Packaging For The Happy Show's Typographic Films by Sagmeister & Walsh

These beautifully designed limited edition Blu-ray packages for three of Sagmeister & Walsh's typographic films, currently shown as part of the traveling exhibition "The Happy Show", each contain a unique earthenware USB drive (specific to each film), the disc and a certificate of authenticity. All the black boxes were individually written on by Stefan.








Centered around the designer's ten-year exploration of happiness, the traveling exhibition of Sagmeister & Walsh's The Happy Show presents typographic investigations of a series of maxims, or rules to live by, originally culled from Sagmeister's diary, manifested in a variety of imaginative and interactive forms. To contextualize the maxims that appear throughout the exhibition, Sagmeister has gathered the social data of Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, anthropologist Donald Symons, and several prominent historians. In addition to individual works, some of which have been custom-made for this exhibition, The Happy Show includes a personal narrative, as Sagmeister's individual experience is portrayed beside social data detailing the role of age, gender, race, money, and other factors that determine happiness.


above photo of Stefan Sagmesiter and partner Jessica Walsh, credit to John Madere (johnmadere.com)

Stefan Sagmeister talks about The Happy Show exhibit:


Bill Rodgers of C-file reports that "The Happy Show was a 2012 traveling exhibition by the New York design firm Sagmeister & Walsh. Spearheaded by Stefan Sagmeister, the show premiered at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in August 2012 (and has since traveled through Los Angeles, Toronto and New York). In addition to being a personal narrative of Sagmeister’s quest for happiness through meditation, therapy and pharmaceuticals, The Happy Show also looked at happiness through social data with factors such as age, gender, race and money. Sagmeister’s work employed graphic design, graffiti, bright yellows, free gumballs and activity cards suggesting things such as cutting out of the show early to go home and have sex.



Video was also a feature of that exhibition. Three of those films are now available in a limited series of boxed USB drives. Each box was written on by Sagmeister; they bear individualized therapeutic reminders to be present, flexible and to ask for what you want. The USB drives themselves are made of ceramic and resemble horns, or tentacles or worm specimens. They look like exhibits taken from the mental health wing of the natural history museum.



Physical media is dead. The conventional wisdom among people who produce this soon-to-be-ancient material is that physical media works best when it enhances the experience of the song or video contained within. Within the last decade we’ve seen musicians release albums that are pressed on X-ray images or are part of a vast alternate reality game. Sagmeister, who has worked within the music industry creating album art for musicians such as Lou Reed and OK Go, seems to be working with similar logic as he created a highly-personalized artifact from his exhibition that draws the experience of his work forward, even if you’re only viewing it from your home computer."

Credits:
Creative Director : Stefan Sagmeister
Art Director and Designer : Santiago Carrasquilla
Designers: Christian Widlic, Esther Li, Thorbjørn Gudnason
Ceramic Production: Janine Sopp
Box Production: South Side Design and Building

Check out the fun title sequence on this one Happy Show video:


all images and information courtesy of Sagmeister&Walsh

Lady Gaga Morphs Into Classic Paintings Via Video - A Comparative Look.

A video installation by artist Robert Wilson inserts Pop music phenom Lady Gaga into such classic pieces of art as Andrew Solari’s The Head of John the Baptist on a Charger (1507), Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' famous portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière (1793-1807).


above: a view of the installation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière
Lady Gaga as the Portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1793-1807):

The original painting:

Side by side:


The Death of Marat
Lady Gaga as the murdered Marat in Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793):

The original painting:

A still of the video:

Side by side:


The Head of John the Baptist
Lady Gaga as Andrew Solari’s The Head of John the Baptist on a Charger (1507):

Video stills showing the morphing of Gaga into the original painting:


The original painting:

Side by side:


The artist at work on the video portraits of Lady Gaga:


The video portraits are one part of a two part exhibit from artist Robert Wilson presently showing at The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. In the second part, he and Lady Gaga are seen in action during the shooting of the video "Flying" (a sort of "making of") , in which the musician can be seen hanging upside down naked while a rope cuts into her skin, bending her left leg, pinning her arms behind her back and deforming her breasts.

Flying:



The artist and Lady Gaga on the set of Flying:


The press release:
The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present an exhibition of video portraits that Robert Wilson made in London in November 2013: Video Portraits of Lady Gaga.

