Hasta La Ideas

London’s StolenSpace gallery has given us a sneak peek at some of the works that will appear in its group show, Love & Hate, which opens tomorrow. Plus, contributing artists Kai & Sunny have offered us one of their new screenprints to give away…

Artists including D*Face, EINE, Kai & Sunny, Kelly Allen, Pete Fowler, Ronzo, Sylvia Ji, and Will Barras were all asked by the gallery to create two pieces of work, one representing “love” and another for “hate.

“The idea is that the show both celebrates and mourns Valentines Day,” says Beth StolenSpace. “We told the artists that the brief could be as literally or as loosely interpreted as they liked. The result is both a visual and conceptual battle of opposites.”

Here are some of the works created for the show:

by EINE

by Kelly Allen

by Charles Krafft

by Kai & Sunny

Created specially for the Love & Hate Show, Kai & Sunny‘s Broken Flower, Love Me Love Me Not limited edition screenprint (above, and a detail shown below) is printed in White Glitter and Black on 100% Cotton Somerset Satin White 300gsm paper (76 x 57cm) in an edition of 60.

The artists have very kindly given us one of the prints to give away to a lucky reader.

To win it, we’d like you get in touch with us via Twitter and let us know your #bestvalentinesgift or your #worstvalentinesgift by the end of tomorrow (Friday 10th), and we’ll pick our favourite.

Love & Hate runs from tomorrow February 10 until March 3 at StolenSpace, The Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL

Artists showing: Arth Daniels, Charles Krafft, Chloe Early, Curtis Kulig, D*Face, Dan Witz, David Bray, EINE, Jamie Burbidge, Jeff Soto, Josie Morway, Kai & Sunny, Kelly Allen, Miss Van, Pete Fowler, Ramon Maiden, Ronzo, Ryan Callanan, Sylvia Ji, Toshi, Will Barras, William Stevenson, Word To Mother.

stolenspace.com

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.

What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Graphic designer and artist David Marsh combines two of his interests in a series of prints – Pantone swatch graphics from Adobe Illustrator and classic album covers

“Hip-hop artist Scroobious Pip liked them so much he commissioned me to design his latest album cover and single releases in a similar style,” says Marsh.

More here

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. From the meaning of beans to the power of love, the February issue of Creative Review features our 20 favourite slogans of all time and the stories behind them.

What makes a great slogan? We investigate the enduring power of these clever little phrases in our special slogans issue, dedicated to our choices for the top 20 slogans.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Two exhibitions explore a legendary New York artist’s fight for linguistic liberation

The character of Rammellzee is one of the most compelling to emerge from the NYC street culture scene of the late 1970s and ’80s. The Queens native began his career tagging the side of A train cars in his home borough and later moved into the budding hip-hop scene, where he emerged as an influential lyricist. Rammellzee’s obsession with futurism and linguistics led him to establish the eponymous persona, at times referred to as “The Equation.” A duo of upcoming exhibitions at the MoMA and The Suzanne Geiss Company explore the work of the reclusive artist, his manifestos and the science fiction-influenced culture that he embodied.

Created over the course of 14 years, “The Letter Racers” sculptures are on view in NYC for the first time. They represent the artist’s manifestos “Iconoclast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism,” two works written in Rammellzee’s idiosyncratic language. The written and visual works explore the slavery and corruption of language and its liberation through the artist’s own work.

The complex theory behind “The Letter Racers” has to do with the freedom of language from its historical fetters. As Rammellzee writes, “In the 14th century the monks ornamented and illustrated the manuscripts of letters. In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation know as THE RAMMELLZEE.”

Playing with metaphysical concepts in the physical world, Rammellzee used found objects from the city streets to create the sculptures. A collection of perfume caps, spray can triggers and other small detritus comprise 52 “letter racers,” armed for linguistic and galactic warfare. Witnessing the series as a whole lends insight into the man behind Rammellzee’s self-made masks as well as the impact of street culture on the American dialect.

