Flat, layered shapes and muted colors abound in the work of Italian illustrator Riccardo Guasco. There is a strong Cubist/Primitivist streak running through these, along with the necessarily minimalist sensibility. Lots of beautiful, empty space that help draw the eye to the dynamic figures and strange scenes contained within them. Tonally, his pieces are often playful and kinetic, though some are wonderfully subdued. The winged girl below features in two more paintings, twisting in each one, as though she and the butterfly are taking part in a languid dance.

“Don’t look at me that way,” detail.

Textured scaffolding made out of paper. Spun cavities, spiraling angles and floating bristol-board islands. A mysterious, solitary logo consisting of circle and the letter X, reinterpreted in dozens of different ways.

Tonight in the Bay Area, artist, photographer and Syzygryd co-designer Nicole Aptekar unveils a series called New / Exploration / Paper at the Satellite66 gallery in SOMA. Coilhouse caught up with Nicole during the hectic last day of gallery preparation to discuss these pieces and the process behind them.

“Play revolver,” detail. Photo by Nicole Aptekar

COILHOUSE: Let’s start with this logo, the circle with the letter “x” positioned inside of it. How long has it been around? What’s the story behind it?
NICOLE APTEKAR:  I came up with the symbol in the summer of 2009. I was interested in sticker art, and wanted something to tag with that was not obviously a tag. I was experimenting with a number of different logos. In some versions, the circle was very dominant. In other versions, it was the “x”. The x-heavy versions of the logo were significantly more… vicious? Aggressive? They had no meaning, yet they had this built-in aggression that I found really interesting and kind of desirable, which I thought was curious, since they were just abstract symbols.  I started putting stickers of the logo up all over San Francisco and wherever I traveled. It was fascinating to see which ones stayed and which ones didn’t.  This version with the double-x is the one that I claimed for myself as a logo. Then I started using it to label things: my laptop, my bike, etc. When I had the opportunity to make it a part of a composition, I took it, instead of just slapping a logo on top of things. One example of that is the “Clear” button on the Syzygryd controller touchscreen… yeah, I tagged my own art.

Conventionally, it’s corporations that have logos, not individual people. So why your own logo?
A big part of it is that I find stickering really fascinating. I’m a big fan of B.N.E. and AERA HAKR. I watch the streets to see all the new sticker people because, for their brief moment, they are prolific. You can’t spray-paint every street, but you can absolutely throw seven stickers down as you’re walking. But I don’t really have the attachment to a name that many in the graffiti community seem to have.  Coming up with a fake name and throwing that down is not my thing. I don’t want people to know who I am, I’m not concerned with getting my name out. I’ve always been into graphic design and typography, though. Seeing abstract symbols in the wild engages my curiosity. There’s moment of puzzlement when you see some strange symbol in some random place, like on a trash can. Like, “what could this mean?” I feel like seeing the same logo in different places gives people the opportunity to get curious and find out. With an abstract logo, it’s not necessarily as obvious as with with a name. I feel like that’s more interesting.

Laser cutter in action. Photo by Nicole Aptekar

How did you transition from making stickers to making these sculptural paper compositions?
In January, I came across Matt Shlian’s work, and I became really inspired. He made a set called The Process Series, which are blocks of stacked paper that was cut using a plotter. He was taking grids and moving them around, and I thought that was really amazing. I’d been using laser cutter for a year and a half at that point, and I thought I could do something similar with it. So I just booked the laser at Techshop to see if it would be possible to laser-cut a piece similar to ones in The Process Series. Except that, instead of using one of his shapes, I used my logo. So I cut it, glued it together – hated the process of gluing it together – and I came up with this. I liked it, but it was so entirely similar to Shlian’s concept that I was really embarrassed by it. But I didn’t want to give up on it, either. So I started to ask myself: what could I do to feature my logo in a way that exposes the depth and breaks away form the grid structure? Shlian’s thing was repeated grids: squares, triangles, etc. He had his own unique way of pulling through depth, and I wanted to see what the variations are on that. I wanted to see what kind of shapes I could compose from my logo that were definitely mine, and not reminiscent of his. I developed several concepts for how to accomplish this using my own terminology. A projected cavity is large shape swept around to make a smaller shape. A spun cavity is when I take a shape and twist it. Spars and scaffolding are beams attached to the side of the frame that hold up elements that need to float.

