•
Mario Batali, Martha Stewart, Boogie, Jimmi Simpson, Brice Marden are just some of the faces you might recognize on the walls of Jose Picayo’s exhibition: “Mug Shots.”
That isn’t to say though that everyone whose picture is up on the walls of the gallery is famous.
Of the couple hundred photos up on the walls of the gallery, there were only about seven who we could readily identify.
Well, that is besides all the folks who showed up for the opening who had sat for their photos. Read more »
•
This Wednesday Jose Picayo is having a gallery opening at the Robin Rice Gallery at 325 West 11th St from 5:30pm until 8:30pm. I recommend you to all stop through and check out his work. Mug Shots is a set of 8″x10″ Polaroids (an AmericanMadness format favorite) he shot each of his subjects and that was it. No digital manipulation, no make-up artists, no after-effects Picayo puts it best saying “A Polaroid is a one of a kind image, it is a tangible ‘real’ object you can hold in your hands” (not too surprising that his work caught our eye).
By way of an explanation for this undertaking Picayo comments: “In an age of artificial beauty where absolute perfection has become society’s standard, we are often disheartened by the reality of our own flawed reflections in the mirror.” Anyway, the AM crew will be at the opening (or at least some of us will be). If you can’t make it, don’t fret, it will be showing through June 22.
AmericanMadness will have a review on the exhibition in the days following the opening and maybe even an interview with Jose Picayo to follow. We’ll keep you posted on that (so, if you have any questions for him, let us know).
•
This makes the third week in a row we have done our art post. Normally we send you to some images of statues or paintings or photos. This week, first up we have something a little different.
We start with Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps. The 21 Steps is the first in a project by six authors to produce six online stories in six weeks (WeTellStories). The stories are all based on classics and, as it seems to be a Penguin Publishing project, the originals are all part of the Penguins Classics series. What makes The 21 Steps (Based on The 39 Steps) interesting and the rest of the lot as well is that they are told in a non-traditional manner. The 21 Steps plays out using Google maps, to actually take you through the story. Last weeks Your Place and Mine was written live online. Week 2’s Slice was told through blogs and Twitter. It looks to be a pretty creative project that takes story telling and re-envisions it with the new technologies available to us today. CoolHunting also has an interview with Charles Cumming. Read more »
•
Elvis has been gone for a while. Having died almost 30 years ago you wouldn’t exactly expect to see new pictures of him popping up anywhere. Except that is exactly what’s going on.
This isn’t some vast conspiracy theory. No Elvis spottings at Wal-mart or descending from a UFO, but rather photos taken by George Kalinsky 36 years ago at Madison Square Garden. Kalinsky was asked to give a picture of an iconic New York Moment and chose Elvis at MSG. He was expecting to dig through his file and find 8 to 10 pictures from the night and instead discovered 4 rolls of film, close to 100 never before seen pictures of the King.
Besides the general excitement of this recent discovery the folks at Graceland are thrilled, calling one of the photos one of Elvis’s most iconic ever. The NY post even has a slide show of six of the images. I would expect to see them on display somwhere before the end of the year with a catch title like “The Lost Elvis Photos” or something along those lines.
•
As I go back through what I have marked up the past week to post here, things that have caught my eye and such, it is looking like I will have a weekly post of art that has caught my eye from the previous week. We’ll see if I can turn this into a regular, weekly column (which requires only that I stay on top of this every week), but for now it is looking pretty good.
Without further ado some of the things that have caught my eye in the past week: Read more »
