"This book (Plans for other days) suggests, it doesn't dictate. It is a list of proposals on how to relate to our surroundings. A manual of moments. It is a life we are living. Being at home, going out, feeling on our own and being together. We look at the simple things that don't get that much attention and seek alternatives to routines. We alter and take over what we can touch and feel. With everyday interventions and intuition we try to reclaime our lives. We try to come closer, closer to our own lives and to others."
Janfamily:

When I mentioned Real Normal to a friend, she gave me a book on wabi-sabi. The book was very easy to read and I'm not sure if I will ever really get what this ancient Japanese aesthetic is but here are two pages I thought were pretty interesting:

I love these sculptures by German artist Dorothee Golz

hypersigil (i desire to lead a glamorous and successful life / i desire to play more video games / i desire to stop letting people mispronounce my name / i desire to set real life goals and achieve them / i desire to become less socially inept / i desire to get paid to use the internet / i desire to become psychic / i desire to become a tetris master / i desire to get a date / i desire to read more fantasy novels / i desire to improve my posture). don't you just love that disgustingly unwieldy title?

thanks to aylor for making me get interested in these textedit pieces again. i like to think of my way of working (or thinking, because i do that more than i work) as a bunch of small, (seemingly) unrelated ideas slowly being absorbed into one larger thing. i was having difficulty trying to relate this textedit stuff to everything else until i started thinking about it again just recently.

I like the black and white textile motifs from Fabric Design Studio, they got me thinking about blackwork and whitework embroidery techniques and the relation to Arend's recent text-edit collages, Aylor's jacquard weavings of Arend's text-edit designs, my interests in perforation and embossed patterns of paper towels and some of my recent line drawings. I'm also considering that I might not have access to a digital embroiderey machine for much longer and haven't taken advantage of it.

Something to think about on a cold and snowy spring day:

"I think many creative people fill their heads during summer. Winters are more for sitting down at your table, taking those things you gathered in your mind during the summer, and making something from them."
Gudrun Lilja Gunnlaugsdottir

Virginia Davis
She paints the tensioned warp threads before she weaves, so the final object is a combination of weaving and painting. More painting though since they're essentially painted and stretched canvases.

"I've been thinking a lot about systems and structures that we use to make reality more legible... like language, grids, calenders, etc. I wanted to use everyday objects to create a physical manifestation of these structures... to physically place the objects into a grid that referenced calenders and written language. i was thinking about how we divide our day into certain sections that are split up by three meals and clocks and it somehow all makes ordered sense that way. but really it doesn't make any sense and isn't ordered and if you really look at the order it's totally arbitrary."

"Daily Planner" by Brenna Murphy

two rolls of paper towels, one is a 2008 calendar, the other has perforated diamonds

From Abbott Miller's Grammar Collection for Knoll Textiles. You can see it at the Art Institute until June.

Plaid based on seventy years of Sirius A and B rotations

apparently as of next month the oasis cafe is moving out of weird food court back to their original location in the back of the jewelry mall. this means you'll no longer be able to enjoy your falafel and the world's most beautiful mural (photo by carson) at the same time. i just thought i should let the world know.
facts about weird food court:

• they're always playing my favorite chicago radio station over the speakers (it might be WLIT or LOVE FM or something). today they played "believe" by cher and "soak up the sun" by sheryl crow and it really improved an otherwise shitty day.
• there are a bunch of (mostly abstract) paintings by SAIC students/alumni/something hanging on the walls
  
• what is up with the weird lighting?
• according to james yood, it's in the earliest louis sullivan building in chicago(!)
  

front design: design by rats

"Rats have gnawed on rolls of wallpaper. The holes compose a repetitive pattern that shows pieces of old wallpaper"

more design by snakes, rabbits, dogs and flies from this swedish design group: front

Joan Jonas

“Jonas’ video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast to one actor, the artist herself performing in her New York loft as Organic Honey, her seminal alter-ego invented as an ‘electronic erotic seductress,’ whose doll-like visage seen reflected bits on camera explored the fragmented female image and women’s shifting roles.” source

“Like a subsuming kaleidoscope, Vertical Roll (1972), Jonas’s most rigorous and notable video work, appropriates a technical flaw—a destabilized signal—and reinvents it as an energetic formal device. Inside the ever-rolling image, Jonas, using several guises reminiscent of her alter ego Organic Honey, constructs a self-portrait that seems impossibly disjunctive. Her identity is prisoner to a (reproductive) mechanism that resists stabilization, resists the calm of integration. The rhythmic crack of a spoon hitting a hard surface accompanies the unnerving picture ‘roll,’ at once a signal of distress and a tapping to readjust the technology.” source

i’ve been looking for joan jonas’s work online for a while now and it’s really difficult to find any video or good images. there’s a copy of vertical roll in the tape collection at school, but i’m really interested in seeing her organic honey stuff. it’s interesting how these quotes (especially the second one) kind of present fragmentation of identity as a “bad thing”, because i’m really interested in that kind of fluidity/destabilization. i wonder if it actually comes across so negatively in the work itself?

drawings with hair by lindsey adams adelman

"A group of friends wearing the new Bless collection spent a day together in a Parisian apartment. They chatted, hung out in the cramped kitchen, played ping-pong, read the paper, and shared a meal prepared by Mark Borthwick. Visitors were invited to see the collection at two different times during the day. They were separated from the models by a rope, an ironic take on Big Brother.

The collection was designed to break the fashion taboo of presenting quite unspectacular and banal, yet extremely comfortable, clothes. They emphasized that normality is nothing to be ashamed of and that such clothes can enhance people's real characters. Non-neurotic clothes for people who simply want to feel good. "

series of paper collages using digital prints (these are all about 6 x 8 inches; they're done on paper from my sketchbook). the patterns (and the pieces of UI) come from printouts of my textedit drawings. these are the last four i made in a series of thirteen and i think i like them the most. the rest are on my website

carrot stabbing beet 2006

more martin creed

"I don't know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying."

Martin Creed, 2001
http://www.martincreed.com/

roman signer, martin creed

Chloe Sevigny is wearing my art.