"My visual work is based primarily on improvisation - on following the pen rather than preconceiving - and on loose associations. My many mistakes are guideposts which determine where a drawing goes next. I create as a way to process darkness into something tangible, something able to be crumpled, something funny and/or laughable."
In Willoughby, Ohio there is a white hut on the side of the road and they sell handmade ice cream in store bought waffle cones. They do not have Superman flavored ice cream. If your shoes do not have laces, they can’t come untied on the escalator. If your coat doesn’t have buttons, they can’t fall off on the train and roll under a stranger’s seat. This last year or so has been pretty tough for a lot of people, and it never hurts to be nice.
THE PREACHER“Blazing fires,” yelled the Preacher. “Blazing fires will purify you! Just go on– walk through them a sinner and exit a saint!” We smiled and we clapped. The next day, we all lit our homes on fire and strode through our front doors into the flames. Oh, how it hurt! How it burned– how we melted! We all rolled on the ground, writhing and screaming. The Preacher tore off his face and his bloody skull laughed at us from our front yards. THE HOSPITAL ROOMThe Hand of God reaches down into my shadowy inferno and yanks me out like an elevator going up, up, up. I am a prophet and no prophets need eyes. We see the darkness and walk through heavenly fire. So, I blindfold myself with white bandages. A black serpent has curled up inside my head. I feel it inhaling my clean air then exhaling its own polluted smoke into my lungs. On a Friday, I tried to gouge out my eyes so it could escape from my skull. Despite all the blood, it still hasn’t moved. As a gift for my sacrifice, the Hand of God touched my blackened eyes and taught me how to see like angels do. I awoke on a Sunday in a white room dressed in a white robe.
"I work with a variety of art techniques, but enjoy working with traditional cut-and-paste collage and illustration the best, because they allow my creativity to flow. My work merges fine art and design, while exploring themes of the feminine in nature, dichotomies, and transformation. I use beauty and restraint as refining lenses through which to focus and bring elegance to a subject. While I experiment with a variety of materials and processes, reoccurring motifs provide discernible cohesion between many of my works." ✱✱✱ Jessica Dame is an artist and freelance illustrator based in Columbia, South Carolina. Originally from Virginia, she grew up on the Chesapeake Bay and spent her days organizing her sticker collections, crafting illustrated stories, and drawing sea life. Largely self-taught, she graduated from Christopher Newport University with a Bachelor of Art in Art History and from the University of South Carolina with a Masters of Library and Information Science.
The natural world, vintage fashion and illustration, children’s book illustration, and graphic design are among Jessica’s strongest sources of inspiration. Jessica works in mixed media and has a particular love for ink, watercolor, gouache, and traditional collage. Under the moniker of Lady Dame Prints, her evocative designs appear on greeting cards, postcards, and stickers. Her work has been featured on Skirt! Magazine, and she has exhibited in Virginia and South Carolina. “I’m not only an illustrator but also a writer, so I love to start my drawings from a story. I mix drawings and stories to create new imagery and I like to mix memories of childhood with current experiences. For this, I often find myself drawing ambiances totally dreamlike and surreal. I want to create in my illustrations new worlds, new sensations. I like to work with geometric shapes, soft lines and I also love colors. I think they are an essential part of my illustrations - without these would not exist. 'My Girls'is the new project I'm making here in Berlin. It is constantly evolving and I feel that within these images there is a lot of the city that is welcoming me at this time. This is also a project for women, portraying the feminine beauty that falls in love, moves and grows with the surrounding environment. It tries to make explicit that the beauty of the female body can be both disarming and elegant (even with a few pounds more). With 'My Girls' I try to talk about all the female eyes that I meet every day, which help me to look at reality with a perspective I had not imagined." ✱✱✱
"These pieces are a minimalistic approach to try and describe some of the indescribable feeling within me. A longing for something I've never known outside of my dreams." ✱✱✱
Alyssa creates all sorts of amazing things. We've chosen to feature her Femmes & Flowers coloring book zine, but click on through to her portfolio or shop at the links below for some more wonderful work! Alyssa Giannini is a Lancaster, PA native living in Olympia, WA. Her Femmes & Flowers Coloring Book zine took over 60 hours to illustrate, proving to be the most involved zine she's worked on in her half a decade as a zinester. She is passionate about creating, caring for plants, snail mail, diy music and dad jokes. You can buy this zine and many others in her etsy shop, and check out her portfolio for a glimpse at her other work, or to commission some art. MRCZ (Marcos) is a Brazilian artist born in 1991. He was born into a small town of ~3000 people and lived for years in a countryside house with his parents, which he believes to have changed him forever. He currently lives in the large city of Porto Alegre where he works in publicity. He started his artistic work in 2015, creating daily between college design courses and work. His main objective was to make something he could pour his entire heart into - to immerse himself completely. His productions are a way of expressing the challenges that come with the responsibilities of adulthood in a grand city. His inspirations include comics, music, the human mind and its gimmicks, philosophy, fiction and science. You can find more of his work here.
