes Paintings

Josh Keyes was born in 1969 in Tacoma Washington. Keyes graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later received his MFA in painting from Yale University. Josh’s work brings to mind the detail and complexity of natural history dioramas, and the color and diagrammatic complexity one might find in cross section illustrations from a vintage science textbook. His work has developed over the past years into an iconic and complex personal vocabulary of imagery that creates a mysterious and sometimes unsettling juxtaposition between the natural world and the man made landscape. The work conveys an anxious vision of what the world might be like in the future as a result of current global warming predictions. Keyes’ interest in creating paintings that fuse realism with the possible often evokes the imagery found in dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature, while other works express the optimism and utopian ideas found in the writings of Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri. Keyes often incorporates objects and animals into his dissected environments that have personal iconographic significance. He weaves his personal mythology through fractured and isolated landscapes that are either overgrown with vegetation or underwater, and often depict historic or military monuments covered with graffiti. The imagery functions as a way for Keyes to express his personal experience and also allows him to comment and interpret events in the world. His work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. Keyes currently lives and works in Oakland California.


Found Here: http://www.joshkeyes.net/paintings.htm

Invisible Mirror Treehouse by Tham & Videgard Han

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.10.09 Design & Architecture

It is an old architectural trick used since the invention of mirrored glass: covering buildings with the reflective material and declaring that they blend in with the surroundings. Most architects use it to convince wary citizens that it is OK if their building is tall because it will reflect the sky and nature. The rendering always makes the building disappear, and the reality is always a big clunky mirrored box. But a mirrored box can be elegant, too, such as this treehouse by Swedish firm Tham & Videgard Hansson Arkitekter. TreeHugger loves treehouses (see our roundup of them here) when they are designed to minimize impact on the surrounding landscape. And in this case, it looks like the architects have pulled it off successfully.

Found Here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/swedish-mirrored-treehouse.php

Calma aka Stephan Doitschinoff

Calma creates street art which is the antithesis of anything obvious and urban. His murals and canvases are covered with graphic images that are an unusual fusion of Brazilian folk art, religious and gothic imagery and a subtle touch of Sao Paolo’s graffiti heritage. As his first monograph published by Die Gestalten Verlag shows, Calma is a dark original.

Dazed Digital: How does Brazilian folk art and engravings influence what you do?
Stephan Doitschinoff: I grew up in Sao Paulo and as a child I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in Bananal, a small village in the Paraiba Valey country side near Rio de Janeiro. Even though most of my family were working class, my grandfather is an educated man and had a nice collection of woodcut prints and a few originals by names like Anita Malfati, Caribé and Volpi. I find really interesting to look at Brazilian folk art today and learn how Christian art was brought with the Portoguese and Spanish conquers in the 16th and 17th centuries and ended up getting so influenced by Afro and Native Brazilian culture. Today you can see the syncretism present in folklore and religion. You will find churches that have altars with Christian saints mixed with Afro and Native Brazilian deities such as Preto Velho, Iemanja and Boi Bumba.

DD: What do you paint with?
SD: I use acrylics when I’m painting canvasses but when it comes to paint murals I use anything, mainly cheap house paint but also any latex, gesso, acrylics, spray, whatever I have. In Lençóis the only paint they used to sell at the local shop was so bad and watery that you would need 2 coats of black to cover other colours. Sometimes you have to improvise. I have used big chunks of bbq charcoal to sketch the murals.

DD: You've been living and working in Bahia. What do you find interesting about the place?
SD: I have been living there for more than 2 years but I have been travelling the countryside of Bahia for almost a decade. Most of these secluded places are so hard to get to that the local culture - their traditions and festivities - are still not suffocated by the internationalized culture and globalization. It is still possible to find craftsman working the way they learned from their grandparents. Afro-Brazilian culture there is so rich. In the slavery times they use to captured whole tribes from Africa and bring them to work in plantations or diamond mines, so there are quite a few African traditions that you wont find in Africa anymore but you do find it in small villages out in Bahia.

DD: What do you like about making street and outdoor work?
SD: Getting people to interact with the work. I have had some strong response in small cities especially. I painted this mural in Alto da Estrela called ‘Daniel’s Prophecy’, that depicts the image on the angel of death condemning the false churches of Satan. It happens that in the same street there was an Evangelical church. A couple weeks after I finished painting I passed through that same street and noticed the mural was all dilapidated and saw chunks of the wall and rocks on the floor. A neighbour described me how kids would come out the church and with bibles and stones in hand and would stone the mural while spitting and yelling things like “For the Blood of Christ” or “Out of my way Behemoth from Hell”. It has happened with a couple more of my murals in the same area.

DD: What draws you to religious imagery?
SD: I guess I was always close to it. My grandmother was a practicing spiritualist.
My dad was a Minister in an Evangelical Church any my mother worked there as well. I basically grew up in the church. I personally see the church as an archaic institution that always aimed to control the masses. I think it is an appropriate symbol for the corrupt modern institutions - like the big corporations, media chanels and governments.

Calma: The Art of Stephan Doitschinoff with text by Tristan Manco and Carlo McCormick is out now

Found Here: http://www.dazeddigital.com/view/default.aspx?Category=22&ArticleID=1639&PageNum=1

Porsche Museum, Stuttgart

The Porsche Museum is a museum in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, Germany on the site of carmaker Porsche.

The new Porsche museum stands on a conspicuous junction just outside Porsche Headquarters in Zuffenhausen. The display area covers 5600 square meters featuring around 80 exhibits, many rare cars and a variety of historical models.

The musuem (official opening: 31 January 2009) is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 6pm. Entrance price: 8 euros (4 euros for concessions, children 14 years and under get in for free when accompanied by an adult).

The museum was designed by the architects Delugan Meissl. The design concept is based on a model by HG Merz who was also involved in the building of the award winning Mercedes Benz museum.^[1]

[edit] Construction

The original Porsche museum opened in 1976 in a side-road near the Porsche factory. It was a relatively small works museum with little parking space and it was only big enough to hold around 20 exhibits (in rotation).

Porsche built the museum as a kind of "rolling museum" with rotating exhibits from a stock of 300 restored cars, many in pristine condition and still in full driving order. Originally there was discussion that the new museum would be built alongside a new Mercedes-Benz museum on former trade fair grounds in the Killesberg area of Stuttgart.^[1]. After the new Mercedes-Benz Museum opened in the east of Stuttgart in 2006, Porsche went ahead with plans to upgrade and extend its museum in the northern district of Zuffenhausen next to the company headquarters. Originally costs were set at 60 million euros but days before the official opening ceremony on 29 January 2009, it was confirmed that the actual costs hit 100 million euros^[2].

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_Museum,_Stuttgart