February 3, 2012 by Robin Locke Monda
In 2011 I watched a movie on cable TV called Sisters. It’s a very early (1973) Brian DePalma thriller/murder-mystery about a local Staten Island journalist (played by Jennifer Salt) who sees a murder from her apartment window—my apartment window!
Well, my apartment window or the window of one of the other five apartments directly above or below me. What a strange experience to watch an actress (in my living room) look out a window (in my living room) while I’m sitting in said living room. I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I kept watching for clues to location. Was it really my apartment? Soon enough I see the actress leave through the front door of my apartment building and get into her car on my street. Continue Reading »
Posted in Beyond Borders, border conflicts, Films, Popular Culture | Tagged apartment, Brian De Palma, film, movie, real, Sisters, suspense thriller, time-space, twins, unreal | Leave a Comment »
August 11, 2011 by Robin Locke Monda
I’ve just seen the 2008 movie “Skin,” based on the life of South African Sandra Laing. And what a life she has lived! Born in 1955 to two apparently Caucasian parents in Apartheid South Africa, Sandra has decidedly non-white features and a skin color several shades darker than her Afrikaner parents. At a time when DNA testing was not yet developed, the parents lived with rumors that the mother had slept with a black man, which, of course, would make the Apartheid-supporting, politically conservative father an especially insulted cuckold. (We now know that 11% of Afrikaners have non-white ancestors.) Rather than acknowledge his daughter’s clearly non-white looks, Leon Laing—who apparently loved his daughter very much—insisted on her whiteness and insisted on white society treating her as white. He successfully challenged the nation’s racial classifications and managed to get his daughter officially designated as white in 1967, but his daughter’s actual experience didn’t improve. People’s responses were based on what they saw and what they saw was a light-skinned black girl—a mixed race child. Continue Reading »
Posted in Beyond Borders, border conflicts, Border Violations, identity, movies, politics, race | Tagged Afrikaner, Apartheid, race classifcations, Sandra Laing, South Africa | Leave a Comment »
January 2, 2011 by Robin Locke Monda
New York artists Barbara Lubliner, Bernard Klavickas, Shari Mendelson, Janet Nolan, Olivia Kaufman-Rovira, Ilene Sunshine and Tyrome Tripoli are upcyclers. They turn garbage into art. Upcycling, according to wikipedia, is “the process of converting waste materials…into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.” The term is on everyone’s lips these days—and why not? With increasing numbers of shopping bags flapping in trees and plastic six-pack yokes skittering down streets, it shouldn’t surprise us that environmental detritus would get funneled through the creative process as often as the recycling plant. Continue Reading »
Posted in Check out..., Design, Exhibition, garbage, Installation, Old Media, Popular Culture, Recycling | Leave a Comment »
December 23, 2010 by Robin Locke Monda
Happy news! Artists and the people who love them meet at last, on mutual ground. No more stark, unfriendly gallery spaces where some intern behind the front desk refuses to acknowledge your arrival. No more standing around at openings with a plastic cup of lousy wine in one hand and a gussied-up Ritz cracker in the other, hoping for a chance to speak with the artist. No more stratospheric prices that make you feel like a dwarf star in the vast art world universe. Really? Really! Continue Reading »
Posted in Art or Commerce?, Authorship, Exhibition, Internet, New Media, Old Media, Photography, Popular Culture | Tagged art world, artists, commerce, creativity, Design, Etsy, Etsy.com, galleries, Popular Culture, selling | Leave a Comment »
December 18, 2010 by Robin Locke Monda
Some time ago I posted my enthusiasm for the Gees Bend quilts and their makers. Working with their families’ old work clothes, and influenced by their faith and surroundings, the Gees Bend quilters created astonishingly beautiful designs that rival the New York School artists celebrated in our art history books.
Now comes 21st century quilting, where technology meets sewing! I should have seen this coming: electronic quilts made from e-textiles. E-textiles are conductive, meaning they can carry an electrical current. When configured with “soft circuitry“, the textiles can respond to environmental changes—such as the presence of people—as well as to changes in light, temperature and wind. Textile artist Mouna Andreos has combined traditional sewing/quilting techniques with a contemporary design sensibility to create electronic quilts that represent and interact with Canada’s chilly climate: Continue Reading »
Posted in Check out..., Design, e-art, Electronics, New Media, Old Media | Tagged e-fabric, e-quilts, Mouna Andraos, quilting, soft circuits | Leave a Comment »
Mobile gardens are here, there and everywhere! On Staten Island, artist activist Tattfoo Tan is hosting a mobile garden “expo” where people can bring their mobile gardens to “ooooh” and “ahhhh” at the ingenuity and beauty of each other’s work, and then wheel their creations a few blocks to the St. George Ferry Terminal where the gardens will be “parked” in the taxi pick-up area for commuters to enjoy for a month.
