The music video for tUnE-yArDs' "Bizness" fluttered through the internet as a colorful extension of main lady Merrill Garbus' long-standing style of bridging movement, geometric facepaint, and playful insanity. It was Garbus' first video to reach the extreme masses, and it, along with the music video for "My Country", were directed by San Francisco's Mimi Cave. They are both exercises in give and take between dancer and creator, and spontaneity and choreography, and both give young children the opportunity to participate in a professional art project. In the Q&A below, Cave speaks with REDEFINE about the creative process behind the videos, and we take a look backwards at the role of movement in tUnE-yArDs music videos through the years. The music video for "Bizness" will also be featured at REDEFINE magazine's Motion & Movement In Music Video panel at Bumbershoot and MusicfestNW 2012. SEE FULL DETAILS

 

REDEFINE magazine interview with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs See all articles related to tUnE-yArDs

 

27 August, 2012

San Francisco artist Alexis Arnold loves to explore unpredictable three-dimensional sculptures. With previous works centered around everything from training bra nets to faux-lawn upholstered decorations, her more recent Past Of Our Future and The Crystallized Book Series sees Arnold mixing scientific experimentation with everyday objects. Combining Borax crystals with things near and dear to human hearts, like vintage furniture and weathered books, Arnold grows wonderfully organic forms out of objects both malleable and solid, invoking nostalgia all along the way. As Arnold says herself in the following interview, "Time (and its physical/visual presence) is an ever-present concept in my work, as well as a large factor in crystal growth" -- and it is this idea that adds even more importance to the past in her sculptures, as it contrasts with the present.
"Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway." -- J.D. Salinger - Catcher In The Rye

 

18 July, 2012

When Nicholas Bohac left behind the Midwest to pursue his artistic career in one of the most expensive cities in the country -- San Francisco -- the decision must have been both wise, for the connections and experience, and terrifying, for the potential financial burden. But thanks to a sympathetic landlord and a supportive wife with more gainful employment, Bohac lives in the SF's Outer Richmond neighborhood, within blocks of Golden Gate Park, and has a studio space that he shares with his landlord, free of charge. The garage studio is hardly one to lounge about comfortably in, but considering the skyrocketing housing rates of the city and its general shortage of space, Bohac is one lucky man. Bohac is one of a small percentage of artists who has the rare luxury of working on art at his leisure. His leisure, however, is not one to be taken lightly; he estimates that he created 15-18 mid-sized pieces, 165 small pieces, and participating in eight shows in 2011. 2012, though, is a new year -- and with it, comes a new approach. He has taken the time thus far in 2012 to step back and reassess his work and his direction. He is learning to be more choosy and to expect more from his work, at the same time that he is reconstructing what he wants his outwards-facing image to be.
Upon first glance, Bohac's works are complex and psychedelic in nature, full of unnatural colors and shapes. But despite how obscured, manipulated and tweaked they might be, their very cores are centered around landscapes -- one interest that is deeply-rooted and enduring in Bohac's life. After all, it is landscapes which drew Bohac from the Midwest, where he had lived his entire life, to the West Coast. "I came out here to visit a friend who had moved out here... [and] I just was like, 'Whoa, there's a lot of stuff out here happening that I've never seen before,'" he recalls. "I'd seen mountains and I'd seen oceans, but I think everything just coalesced together in this area, and it makes these really interesting landscapes." To pay homage to his new surroundings, Bohac began with painstakingly rendered tempera paintings based off of photographs he had taken of the ocean. Ultimately, though, it was attending art school and taking in critiques from others that refined Bohac's style from mere imitation to reimaginings of everyday scenery.
"I think one of the best things anyone -- any instructor -- ever said of me was when I was making two or three of these collage paintings at once, and they were all at night and you could see the blue sky and the stars. He said, 'Why don't you make the sky this pink?' and that's all he had to say, and all of a sudden everything opened up a little bit more."

 

06 April, 2012

If ever there was a gallery that were my soulmate -- or that I would want to be my soulmate, anyway -- it would be San Francisco's Gallery Hijinks. Their opening this Saturday, February 4th, features the works of New York artist Matthew Craven, who painstakingly inks and collages geometric black and white images onto aged paper. His source imagery reads vaguely familiar, perhaps reminiscent of old Roman or Greek ruins paired alongside patterns from the Peruvian Andes or West African baskets? It's anyone's guess after Craven's done synthesizing together historical and cultural elements from across the globe to create his own minimalistic mythologies. (8 IMAGES TOTAL)
SEE ALSO:

Matthew Craven Artist Interview: Getting Existential Through Pattern, History & Anthropology (2015)

 

02 February, 2012

Shai Kremer's Fallen Empires series shows unbiased images of Israel's decay and destruction, encouraging dialogue via archeological remnants and landscapes....

05 January, 2012

The SF Moma blog has taken to publishing a series of Positive Signs, which is described as, "a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June. (*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature...

01 June, 2011

San Francisco-based artist Justin Lovato creates geometrically-driven works stemming from any number of esoteric influences and symbolism pulled from mathematical, pattern-based sources. Though Lovato says that his art is framed by "open-ended" symbolism, he describes his personal mythology and conceptual inspiration, saying, "I think [my...

22 April, 2011

I'm going to infer a lot of things from Dan Lydersen's pop surrealist paintings, so here goes: 1) He must be kind of fun; 2) He must have diverse interests; 3) He must be constantly pushing himself as an artist; 4) McDonald's must have some significant impact in his...

21 January, 2011
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