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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Eschew was practically beckoning my name at Comic Con last month. The sharply rendered lines of Robert Sergel’s crisp white-on-black illustrations frame subtly poetic anecdotes of enlightened banality. Subjects include the spiteful disposal of a squirrel’s corpse, video game-related head trauma, ringworm and awkward hook-ups. Check out some images of Eschew below, along with a few panels from Sergel’s online series, (idiot comics).

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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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“Words” is a gorgeous and spectacular ouroboros of visual wordplay produced by Everynone to tie in with one of the world’s greatest podcasts— right up there with This American Life, no joke!— WNYC’s Radiolab. You’d be remiss not to listen to their latest episode, which is all about words and the function of language in our brains.

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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Go back in time, before there was TiVo, before there was Internet, back when you relied on the TV Guide to soak up the smallest shreds of TV trivia. Imagine being a kid again, on the shag carpet of your parents’ wood-paneled den, wasting away the long summer days indoors. The fan’s blowing as hard as it can, pushing hot air around, and you’re propped up on your elbows waiting patiently for Star Trek reruns to start. “Space,” finally, “the final frontier.” And for the next 30 minutes you’re somewhere else entirely, sucked into the set, and you wish you could just live in there forever, with these characters you’ve come to love. They’ve been with you through so many hard times, and you with them. Especially the handsome, severe (but secretly sensitive, and somehow sexy) Captain James Kirk.

Painter Luke Butler calls Kirk “a model of vulnerability … a most stout and reliable figure,” and notes “if you have watched enough TV, you know this to be true.” In Butler’s Enterprise series, we’re granted the chance to linger in the golden fantasy-land of Kirk, his deep space compatriots, and the suave ubermensch buddy cops of Starsky and Hutch, frozen in moments of strong emotion, tender affection and terse action. All unnecessary elements have drifted away, as Butler isolates these beautiful, irreplaceable cathode-ray men, amidst a universal expanse of resounding gray silence.

Along with Future Shipwreck favorite— and fellow TV-devotee— Desiree Holman, Butler sits on the roster of San Francisco’s tremendously rad Silverman Gallery. His other bodies of work include a haunting tribute to “The End” and a creepy-funny series of porno-political collages depicting 1970s world leaders luxuriating in the nude.

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Video for Caribou’s “Sun,” directed by Simon Owens. What fun! But how do I find this mysterious, Inland Empire-esque ballroom? Maybe it’s like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, where the gang exchanged an egg to get directions to the “secret underground club” where Emily Valentine laced Brandon’s drink with U4EA.

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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Danish-Canadian illustrator Basco5 is a real pro at drawing the cutest, cuddliest macho dudes around. Who else can so seamlessly combine rainbows and smiling pastel colored blobs with ultra-gory death scenes and teardrop tattoos?

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Is Raoul Gatepin a rogue anthropologist from another planet? He must have been sent here by some sinister space committee to study humanity through the lens of chilled objectivity—but it’s clear in Gatepin’s photography that he’s fallen under the spell of this planet’s sublime strangeness. His desolate, disorienting landscapes are somehow stunningly intimate, in spite of their silence. One series of odd architectural images, Piramid, calls upon a quote by the curmudgeonly hypothetical naturalist Henry David Thoreau to frame the work within a skeptical view of the everyday world. As you sink into Gatepin’s photos, however, the referenced cynicism seems little more than a sly pretense for the ugly beauty and accidental geometry he’s secretly sharing. Sure, humans are illogical, nearsighted beasts, but look how great their weird world can be!

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Michael C. Hsiung can do no wrong. He has a new t-shirt out, based on an amazing drawing called On wild and adventurous Penny-Farthling riders. This work contains all the essential elements of a Hsiung masterpiece: portly, hairy-chested man, horizontally striped pants, top hat, moustache, generic bottle of beer, and deliciously antiquated form of transoportation: the penny-farthing. And it’s on a t-shirt? Sold! Inspect this marvelous drawing up close after the jump.

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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.

How can we make it so that men look like this all the time? I’m serious, is there a petition I can sign? Dave Mead took these photos of fantastically flocculent fellas donning dapper olde thyme frocks at the 2009 World Beard and Mustache Championship in Anchorage, Alaska (where else?), but I wish I could tell you that this was just a page ripped out of a standard college yearbook in the year 2010. Why can’t we live in a world like that?

Via Share Some Candy.

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Graphic designer and illustrator Luke Elliott hails from Nottingham, England and packages products so perfectly, you might even find yourself with a hankering for some adorable Quaker Oats.

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