Mobile gardens are projects that redefine “green space” on the micro scale. You can roll your mobile garden—planted in an old office chair seat, grown on a skateboard or cultivated in a rusting shopping cart—to the nearest urban sign post. Then chain it and leave it to flourish in the sunshine for all to enjoy. Get a large group of mobile gardens together in one place and you’ve got a temporary island of atomized greenery on wheels. If you get really ambitious—like artist Joe Baldwin—you can turn a train car into a mobile garden for commuters Continue Reading »
Posted in Beyond Borders, Urban planning | Tagged guerrilla gardening, mobile gardening, urban greening | 1 Comment »
November 7, 2009 by Robin Locke Monda
I live across the street from an empty lot—two, actually. The first (let’s call it “Lot A”) is directly across the street and faces the front entrance to my apartment building. For twenty years it has been advertised as the site of a new coop building project. The ramshackle and weather-beaten plywood barrier that fronts the property is “secured” by a chained link gate with huge gaps on either side where people can, and do, enter.
The second lot (“Lot B”) is on a side street. From my fourth floor perch I look down on its cement perimeter with the embedded metal fence that marks an intended outdoor parking lot. At the front, a paved drive barely makes it past the padlocked gate before fading to dirt road and grass. In the middle of Lot B there are several mature of trees and scattered weed-bushes. Someone mows the abundant grass regularly. Continue Reading »
Posted in Authorship, Border Violations, Check out... | Tagged Bourriaud, Rirkrit Tiravanija | 4 Comments »
Sounds carry historical and political significance, even when they are intended as pure entertainment. Alternative meanings shimmer just beneath the surface as accepted meanings—safer meanings—give way to the attentive listener. Consider the sound of fireworks. According to Wikipedia, fireworks “were originally invented in ancient China in the 12th century to scare away evil spirits, as a natural extension of the Chinese invention of gunpowder.”
In the twenty-first century, fireworks and other forms of explosive entertainment continue to fulfill their ancient mandate to scare away “evil spirits.” When we pack a blanket and join our family and friends on the beach to experience the fireworks, we banish loneliness, depression and tiredness, as well as our anxieties about the economy, our worries about the country’s values and the concerns we have about the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continue Reading »
Posted in Audio work, Games, politics, Popular Culture, Television, The News | Tagged 4th of July, blockbuster movies, entertainment, fireworks, gunpowder, video games, war | Leave a Comment »
The digital world and the actual world can bleed into each other in mind-bending ways. A recent example: the furniture sculpture of Sebastian Brajkovic. His chairs are planted solidly in the physical world yet appear to morph, at light speed, into virtual objects. In some ways this blurring / merging / mashing of staticness with motion can be traced back to the Futurists. They attempted to capture the mechanical speed of modern life in paintings and sculptures. Futurist artists were galvanized not only by first-hand experiences of speedy 20th century living, but also by its representation in movies and photographs. As a child of the 21st century, Brajkovic references computer-generated imagery. Though anchored in “meat space” by needle-stitched embroidery, fine fabrics and ponderous bronze frames, his chairs are transformed by our shared experience of the ephemeral digital trace. As to the usefulness of a Brajkovic chair for the purposes of sitting, who cares?
Photograph from Sebastian Brajkovic’s site.
Posted in Beyond Borders, Design, New Media, Old Media | Tagged digital design, furniture design, Sebastian Brajkovic | 5 Comments »
February 6, 2009 by Robin Locke Monda
A commercial display of baked goods is an art form built on the strategic use of separation.
Example: We step from the mean streets of our little town or big city into a store scented with vanilla, cinnamon and coffee, pull a tiny paper ticket from a stingy red dispenser and read the number that tells us… nothing, really, except that we must be patient. We are. We take our place among the many suitors craning to see the confectionery vision laid before us. Glittering gustatorial gems are staged in Busby Berkeley arrangements on gold foil laminated cardboard platters and white paper doilies.
When we finally reach the front of the line we bend down to peer through the glass encasement—the border fence, the high wall between us and our object of desire. Trays and rows of frosted, sprinkled, drizzled, confettied, and powdered morsels tease our eye and our pallet. Continue Reading »
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Art or Commerce?, Exhibition, Installation, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment »
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In 2011 I watched a movie on cable TV called Sisters. It’s a very early (1973) Brian DePalma thriller/murder-mystery about a local Staten Island journalist (played by Jennifer Salt) who sees a murder from her apartment window—my apartment window!
