Gross! In a fun Garbage Pail Kids way. But wait: under the coy crude veneer of Allen Cordell’s music videos for Beach House, Tobacco and Future Islands, there’s a natural grace at work. An innate understanding of rhythm, a surprising sympathy for our fellow man. Characters with creepy faces dance angrily amidst gooey special effects, and somehow, the repressed desires bubbling beneath the surface manage to wrench your heart. Or maybe that’s backwards— maybe it starts with a sense of humanity and then pulls the rug out to reveal the absurd. Like, “Longing. It’s beautiful, yeah, but it’s also ridiculous.” Either way, misery and frustration are the unlikely fuel for a nervous humor here. We’re encouraged to laugh, even as we cheer on the lonesome-hearted.

Cordell’s paintings exist in a similar cloud of uncertainty, appropriating images of pornography, horror films, animals and anonymous strangers to unsettling effect. Those thrilling and frightening parts of childhood rendered in sharp relief.

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Photos and art pieces by Brooklyn-based Jesse Hlebo, who also makes zines, cassette tapes, and other rad objects that exist in real life, through Swill Children.

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Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

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Before the Work Is Done: Tipping Point #4, an oil painting by Rhode Island-based artist Jemison Faust. Who among us hasn’t been there? You’re trying to get some shit done, but there’s just all this stuff lying around in a soul-crushing mess, taunting you with its accusatory tranquility. Man, staring at this painting is making me feel guilty for the rotting colony of dirty dishes that’s been lingering in my sink for weeks. BRB!

Via New American Paintings.

Oh shit, Mastodon Mesa news bonus round!! Dudes, truly, I cannot tell you how excited I am about our new show at Mastodon Mesa. Basically, it’s this: 25 of our favorite artists exhibiting work inspired by found photography, alongside thousands of forgotten snapshots from Mark Kologi’s immense collection. The line-up is insane! Come join the fun at Private Investigation and sort through decades of anonymous memories on Wednesday, September 15th!

Featuring: Ben Aqua, Beastburn, Derrick Beckles (TV Carnage), Jordan Crane, Stephanie Davidson, Kirk Demarais, Steven Andrew Garcia, Adan de la Garza, Desiree Holman, Michael C. Hsiung, Parker Ito, Nathan Jones, Mike Kitchell, Sage Keeler, Mark Kologi, Roz Leibowitz, Suki-Rose Otter, Paul Pescador, The Perlorian Brothers, Christian Ramirez, Benjy Russell, Tanner America, Brad Troemel, Richard Vergez, Adam Villacin and Melissa Wallen.

After the jump, the full flier for Private Investigation, plus a hyperbolic manifesto for the show.

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It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.

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Art inspires fashion all the time— but simply taking photos of an installation piece and printing them a dress? That’s some future shit! The new winter collection from Shenzen-based fashion label ffiXXed uses images of James Deutsher’s awesome installation We are Building a Civilised Space Here (also the title of their collection) as the aesthetic foundation for the two pieces seen above. It’s an audaciously direct approach, sure, but the results are stunningly effective, and palpably romantic. What a lovely way to reimagine the “floral print” dress!

Via Real Normal.

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Bert Mebius is this beguiling Dutch dude who I don’t know much about. He sent me an e-mail introducing himself, along with some stupendous sketches. He makes a new drawing every day, and posts them on his website, bertmebius.nl. I asked him to write a little bit about who he was, so he sent me a nine-part manifesto called One Day I Failed As An Artist. It’s pieced together out of ruminations on art school, flashes of violent dreams, childhood memories about going to the movies, and the lyrics of Jean Ferrat. It’s kinda long, so here’s just a small segment that may shed some light on the mind of Mebius, impenetrable illustrator of the Netherlands:

5. On the day I failed as an artist, I wrecked my studio.

I was at my work table (where I spent hopeful hours doing nothing nearly every day), kicked over the chair and up-ended the table. Which took a bit of an effort; it was a heavy table. Everything in my studio was of the highest quality.

After the table it was the turn of the cupboards where I kept my materials. I pushed them over, spilling out their barely used contents: pens, brushes, pencils, chalks, tubes, pots, bottles, rollers, buckets, marker pens, spray cans, tape, stags of paper in all shapes and sizes, scores of sketchpads ( in all shapes and sizes), boxes with clippings, scrapbooks, projectors, rulers. I pulled out the phone plug and hurled the phone into a corner. Then came the paintings, or more accurately the empty canvases I had stretched and prepared myself, which were stacked in layers against the walls. I kicked them, booted some of them to pieces and slung them onto the pile. Ventian blinds and curtains were next. The bookcase (art books, art magazines) was the last to hit the floor. Hier und jetzt: das tun was zu tun ist by Jörg Immendorff ended up on top. Pure coincidence.

6. My failure as an artist did not consist of the fact that I had destroyed my studio (nor the days, weeks, months of stagnation and inertia that preceded it), but that I had failed to photograph the aftermath. I only realised this much later, when I saw Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room.

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The idea of photography as a way - to experience the world as it is not, in different ways - is fascinating to me, transforming the known into an unknown unapproachable virtual reality that is able to contain an enormous power.

So sayeth artist Anne de Vries and, amazingly, his work is actually able to back it up. Take one look at his pictures and it becomes clear: anything, no matter how utilitarian or mundane, can be reconfigured, distorted, replicated, or marked in just such a way that it is no longer a familiar object, but a foreign concept. It turns out the boundary between reality and unreality is remarkably thin. Our minds are constantly on the lookout for a foothold into the abstract: stick a pair of eyes on a chunk of wood or and a soul is born. Combine colorful construction paper with eerie smut and suddenly sex is something altogether alien. A few well-placed exercise balls and a couple smears of paint, and our dreamy muscle man is now inhabiting a breathtaking nowhere space.