“Don’t look at me that way” before it’s printed and cut, in Rhino 3D.

Can you describe your process for making these?
I start by designing these in CAD using Rhino 3D. In Rhino, none of these pieces are cut – it’s all one solid piece – so it’s hard to predict what kind of interplay all the individual layers will have. By the time I chop them up with the laser and lay out the pieces, I have no idea what it will all look like until it’s assembled. I’m completely unable to work on more than one of these at once. Each one leads directly onto the next; many of these contain new variations on a technique I had just learned while making the previous piece. For example with this one, I developed the notion of having the frame turn into that shape in the center, becoming part of the composition. And then with this one, which I made right after it, I did the same thing but also took that shape and twisted it. The shape of this one is basically secondary to the movement of the bar and its center point. That’s something that I never saw when I was doing it in CAD, but it looked shockingly beautiful to me when I started to put it all together. And then in the next one after that, I also had that frame and that spun cavity, but I added scaffolding at the top. In putting together this exhibition, I’ve learned a ton. Each one of these pieces represents an amount of knowledge I have gained.

One of Nicole Aptekar’s original pieces will be available at the Coilhouse Black & White & Red All Over Ball silent auction in New York this August 21st. See you there!

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE: This week marks the final chance to see Savage Beauty before it closes on Sunday, August 7th. Due to the exhibit’s overwhelming popularity, the Metropolitan Museum has scheduled special viewing times for the upcoming weekend. Do not miss the opportunity to witness this one-of-a-kind show honoring one of the most spectacular talents to ever grace the fashion world.

Alexander McQueen’s “The Horn of Plenty”,  autumn/winter 2009-10. Black duck feathers. (via)

“When I am dead and gone, people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.” -Alexander McQueen (1969-2010)

The death of the Scottish designer Lee Alexander McQueen in February of 2010 sent shockwaves throughout the fashion industry that rippled steadily outward, pervading the worlds of fine art, music, theatre and design. Suddenly, one of the bravest, boldest and incredibly imaginative forces in fashion was gone. McQueen’s suicide took place just a week after his beloved mother, Joyce, died from cancer, and with little more than a month to go before he was to debut a new collection in Paris. The international outpouring of grief was palpable, as everyone, from socialites, celebrities and fashion students from countless walks of life remembered the designer in extensive magazine features, blog posts, Twitter updates, and Tumblr tributes. McQueen’s strong features and piercing stare appeared on the cover of most major newspapers.

(via)

McQueen’s influence was undeniable; he had unleashed, with collection after collection, a romantic assault on the senses and invited his viewers to look with their minds, not merely their bodies, when deciding what to wear and how to wear it.

Never had a designer injected so much personal anguish and cerebral delight in his creations, and the materials he used, from pony skin, ostrich feathers, medical slides, hammered silver, balsa wood and tulle, became fashioning for the soul. For the past several months, devotees have streamed through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to personally experience many of his most iconic creations up close, presented in the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty retrospective. Curated by Andrew Bolton of The Costume Institute, the exhibit shows more than one hundred designs in tailor-made galleries befitting each of McQueen’s influences.

One of the more unique looking, and easily one of the most unique sounding musical instruments ever invented, Hans Reichel’s daxophone is sure to put some spring in your step and some giggles in your face this fine morning:

A bowed musical instrument that falls into the category of “friction idiophones“, the daxophone consists of a long, thin wooden blade notched into a wooden block containing one or more contact (piezo) mics, often attached to a tripod. In addition to being bowed, daxophones can be plucked or struck, conducting sounds the same way “a struck ruler halfway off a table does”, with each vibration moving through a “tongue” of wood into the instrument’s wood block base, which acts as a resonator for the contact mics contained inside.