Two years after his premature death, The Suzanne Geiss Company is exhibiting “Rammellzee: The Equation, The Letter Racers” from 8 March to 21 April 2012. At the same time, the MoMA will present a few pieces from “The Letter Racers” as part of the “Print/Out” exhibition starting 19 February 2012.

“The audience was made to suffer. At one performance the only person allowed to sit was Duchamp. He said, ‘I am very old, and I cannot stand, please let me sit down.’ I thought, ‘Maybe it’s a trick. But then again, he was very old.’ I think Duchamp went to everybody’s performances. ‘Nekropolis I’ ended with us all becoming mice, dressed in burlap bags. We crawled out into the audience slowly; we couldn’t see. Then we were supposed to just drop somewhere and not move until they went home. According to the story I wound up on the feet of Duchamp. But I couldn’t see who it was. It’s a good story, but as time goes by you wonder, ‘Did this really happen?’”

-Artist Claes Oldenburg recalls for Carol Kino what actually happened at the Happenings, in an article published in today’s New York Times. A critic writing in 1962 described “Nekropolis I” as enjoyable for “the heavy slow clamor of these bulky creatures crawling and messing around in that bulky ‘environment’ of burlap, paper, paint, and other assembled junk.” Oldenburg was singled out for having “made wonderful nondescript jungle sounds and heaved his considerable weight from mound to mound like a natural denizen.”

Pictured: Lucas Samaras, left, and Oldenburg in a scene from “Nekropolis I,” from 1962. (Photo Claes Oldenburg; All rights reserved Robert R. McElroy/VAGA, NY)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Milton Glaser’s latest book shows adaptation as a mechanism for learning

Over the past five years, the highly influential graphic designer Milton Glaser has designed rugs, sculptures, posters and interior spaces for a variety of independent projects. In the forthcoming book based on the 2010 AIGA exhibition of the same name, “In Search Of The Miraculous or One Thing Leads To Another“, Glaser shows how the concepts for these works relate to each other as a continuous evolution of ideas.

Glaser began studying Kundalini yoga in the 1960s from a spiritual leader named Rudi, who believed that your consciousness grows by layering past lives—whether that was the past life of yesterday or long ago. The cover art Glaser did for Rudi’s book, “Spiritual Cannibalism“, not only opens this book, but the guru’s teachings serve as a metaphor for the natural progression of Glaser’s work into new designs born from past ideas.

As design consultant Ralph Caplan explains in the foreword, you can see traces of the book jacket design for “Spiritual Cannibalism” in the identity of Glaser’s graphic design for NYC’s Tibet-focused Rubin Museum of Art in 2004. Glaser was asked to create interior works, including a series of patterned silkscreen prints and a massive gilded copper wall panel inspired by his drawings of Tibetan clouds. Glaser explains in the book that these projects inspired a new interest in pattern design—from there, the unexpected opportunity to make rugs based on the patterns gave new purpose to the work he was doing, eventually giving rise to several new poster designs, and an important study on light and dark.

Another example of Glaser’s penchant for perpetual revision lies in his series of Shakespeare portraits created for the Theater for a New Audience. The various looks Glaser gives the legendary bard not only demonstrate his ability to see something from several different perspectives, but they also served as inspiration for the theater’s annual award, which is an iridescent bust sprayed with automotive paint that changes color depending on how you’re looking at it.

Glaser was once again inspired to experiment with patterns and portraits, which led him to develop a new series in which he explores the point where the image becomes visible through the pattern, like a more thoughtful and visually compelling version of Magic Eye posters.

In an interview with Anna Carnick for her book “Design Voices“, Glaser neatly explains his process of refining and reflection. “The work itself becomes a mechanism for learning,” he says. “And that is the most highly desirable aspect of design or anything else for that matter.”

Glaser will be at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena for a discussion and book signing 16 February 2012. Pick up a copy there or pre-order from Amazon for $20.