Since his materials are digital and limitless, it’s impossible to predict the form de Vries’ next project will take or the possibilities it might reveal. But one thing you can rely on is that he will give the people what they want: something new. De Vries champions the image as an act of creation, rather than documentation. Construction rather than reproduction.

If you work as an artist with the same medium you cannot avoid the question, why make more images if there are already so many? This question became central in my practice, through my work I try to find answers and formulate more questions.

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Installations by California-born, Australia-based artist James Deutsher. I’m especially stoked on his recent piece We Are Building A Civilized Space Here. It really does look like a fun place to be.

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The work of multimedia artist and all-around digital maverick Travess Smalley really fucks with my sense of scale. Mountains nest within mountains, Magic Eye patterns might be topographic maps of lava planets, and neon galaxies of abstract forms easily meld into the molecular substructure of THC. There’s no solid distinction between part and whole. A weird alchemy is at play here: everything in Smalley’s world seems perpetually caught in the process of becoming another aspect of itself.

His vibrantly visceral objects of inscrutable origin are fundamentally maximalist and endlessly nostalgic for an era that never happened but, with luck, still might. They appear equally at home wherever you encounter them: in the nowhere-place of the internet, the walls of a gallery at CTRL+W33D’s rad recent “Troll” exhibition, or the centerfold of a fancy magazine. Intrigued by the output of this cryptic chameleon, I sought answers from Mr. Smalley himself. He was kind enough to illuminate a few of the many mysteries surrounding his craft, and share some new pieces:

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The number of Mommy Bloggers in the world is fully breathtaking. For each 20-something hipster with an artsy minimalist Tumblr, there are a dozen Midwestern housewives boasting visually baroque blogs, brimming with snapshots of their children at the beach and essay-length anecdotes about grocery shopping and lactation. Kids say the darndest things, parenthood is like riding a bicycle with no handlebars, and here are the consumer goods I use.

Many successful Mommies are straight-up hustlers, their sites weaving in sponsored product reviews of the Dove’s new body wash and banner ads for Kitchenaid appliances between intimate missives on the tribulations of home-schooling and up-to-the-minute news on their bathroom remodels. These micro-micro-ad buys from multi-national conglomerates blend in with personal ephemera in a way that feels both unsettling and oddly natural, like of course this is where the Internet is taking us, of course.

In an era where the American Dream means living your life in public (and getting paid to do it), housewives are more than just the target demographic for consumer goods, they’ve also become active participants in their marketing. As this power dynamic shifts, products take on a new relationship with the physical space of our everyday lives, and suburban homes become Hollywood soundstages ripe for the hawking of everything from Jif to Snuggles.

That’s kind of what the fabulous art project Tanner America is about. It’s a satirical blog comprised of Photoshopped approximations of normal American life, seen through the eyes of the eerily gung-ho Tanner family of Colorado Springs. Through bizarrely mundane yet obviously simulated snapshots and hilarious matter-of-fact captions, Tanner America produces an uncanny sense of unease towards the everyday, like a Web 2.0 Twin Peaks. Incidentally, the Tanners nonchalantly report the overtly Lynchian discovery of a dismembered ear in the nearby woods. Go lose yourself down the rabbit hole, and don’t miss Jacob Gaboury of Rhizome’s insightful commentary on Tanner America.

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Brian Khek is a young digital artist from Chicago, who, if his website’s links are any indication, seems to run in the same circles as some of my favorite denizens of that windy, windy city—Brad Troemel, Micah Schippah, and Carson Fisk-Vittori. They’re all graduates of SAIC—the new RISD? Discuss. What kind of crazy cyber-drugs are they putting in the water up there? Khek’s pieces rise to the surface from deep chambers of the virtual world’s collective unconscious, blithely challenging the ancient eminence of all things organic. Primo.

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I like to imagine that Fritz Lang, with his penchant for blown-up science textbook illustrations, and Leonardo da Vinci, with his designs for contraptions both whimsical and practical, would be totally stoked on the work of multimedia collagist Jacob Whibley. A quick survey of his artistic output reveals microscopic vistas of the still-beating hearts of impossible automata and altars for the worship of logic and ideas… or at least that’s what I see. Whibley’s work is like a blueprint for imagination, equal parts Rorschach test and mechanized mandala whose contemplation allows you access to hidden inner truths. Of course, this only raises more questions about the man behind the mysticism. He took the time to address a few of my queries about process, precision, and future projects.

From diagrammatic collages to surreal sculptural pseudo-playscapes, your work, while fantastical, seems to encourage the perception that it is meant to be used for a specific function: creation, recreation, meditation. What kind of purpose does art serve for you? What effect do you want it to have on your audience?

Art has always been about exploration and inspiration for me. I get excited working with new materials and looking for new bits of ephemera. Each piece is both an exercise in solving spatial/compositional problems and the examination of a variety of themes: interstitial spaces, unfulfilled histories, new combinations of forms, and unfulfilled potentials. For the viewer, I want to instill that same sense of confusion, curiosity, and contemplation.

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He’s an 83-year-old queer experimental filmmaker, they’re the sprawling Italian family responsible for making the world’s greatest knitwear. This is the fantastic video that brings them together. Kenneth Anger shot the Missoni family frolicking in a series of Italian courtyards in this ad for their Fall/Winter 2010 collection, and it’s kind of beautiful. I’m amazed how similar in its aesthetics and visual conventions this is to Anger’s work from the late 1940s and 50s, and yet how effectively mesmerizing the magic of Kenneth Anger remains. Once you find that sweet spot in your work, sometimes it’s a good idea to just linger there forever.