Depending on the shape and grain of each wooden tongue, and how they are manipulated, all manner of uncanny (and often hilarious) warbling, moaning, grumbling, yodeling, spluttering, rasping, growling, yowling sounds can be coaxed from these oddly human-sounding pieces of wood. (The daxophone’s name comes from the use of a stopper block of wood called the “dax”, which is fretted on one side to produce fixed pitches, while the other side is curved and smooth, allowing a performer to shift more fluidly from one note into the next.)

A variety of daxophone tongues. (Via oddmusic.com.)

Generously, Reichel offers extensive downloadable plans for his invention on his website so that other woodworkers can create daxophones of their very own.

Visit oddmusic.com to find out more about this, and countless other experimental instruments and musicians. Also worth checking out:

• Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones
• Orbitones Spoon Harps & Bellowphones
• Bradford Reed
• Interview with musical instrument inventor Dan Rathbun
• INSTRUMENTAL documentary by Gabriel Shalom
• The Vegetable Orchestra

Toch Studio’s opening titles for MadInSpain, an annual design conference in Madrid that took place at the beginning of this month. Taking the theme of madness, the team created an unnerving animation featuring tumorous protrusions erupting from the back of their subject’s head. Balloon-like, they float in mid-air, connected by gnarled and knotted cords. Creepy and clinical, it’s a clever, if unsettling, representation of creativity.

Thanks, John!

Le grand digérant (Digesting the great)  No. 4, 102 x 162 x 15

“Giai-Miniet is what’d you get if Kafka had designed Barbie dreamhouses.” (via)

Dreamhouses?  Perhaps more like maisons de cauchemars.   Marc Giai-Miniet‘s painstakingly detailed, mixed-media shadow-box installations are  reminiscent of  a vaguely ominous, fading nightmare; a slumbering visitation to a childhood home,  dilapidated and abandoned,  darkened corridors permeated with a surreal atmosphere of dusty déjà-vu.

Ominous,  fantastical, and yet on some level that barely registers  – these ‘boxes’ are familiar and comforting in a way unique to those corners in which we have previously peeked and will explore once more when we are slumbering and our subconscious holds sway.  Again and again we will wind through our own personal, chaotic and connected dreamhouses –  and M. Giai-Miniet appears to know  this full well.

Born in 1946 in Trappes, France, Marc Giai-Miniet studied at the l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, a distinguished national school of Fine Arts in Paris, France. He is currently the Secretary of the Salon de Mai, a gallery founded in Paris with the purpose of encouraging and exhibiting younger abstract artists.

Marc Giai-Miniet, photo by Sylvie Giai-Miniet

According to Giai-Miniet (though run through Google translator) :

“The ‘boxes’ have appeared relatively late in my work as a painter, as a natural and necessary, and have become an inseparable part, a double play. Reminiscent of my teenage desire to do theater, and perhaps even the deepest yet my memories of childhood games pitched battles between miniature electric trains and installed under the table in the family dining room.  These “boxes”, from their manufacture in the years 92 – 93, repeated the themes of my paintings: the brainwashing scene, visit the mummies, stirring transfusions and various larvae.  Small characters were cardboard cut out of the ballet and existential irony of my painting.  Over work, buildings are becoming increasingly large, the characters have disappeared and books, whole libraries have taken place in conjunction with laboratories, storage rooms, waiting or interrogation cells, stairs, corridors, furnaces, sewers or outbound docks … I understand that the books burned, and figured, were painful metaphor of human life, both mind and matter and inexorably doomed to their fate. . For not only the books can be burned but sometimes transmitted through knowledge, they we “burn”, we transform, we accompany or lead us astray … in a vision became ‘existential.’ ”

Grande Boîte Blanche, 130 x 130 x 11

I suspect that when many Americans think of The Future, it looks like something envisioned by Disney; all moving sidewalks, flying cars, and abodes akin to The Monsanto House of the Future. “Magic Highway USA” doesn’t stray too far from these established tropes. There are still the flying cars and moving sidewalks but there are also truly fantastical items like giant machines that build bridges into the thin air underneath them out of quick drying concrete mixtures or machines the melt tunnels into mountains using The Power of the Atom. On the other hand, it also vaguely hints at devices very much like modern GPS units. And unsurprisingly, considering the mindset at the time, there are highways everywhere, vast networks of roadways crisscrossing the globe, enabling you and your family to drive through the Taj Mahal or up the Great Sphinx’s nose. A spiderweb of automotive activity, always on the move, never stopping. Welcome to The Future.

