You know what I never get tired of? Sassy ladies and their punk rock anthems. Seriously, I could listen to songs like “I’m Over It” from Los Angeles-based artist Blushh all day long. Because that is how I roll. We’re closing in on the end of summer pretty quickly, and I am trying to milk it for all its worth by posting any video with a vibe that’s even tenuously-related to summer, for which “I’m Over It” qualifies, because a swimming pool comes into play. Any port in a storm.
Anywhey, after sitting down to breakfast and discovering that she is out of her favorite cereal, Blushh takes the bus to a Birthday party that she seems to be concerned about arriving to on time. In fact, she arrives so late that the party is way over, and she wanders though the detritus of post-celebration decor (strongly influenced by the color scheme at IKEA) before snacking on admittedly-delicious-looking cold pizza, wandering out to the backyard, and diving fully-clothed into the pool. Because, she is over it. To find out what happens next, check out this rad video! Recommended to all who love the sassy punk ladies, “I’m Over It” can be found on Blushh’s recently released, 5-song EP Thx 4 Asking, out now on Yellow K Records. Enjoy!
David Hockney’s most famous paintings of Los Angeles, such as A Bigger Splash (1967), depict a commonplace aspect of the city: private swimming pools. This is the final and the largest of three versions on the same theme, all based on an image that the artist found in a book about home pools. Hockney took care to keep the backdrop as flat — almost abstract — as possible, using rollers to apply the acrylic of the azure sky. The splash, in contrast, meticulously rendered with small brushes, took the artist nearly two weeks to finish. “I loved the idea of painting this thing which lasts for two seconds,” he said. “The painting took much longer to make than the splash existed for.” The result is one of the most iconic depictions of a certain upscale California lifestyle; aspirational, and perhaps more Hollywood make-believe than real.
Photographed as Part of the David Hockney Career Retrospective, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC Through February 25th, 2018.
Ah, California at Christmastime is a singular experience, filled with visions of kidney-shaped swimming pools expertly re-created by the pool replastering Orange County company and of course, oversized Pink Flamingo statues.
David Zwirner Gallery is currently hosting its first exhibition with William Eggleston since having announced the gallery’s exclusive worldwide representation of the artist. On view at the space on West 20th Street in New York are works from Eggleston’s monumental project The Democratic Forest.
Over the course of nearly six decades, Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning.
His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked the first presentation of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston’s Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance within the art historical canon, and it solidified the artist’s position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. Eggleston’s work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.
The Democratic Forestis among Eggleston’s most ambitious projects and a prime example of his uniquely recognizable aesthetic. Likened to an epic journey or an enduring narrative, it comprises a careful selection of works from over ten thousand negatives he took in the mid-1980s across the southern and eastern parts of America and in several European countries.
These profiles of rural back roads, industrial and residential environs, architectural details, restaurant interiors, and parking lots, among other locales, eluded the conventions of both reportage and the black-and-white art photography practiced by many of the artist’s peers at the time, and instead shaped their own definition of what a photographic image could be—intuitive and charged with imaginative possibilities.
Collectively, the project echoes Eggleston’s predilection for the “democratic” vision of the camera, able to render equally what is in front of the lens.
The show will include over forty works from The Democratic Forest, the majority of which have not been exhibited previously. Although taken thirty years ago, the photographs appear to cast their subjects in a timeless light.
As the art historian Alexander Nemerov writes in a new catalogue published by David Zwirner Books/Steidl on the occasion of the show:
Eggleston’s work—the great flow of it— feels…impelled by the world. It feels, to put it another way, pulled along by the world, by things outside the artist, rather than compelled by something inside him . . . [O]ne feels him being borne along by a current… [T]he current [he] rides along is simply the proliferation of scenes — the great panoramic film strip of it, never ending in its flow of gas stations and horse buggies and parking lots and roadside trees and filigreed urns stamped in tin. But more than that…there is the feeling that the infiniteness of the world, the sheer extent of it, is its own kind of eternity.
William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today.
William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest will be on Exhibit Through December 17th, 2016 at David Zwirner Gallery, Located at 537 West 20th Street in the Chelsea Gallery District.
National Donut Day falls on the first Friday in June, but you love Donuts all year long, so one day is just not enough! Since it’s almost summer, so how about having some fun in the sun…with donuts!? All products courtesy of Bigmouth Inc!
