Author Archives: Linnea

A Room of My Own

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I signed the lease on an apartment last night! I plan to move in October 1. After 9 months of going from place to place, whether St. Maarten or Mexico or different sublets in New York City, I’m tired. I want a place of my own. And so it is with great relief that I am hiring movers to help me get my stuff out of storage and put it in this white box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a year.

But the question is: what to do with all those big white walls?
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Genius: Vegetable Heads ala Photoshop and Mannerism

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Linnea’s Melonhead

As you can probably tell from my melonhead, I am the child prodigy of my Intro to Photoshop course I started last night. Last night’s assignment was to take all these different fruit and veggies and make them into a melonhead, in a file named–at my teacher’s insistence–“Linnea’s Melonhead.” Hmmm.

Obviously, I’m not good at all, which is why I am taking the course. If I was good, I would have found a way to split the kiwi mouth into upper and lower lip and turned them into animated gifs that moved up and down like he was talking.

In the great tradition of melon and other cruciferous heads, mine doesn’t rank next to these:

Summer by Giuseppe Archimboldo, as are those below

Autumn
Man in the Vegetables

I think Man in the Vegetables is probably my favorite of these bizarre works, with his sly peeping expression, but this angular, incredibly modern-seeming man of books is also amazing when you think that Arcimboldo painted it in 1566:

Claire Twomey: White Baroque

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Claire Twomey combines a Baroque excess of domestic–therefore feminine–paraphernalia with a Minimalist palette that manages not to overwhelm in her immersive ceramic installations. The white palette is really interesting with the shadows that come into play. They are installations rather than sculptures because they not only interact with their environment but because they often involve the viewer as well.
A bit like Rachel Whiteread’s  signature plaster casts of the insides of ordinary domestic objects, like wardrobes, beds, floors and baths in 1988 that have been described as “minimalism with a heart”. This artist, also British, has done a number of cool things, including but not limited to:
  1. In London in 2006, Twomey created an intervention that wanted to  create an interaction between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the audience. The work, Trophy, filled the cast courts with 4000 Jasper Blue birds. The birds sitting amongst the classical sculptures created a three-dimensional landscape to walk within. 
  2. For Consciousness/conscience 3000 units of porcelain were produced to create a temporary floor at the Ceramic Biennial in Korea. The floor was crushed by the participation of the audience during the exhibition period. Crunch crunch. That kind of porcelain destruction seems absolutely delicious to me.