Via Paperwalker : Super Punch

Photo by Trevor Tondro for The New York Times

Two urban faery friends of ours in Williamsburg, ladies who have cultivated one of the most unique and enchanting domiciles you’ll ever see, are attracting a lot of attention, lately! Coilhouse first posted about Paige Stevenson and her Brooklyn loft, now called The House of Collection, in Feb of 2008. Since that time, the ever-inspiring Paige and her consummately luminous domestic partner, Ms. Ahnika Meyer-Delirium, have been working (and playing) toward making their wondrous 2000 square-foot loft more vibrant than ever.

Paige’s interview with All That We’ve Met last month is sure to inspire. Even more recently, the New York Times’ in-depth coverage of the House of Collection, –which features both Paige and Ahnika discussing their kindhearted philosophies of life and decor–  offers a gorgeous tour of their abode. An excerpt from that article, titled “In Williamsburg, a Live-In Cabinet of Curiosities“:

It’s the way objects are deployed — all over the place, in large quantities and with a sense of play — that makes for something unexpected. A mounted deer’s head is one thing. A deer’s head with a pink brocade eye patch, false eyelashes and a glittery nose is another.

Likewise, grouping all the plants in the living room, even when it’s a room as large as theirs, makes an impact. “People sort of melt open,” Ms. Meyer said. “They feel as though they’re in a magical fairyland. But they also feel at home.”

The House of Collection is rich in such contrasts, a place cozy and vast, one that is urban but, thanks to the greenery, the farm tools and animal forms, has a country feel. It’s fitting for a couple who are both very domestic and deeply unconventional.

Photo by Trevor Tondro for The New York Times

New York City can sometimes feel like an especially cold and aloof realm… yet the HoC is as warm, welcoming and accepting a place as you are ever likely to observe.

Ah, you beauties! Well done.

News vis M. S. le Despencer, thanks!

Best lead to a new article EVER, right?

Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will open its doors at in 2015, has acquired Parliament’s Funkadelic Mothership (the second incarnation, that is — the first having long-since departed for other galaxies).

The legendary stage prop will serve as a crucial building block of the museum’s permanent display permanent music exhibition. Via Funk Music News:

When the band lowered the Mothership from the rafters of the Capital Centre in Landover in 1977, the response was rapturous. Not only was it instantly stunning — it felt like a cosmic metaphor for the sense of possibility that followed the civil rights movement.

That symbolism isn’t lost on the Smithsonian.

“With large iconic objects like this, we can tap into . . . themes of movement and liberation that are a constant in African-American culture,” says Dwandalyn R. Reece, curator of music and performing arts for the museum. “The Mothership as this mode of transport really fits into this musical trope in African American culture about travel and transit.”

It will be exhibited alongside other artifacts from American music history — Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, James Brown’s stage costumes, Lena Horne’s evening gowns. But it will be the only spaceship.

YES!! “Free your mind and come fly with me… it’s hip! On the Mothership. Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride…”

Philip Andelman’s meditation on the manufacturing process of the hourglass. Designed by Marc Newson’s for Ikepod, it is made from borosilicate glass and filled with millions of stainless steel “nanoballs”. Adnelman filmed this at the Glaskeller factory in Basel, Switzerland and the entire process is fascinating — a hypnotic sequence of whirling machinery and fire set to Philip Glass’s “Opening”. It’s so fascinating, in fact, that I almost wish there was some exposition if only to explain just how they measure out the aforementioned nanoballs so that each glass accurately metes out its allotted dosage of time.

Via Bioephemera : Brainiac