American artist and stage director Wilson has based this series of slowly shifting video portraits on old masters like Ingres and Solario. Lady Gaga's face and body metamorphose into the features of Mademoiselle Rivière, for example, in a video inspired by the famous portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1793-1807). Wilson also gives us a variation in eleven steps based on Andrea Solario's Head of John the Baptist on a charger (1507) in which the 16th century model and the transformed face of the pop star merge in and out of each other.

The second room is devoted to the making-of of the two artists' joint production. Robert Wilson and Lady Gaga are seen in action during the shooting of the video Flying. Robert Wilson dictates every movement, every item of scenery and every shade of lighting. His artistry as a stage director finds its highest fulfilment in Lady Gaga’s sheer power and determination. "She is capable of changing character at an alarming speed", says Wilson.

Video Portraits of Lady Gaga is Robert Wilson's fourth exhibition at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. In 1993 the gallery presented drawings from his adaptation of Mozart's Magic Flute at the Opéra Bastille, and in 1996 the designs for the opera Erwartung at the Théâtre du Châtelet. In 2006 there was an exhibition at the gallery of his series of portraits, Faces of Mozart, in graphite, coloured inks and watercolour.

Check out Wallpaper Magazine's article on the exhibit here

About the artist:
Robert Wilson was born in Waco, Texas. He studied at the University of Texas and at the Pratt Institute, New York City. In the 1960s he was recognized as one of the leading lights of avant-garde theatre in Manhattan. With the performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, he created Deafman Glance (1970) and in 1976 his opera Einstein on the Beach with music by Philip Glass brought him worldwide renown and changed conventional perceptions of opera.

Since then, Robert Wilson has staged both original works and works from the traditional repertoire, notably: The CIVIL warS (1983-1985), Salome at la Scala, Milan (1987), Black Rider at the Théâtre du Châtelet (1990), Orlando with Isabelle Huppert at the Théâtre de l’Odéon (1993), Wagner's Ring at the Zurich Opera (2002), Lulu by Frank Wedekind with music by Lou Reed at the Théâtre de la Ville (2011), The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic in Manchester (2011) and at the Teatro Real, Madrid (2012). In November 2013, he presented The Old Woman by Daniils Kharms, with Willem Dafoe and Mikhaïl Barynchnikov at the Théâtre de la Ville and in December, at the same venue, Peter Pan with the Berliner Ensemble and music by CocoRosie. He will be staging another production of Einstein on the Beach in January 2014 at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Robert Wilson is currently featured in the Festival d’Automne à Paris, 2013 and he is guest artist at the Louvre.

images courtesy of the artist and the gallery -  their official sites, facebook pages and twitter feeds

Heroines by Deborah Oropallo At Melissa Morgan Fine Art

above: Deborah Oropallo, Where am I?, 2012, 50 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper

Melissa Morgan Fine Art just received artist Deborah Oropallo's newest paintings and works on paper from her latest series “Heroine.” in their Palm Desert Gallery.

Oropallo says of the Heroine series, which was begun in 2012, “The ‘struggle,’ I think, becomes a kind of metaphor for how women in the media have been portrayed, or wished to be portrayed…pre- or post-feminist, depending on the decade. Since the beginning of the comic-book industry in the 1940s, super-heroines have searched for identity on a broader scale. The super-hero fights for justice, but the super-heroine must also fight for equality. These eroticized and deified female characters, conformed as they are to the comics medium’s traditional visual tropes, thus carry out their struggle in a realm of ironic dichotomies—empowered and exploited, funny and tragic, masked and exposed.”

Don't Believe Me?
2012
Acrylic on Canvas, 64 x 49


This is just the beginning.
2012
80 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas


What have you done?
2012
49 x 64 inches, acrylic on canvas


There's not enough time!
2012
50 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


How can this be possible?
2012
80 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas


Not even you!
2012
38 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


This can't be happening!
2012
38 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


From Magolia Editions:

"Deborah Oropallo continues her exploration of the iconography of power and costume in a new series of mixed-media works depicting abstracted female forms clad in superhero costumes. Oropallo’s inspiration for these prints was a troupe of female performers in Los Angeles, whose thriving web-based business venture involves dressing up in superhero costumes and enacting live-action comic books. The artist’s digital manipulation of these figures and their outfits zeroes in on ambiguous moments of dressing and undressing, where a metamorphosis, a kind of becoming or un-becoming, seems to be taking place. This ambiguity is heightened by the artist’s removal of nearly any trace of human flesh or faces from each figure, a signature move that destabilizes the work, creating a tension between figuration and abstraction: because so much information has been removed from each image, the fragments and gestures that remain assume both an air of mystery and a critical significance."

