Fire, mushrooms and an uncommon raccoon

Fired Up campfire tealight from Fred, $12 (matches and tealight included, 2.5" x 4")



Hosting the book club reading of Thoreau in your cramped city apartment? Desperate to cast your gaze on something other than the red-brick outside your window? Reset the tone of your urban dwelling with a few funny items from the Curiosity Shoppe, a San Francisco store front full of all sorts of amusing finds. The crackle of the candle won't down out the sirens, but a focused push to complete Claus the raccoon, your new woodland companion, just might.




Camping plates by Caroline Wolfe, $60
Set of four 80inch diameter glass dessert plates, dishwasher safe (top rack only)






Porcelain log vase, $40 (2.5" x 7.75") and a couple of Parasol and Panther Cap mushrooms (2.75” x 4.75” and 3” x 2.5” respectively)




Claus the raccoon, a Let's Stitch kit from egg press, $26
Screen printed on canvas, includes sewing instructions and name tag (approx. 11" x 8")


www.curiosityshoppe.com

Groove is in the Art

Frank Stella's 1970 Flin Flon
Synthetic polymer and fluorescent paint on canvas
NGA (Australia) 2002.294


Fantasizing about Modern art for your walls, but can't quite make the stretch to a Stella or a Noland? Consider a focus wall with one of the many fabulous finds at Interior 1900, a Swedish online retailer of wonderful papers (circa 1890s-1980s) with a primarily Scandinavian - and Modernist - bent.












Wallpaper no: 476
Production period: Early 1970's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 26
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Both rolls sells together, price is for one roll.
Available items: 2
Price: 700 SEK
Price: 118 USD, 80 EUR, 60 GBP



Wallpaper no: 1193
Production period: Early 1970's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 58
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper. Both rolls sells together. Both rolls sells together.
Available items: 2
Price: 750 SEK
Price: 126 USD, 85 EUR, 64 GBP


Wallpaper no: 1091
Production period: Late 60's or early 1970's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 63
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Available items: 5
Price: 650 SEK
Price: 109 USD, 74 EUR, 56 GBP


Wallpaper no: 1409
Production period: Late 60's or early 1970's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 59.5
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Available items: 11
Price: 700 SEK
Price: 118 USD, 80 EUR, 60 GBP



Wallpaper no: 1403
Production period: Late 60's or early 1970's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 26.5
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Available items: 5
Price: 600 SEK
Price: 101 USD, 68 EUR, 52 GBP






Wallpaper no: 1575
Production period: Late 60's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 13.5
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Available items: 3
Price: 650 SEK
Price: 109 USD, 74 EUR, 56 GBP




Wallpaper no: 1578
Production period: Late 60's
Width, cm: 53
Length, meter: 9.6
Design repeat, cm: 23
Picture above show 20x30 cm of the wallpaper.
Available items: 8
Price: 600 SEK
Price: 101 USD, 68 EUR, 52 GBP

interior1900
Magnus Karlsson
Skogsv. 8
532 32 Götene
Sweden
tel +46511-341100
interior1900.com

Time and Space

An installation photograph from (In)discrete Objects, the 2005 exhibition of works by Timothy Horn organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee.



When I started this blog several years ago now, I suppose I already had a pretty clear sense of the kind of objects and artwork I respond to... clever appropriation of historical designs (like Jo Meester's vases in the previous post), or contemporary interpretations of long-forgotten fads (like Barbara Uderzo's succulent rings).

In that same vein is Timothy Horn, an Australian-born artist working in the United States. Horn's remarkably strange and curious pieces are based on antique jewelry designs, but blown up to such an enormous scale that they create a unnerving distortion, as if one has looked through someone else's glasses. Horn's fascination lies at the intersection of the intimacy of ornament and the vulgarity of beauty. There, the subtle decoration of an 18th century hair comb becomes a glittering, indulgent and discotheque-like wall sculpture.




I Want Candy, 2001
Nickel plated bronze, cast lead crystal, easter egg foil, 35.5 x 25.5 x 4 inches


I Want Candy, detail




More recently, Horn has turned to antique furniture, particularly the designs of Thomas Chippendale, for inspiration in the appropriation game. By digitally distorting Chippendale patterns, Horn created "new" designs that he then carved in wax. The wax designs were then used to make molds, from which he could cast replicas in rubber. The wobbly pieces, seeming all the more surreal for their honey color, can then be mounted on the wall... and wiggled or manipulated by curious viewers. In the words of the Albany University Art Museum, who organized an exhibition of his work in 2006, Horn's furniture sculptures turn "tasteful sources [into] objects that creep, ooze, and dangle down the walls with a libidinal force all their own." The intersection of intimacy and vulgarity has proven a fruitful place.




Silk Purse (Sow's Ear), 2005
translucent polyurethane rubber, 47 x 34 x 6 inches


Silk Purse (Sow's Ear), detail





Mutton Dressed as Lamb, 2005
transparent rubber, 40 x 30 x 9 inches - edition of 3


Mutton Dressed as Lamb, detail




Horn's work will be featured in three US exhibitions opening this summer: solo shows at the ICA in San Jose and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a group exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. He's represented by Hosfelt Gallery, which at the moment has more information than his own developing website, www.timothyhorn.net.

Erasing to Reveal

Look closer... what at first appears to be a 19th-century still life is actually a photo-studio shot of Dutch artist Jo Meester's manipulated vessels.

Meester, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2001 and established his own studio last year, recently began exploring ways to create objects that blend historic design and historic techniques with modern aesthetics and technology. He works in all media, but I'm most intrigued by the Ornamental Inheritance series that uses old (but not antique) delftware vessels. The pieces are carfeully sand-blasted in such way that a horizon develops around the body of the form. What Meester leaves, in these relief-like carvings, are "silhouettes" familiar in contemporary life: modern architecture, smoke stacks, windmills (turbine, as well as the old-fashioned kind) and fast-food signs like the Golden Arches of McDonald's. Birds and airplanes fly overhead.









Pieces from the series will be included in Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics, on view May 15 – September 7 at the Gardiner Museum in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition is curated by ceramist Marek Cecula.

Meester's work is difficult to find outside the Netherlands, but his website includes a list of retailers, primarily design museum shops in the major Dutch cities.


jomeesters.nl

A drink precedes a story

White-brass alloy and aluminum Guinness cuff by Oregon-based designer Renée Christopher
www.hardwearbyrenee.net
$27