shen wei

website

julia fullerton-batten

website

alison brady

website

Robert Mapplethorpe

portraits:

self portraits.

 see more at http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography/

Alain Delorme

from series "little dolls"

"Inspired by the advertising aesthetic, the series Little Dolls, takes an ironic and worrying look at the identification by young girls with western female stereotypes, such as the Barbie doll, which over the last 60 years has become its' commercial icon.Incarnation of the fantasies of contemporary consumer society, a mediatized toy sold across the planet, Barbie is today the biggest selling doll in the world, and consequently, one of the main objects of identity projection for little girls."

"In Alain Delorme's images the mix of innocent youth and commercial object, denounces the standardization and subjection of bodies, smiles, looks.Smooth skin, smiles and forced attitudes, are constrained by an ever-present hand. At once little girls, women and dolls, the Little Dolls show a possible worrying future where the child, at the cost of plastic transformations, risks to become a simple object, amenable and transformable at will."

Ute Mahler

After many years of watching talk shows, and knitting blankets, my grandmother has ventured out into the 'world' again. By which i mean, she's stepped out into Providence to see and live all its quiet charm and busy construction crews around every corner; in the company of a group of 60+ seniors. I guess nursing homes aren't all about Bingo and live performances from impersonators (Mister Lonely). She's loving every moment of her time there: the up and coming out of state-adventures, painting classes and lunch/yarn swaps, and even the weekly trips to Wal-Mart.

I've been thinking of giving her a camera to capture some of those moments, but until then, i've been looking at some photography that documents the life of people living in nursing homes or in hospices.

from the series The New Aged by Ute Mahler

Google Images

I use google images [street view] a lot when getting detailed directions, and nearly always walk away with a little something extra: an excerpt of a benign event, a weather change within 2 steps, or sometimes even a street brawl. I have taken a "walk" through the center of Yalta, Ukraine, and have explored parts of Estonia that i haven't been to, all behind my computer, thousands of miles away.

We all know that the accessibility that the word wide web creates is incredible, and has inspired artists of all mediums to work/incorporate/draw inspiration from them. Images from

Google found a place on our crit walls, in our day to day adventures, and in galleries.

Did anyone see the lecturer that spoke about the process of creating these images for google maps?

Did anyone see the video made by Arcade Fire that incorporated google maps imagery/chrome?

If not here it is:

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

( this article talks about the video )

Here is a series of Google Image "moments" uploaded from this source:

feel free to comment an image from google maps if one has stuck out to you and you happened to save it.

Kelli Connell

website

Francesca Romeo

website

Naho Kubota

website

Sub(urbia): Rick Amor

Rick Amor (b. 1948) was a student of the widely-known Australian figurative painter John Brack in Melbourne in the 1960s. Brack was a member of the so-called 'Antipodeans' group, which protested against the dominance of American abstract impressionism in the late 1950s. Maintaining a commitment to figurative representation, Amor has an altogether darker vision of the urban landscape than Howard Arkley or Jeffrey Smart:





Call me crazy, but sometimes I think if I could paint like this, I would stop with this photography caper.

Rick Amor is represented by Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. See more of his work here.

Sub(urbia): Jeffrey Smart

Australian figurative painter Jeffrey Smart (b. 1921), who has lived in Italy since the 1960s, could easily be dismissed as an Edward Hopper knock-off, although I think there are new and more interesting things going on in his work:





This one, called Turn Off to Dandenong Road, looks uncannily like some of Stephen Shore's 1970s and 80s large-format color work (say, for example, this photograph). I'm not too sure of Smart's references, but I have no doubt that he is more than familiar with that era of American photography.