In a 2009 essay on Oropallo’s work, Nick Stone writes: “We know that we are decoding these images not because we are sure of what they mean but precisely because we are unsure; from a semiotic point of view, the works’ indeterminacy is what makes them tick. Because the code is not immediately legible, we become aware of its presence, and are confronted by a system which we may not have even been aware that we were using. This tendency to mask and unmask via layers and distortion is a consistent theme for Oropallo: in a 2004 interview she noted, ‘I’m always trying to soften the definition, [to] dissolve the images a little more.’ Beginning with the Feign series and continuing through the works collected here, Oropallo’s work has increasingly honed in on this theme; she has committed herself to a singular exploration of this indeterminacy, the process of blurring, distorting, and erasing information so as to scramble the viewer’s radar. In Feign, the digitally painted figures are recognizable as such, and their gender roles and costumes are fairly clear; it is the surface code, the medium, the code of line and color on a ground, which is being interrupted and jammed. As the figures in Guise become more indistinct and the boundaries of each figure and his or her costume – the boundaries of his or her very his-ness or her-ness – suddenly the codes of gender and power begin to break down and dissolve into one another. And in Wild Wild West, the figures have disappeared completely, as if acid has eaten away at the underlying medium by which these codes are transmitted. In this series it is as if Oropallo is paring each image down in search of the barest minimum of information necessary for our eyes to read into line and shape a link to some conceptual referent. By feeding our internal codecs ever fuzzier and more ambiguous data, she dares us to be sure of the meaning we take from each image.”

Visit the Melissa Morgan Fine Art gallery to see these wonderful works. They are located at 73-040 El Paseo in Palm Desert, CA.

New and Beautiful Paintings by Stephen Magsig. City Views Opens At George Billis Gallery.

above: Stephen Magsig, 68 Mercer St., Oil on linen, 30 x 24"

I've been a longtime fan of Stephen Magsig's work having introduced you to his Urban Alphabet paintings and his Postcards From Detroit back in 2009.


above: Magsig's Urban Alphabet, a series of small scale paintings of letters from city signs (I own the "A", the "O" and the "K")

Stephen's latest show, City Views, opened yesterday at the George Billis Gallery in New York and features several new pieces that capture the flavor and ambiance of New York. The oil paintings on linen depict urban storefronts, cast iron facades, street corners, neon signs, bridges and city views in Magsig's inimitable style.


above: Stephen Magisg, Manhattan Bridge, Oil on linen, 30 x 60"

Void of human figures, his paintings combine the early morning light of Edward Hopper with an adept realism. Long shadows, empty street corners and closed cafes exude an emptiness while simultaneously appearing inviting. His work successfully combines the aspects of a large inhabited city with the quietude of a personal and private moment.

168 Mercer St., 40 x 30":


54 White St., 30 x 24":


Brooklyn Bridge Shadows, 30 x 60":


Duane St. Shadows, 48 x 40":


Bass Ale, 42 x 36":


40 Walker St., 62 x 48":


Bleeker St. Shadows:


Lincoln Tunnel Ventilation Tower, 24 x 30":


Rheon Cafe, 42 x 36"


281 Church St at White St., 62 x 48":


Nolita Corner, 30 x 24":


Broadway Shadows, 20 x 16":


108 Franklin St., 20 x 16":


Sunday Morning Shadows, 24" x 30":


The show runs through May 25th.

City Views, George Billis Gallery
521 W. 26th Street, B1
New York, NY 10001
April 23 - May 25, 2013
Reception, Thurs April 25, 6-8 pm
www.georgebillis.com

Stephen Magsig website

If you never saw his Urban Alphabet or Postcards from New York, see those here.