Mai Visti e Altre Storie continues!
On October 27th, the exhibition Archiving Strategies will open at the Arteco Temporary Space. The exhibit is included in the wider context of Nesxt, an observatory in progress about the no-profit sphere intended as a fundamental and necessary area of the Art system - an independent research and experimentation zone in an incessant metamorphosis. Archiving, recording, cataloging and preserving are common words in the context of contemporary artistic practice, conveying not only the necessity of transmission of memory, but also touching on varieties of reception. In the rooms of an empty house hosting the Arteco Temporary Space, original artworks from artists belonging to the Mai Visti e Altre Storie archive show a plurality of archiving practices that start with the necessity of preserving memories of daily-use objects through musealization, presented here in the photographic and cataloging objects of the Museum of Anthropology and Etnography of the University of Turin. Liliana Macario who "knits the weave" of her own memories into a unique, long scarf, takes an intimate approach to memory. Also on display is the extremely declared strategy pursued by Gaetano Carusotto through unfinished writing. You'll also find patiently created artworks by Ernesto Levesque, in which text and watercolour have a dialogue. Mai Visti e Altre Storie (Never Seen and Other Stories) is an archive preserving and enhancing Outsider Art in the Piedmont area. It provides opportunities to reflect on the permeability of the boundaries between concepts as mainstream and outsider, commonness and abnormality, considering art and culture as shared heritage and instruments for active citizenship. Click HERE for a full list of partners and to learn more. The Artist
Rossella, Lella, Rosaria - different names used to sign her artworks. She creates an essential world, sometimes complicated in symmetrical and specular figures - well designed in the series of self portraits, shoes, and houses (always with doubled streets), chimneys and trees; some abstract paintings draw remarkable similarities to graphic design and contemporary illustration; artworks from Rossella are painted in bright colours, with high contrasts and essential marks and gestures. She has worked in Turin since the '80s and hosted a solo exhibition curated by Print About Me at The Others Art Fair in 2014. The Exhibition Rossella Carpino' solo exhibition is in the context of Mai Visti e Altre Storie (Never Seen and Other Stories), a project for enhancement of Outsider Art in Piedmont Area (Italy). It is based on the idea of Tea Taramino (Città di Torino, Servizio Disabili), curated by Arteco (Annalisa Pellino and Beatrice Zanelli) in collaboration with Passages cultural association. /maɪ prɪnt/ solo exhibition of Rossella Carpino is the first of a series of solo exhibitions about artists included in Mai Visti e Altre Storie archive (www.maivisti.it). The exhibit displays artwork from the '80s to present and retraces Rossella's artistic research in conjunction with serigraphies (screen printing) by Print About Me from Rossella's artwork for /maɪ prɪnt/, a project in the context of Mai Visti e Altre Storie. /maɪ prɪnt/ was born as a tool for sharing outsider artworks from the Mai Visti archive through their limited edition serigraphic reproduction. Also on display is a short video by Claudio Malpede to show how serigraphic technique works. The venue, Palazzo Barolo, is a typical Italian baroque style palace, but the exhibition setup, totally contemporary, will make a sort of "shortcircuit" in the traditional way of approaching and perceiving the interior. The Details: Address: Palazzo Barolo, Via delle Orfane 7, Turin, Italy Opening: May 19th 2016 at 6:00 pm Exhibit Hours: Monday, closed Tuesday to Friday, 10:00 am to 12:30 pm and 3:00 pmto 5:30 pm Saturday, 3:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 3:00 pm to 6:30 pm Contact and Websites: stampa.arteco@gmail.com | www.associazionearteco.it | www.maivisti.it |
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