steve miller.

Like those curious images that cruise by on the screen of an airport luggage scanner (only better), Steve Miller's x-ray photographs are a bit of the ordinary made extraordinary. These are a few images from Miller's most recent show - Fashion Animal - held at Galleria Tempo in Rio de Janiero. By juxtaposing x-ray imagery of local Amazonian wildlife with high fashion handbags and shoes, Miller attempts to marry themes of "consumption" and "exoticism" between the animate and the inanimate.

Steve Miller's website here.

just a thought. [charles collins]

Collin's crustacean portrait, Lobster on a Delft Dish (1738), is perhaps my second favorite thing an artist has ever done with a lobster, surpased only by this, of course.

Accomplished, retrained, but just Baroque enough to be obscene. Bravo Charles.

hilary faye's gifs.

Hilary Faye is an immensely talented artist whose saturated-postcard aesthetic translates across a variety of mediums with such sincerity, it’s hard not to admire her. Witty collages that play with perspectives and Italian grannies, whimsical GIFs that make you giggle, surreal stop-motion animations, photographs of roadkill… it all falls under her creative umbrella, and I’m in awe.

 “Let’s share weird ideas,” she says. If by that she means more desert nights spent on garish sofas and weeping riverside in an over-sized armchair, then I’m with you, girl. 

Hilary’s website here.

egg art.

So today is Easter and all that jazz, and I thought how better to ring it in than with a little showcase of the joyfully quixotic world of egg artistry. It's a pastime that dates most famously back to 19th century House of Fabergé  in Russia, but who can say how long mankind has been diddling with it's hard-boileds? Probably forever.

Modern practitioners range from the humorous...

 (see more here)

To the unbelievably intricate...

 (70-year old Slovenian artist Franc Grom has been drilling into shells for 18 years - see more here)

To the deliriously kitsch and opulent....

 (Fahra Sayeed is a "pioneer in promoting egg art in India". See more here)

 There's even an International Egg Art Guild, whose archive of annual "egg artisan" exhibitions I would highly recommend. 

And of course there's The Big Egg Hunt (presented by the fabulous Fabergé, naturally) going on all round London town as we speak.

The point being - there is just so much bloomin' egg art out there which goes far beyond the usual Easter fare. Seems like we'll never be satisfied just to scramble 'em - so go get crackin' (apologies) and revel in the knowledge that to be human is to turn food into art, but never to consider it unnecessary.

david thomas smith.

Of all the things Google Earth has done for the planet, it's contribution to art is due a bit of credit. There's been candid street view snaps, interactive mirrored maps and people who comb the globe looking for glitches. The beautiful thing about it all is a sense of non-ownership, of using this collection of readily available, public imagery to create work that steals from the collective visual language - resulting in this an archive of stuff that all looks oh-so-similar, oh-so-familiar, and yet wholly strange, unique and not quite of this world. 

David Thomas Smith pulls together thousands of jpegs to produce these ridiculously intricate large-scale photographs. (I recommend going to his site for a proper look, these highly compressed versions hardly do justice to the originals.)

And while he notes Persian and Afghan rug design has influenced their look, he ultimately sums up his inspiration as  "too much time on the internet". Well, if this is what endless idle hours online looks like then I'm not complaining. 

How many more ways can we rearrange the Google Earth library? We'll wait and see. 

David's website here.