Hasta La Ideas

Kawaii cuteness and “Bronies” in a month-long LA exhibition

The magical world of My Little Pony (MLP) brings delight to everyone from school-age girls to grown men (we’re looking at you, “Bronies”). This weekend the My Little Pony Project 2012 will debut at LA’s Toy Art Gallery with customized 18″ ponies, jewelry by Onch Movement and a month-long celebration of the super cute kawaii world of MLP with an art show, mural project, screenings and events.

My Little Pony was created by illustrator Bonnie Zackerle in 1983 as the smaller version of Hasbro’s original 1981 My Pretty Pony design. Little girls immediately fell in love with these small, colorful plastic ponies featuring silky hair and whimsical designs on their hind legs and hoofs. The original set of MLP characters sported names like Cotton Candy, Clue Belle, Butterscotch, Minty, Snuzzle and Blossom. As the popularity of the toys grew, so did the My Little Pony world. In 1984, their first prime-time special “Rescue at Midnight Castle” led to more specials, a TV series and a feature-length film aptly named ” My Little Pony: The Movie”.

Hasbro celebrated the 10th anniversary of their favorite equines by debuting Sweet Kisses, Colorswirl, Sippin’ Soda, Wedding Pony, Flower Fantasy and more. Now, nearly 30 years later, the brand is still going strong thanks to an alternative scene that continues to worship the pastel ponies. Customized toys have sprung up around the globe, transforming MLP into everything from horror film icons to Star Wars characters. Even fetish imagery was branded on the plastic ponies. My Little Pony is a major force in pop culture, spawning trans-generational obsession evidenced in the endless stream of MLP tattoos.

For more proof of MLP domination, a search for My Little Pony on Etsy yields over 4,000 results and Deviant Art boasts hundreds of thousands of MLP-inspired artworks. Many a Brony—the brilliant mash-up of “brother” and “pony”—could be found at the recent “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” show, saying they’re attracted to the pony’s colorful imagery and positive messages.

The My Little Pony Project 2012 kicks off its exhibition in LA with a series of events presented by Hasbro, We Love Fine, LA-based design firm Mighty Fine and Street Sweets. The show features one-of-a-kind customized ponies by 6%DOKIDOKI, 64 Colors, Ana Bagayan, Angry Woebots, Blamo (Mikie Graham), Lisa Alisa, Luke Chueh, Madoka Kinoshita, Martin Hsu, Perez Hilton, Spank!, TOUMA and more. Ten percent of the sales will benefit Give Kids the World, an organization that gives children with life-threatening illnesses the opportunity to take a vacation to a fantasy-filled resort with their families.

Coinciding with the show, Onch Movement—the pop culture icon and jeweler who creates Nicki Minaj’s over-the-top treats—will launch an MLP line alongside his existing collection of colorful novelties. Onch created these new pieces for the Bronies and Pegasisters (the term for women who love MLP). As Onch enthusiastically proclaims, “We are trying to take the pony to another level!”

The show opens 5 May 2012 and will be on view at Toy Art Gallery until 26 May with events for fans to meet special guests from The Hub TV’s “Friendship is Magic“, a family day with crafts and face painting and cupcakes, and a screening nearby at the Silent Movie Theater (where at least a few Brony’s are sure to show up). Also beginning the week of 5 May, Buff Monster, COPE2, Indie184, and other artists will be busy painting MLP-inspired murals at Joyrich and De La Barracuda near Toy Art Gallery on Melrose.

The original 18″ ponies will be available in the Toy Art Gallery online shop.

Toy Art Gallery

7571 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90046

London architects Featherstone Young have completed this day centre for homeless people in east London.

Built for charity Providence Row, which provides food, clothing and showers to London’s homeless, the new Dellow Centre centre provides space for activities to encourage self-expression and learning.

It incorporates a bicycle workshop on the ground floor, art studio and performing arts space on the first floor and offices for the charity at the top.

The new structure sits across a courtyard from the charity’s headquarters, completed in the 1980s, and is surrounded on three sides by tall neighbouring buildings.

Stripes of green and yellow perforated panels clad the top and ground floor, while the zig-zagging facade in between angles the large windows away from the street and towards the headquarters opposite to visually link the two.

The upper storey has a zig-zagging terrace that follows the line of the facade and a bright yellow, irregularly shaped skylight crowns the building.

Featherstone Young previously designed the London offices for advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy and a house cantilevered over a river in Wales.

Photographs are by Tim Brotherton.

Here’s some more information from Featherstone Young:

Dellow Centre by Featherstone Young

Client brief

Featherstone Young were appointed by Providence Row to design a new arts and activity building as part of their day care facility in Wentworth Street in London’s East End. Providence Row is a homelessness charity that provides support to homeless people in Tower Hamlets (one of the UK’s most deprived districts) and the City of London. The Dellow Day Centre provides essential services such as food, clothing and showers, helping to restore users’ health and dignity.

The new building will allow Providence Row to operate a range of structured and meaningful activities for their users. The ground floor will house a bike workshop, enabling users to develop their skills and set them on the first steps towards employment. The first floor will contain an art centre for visual and performing arts activities, allowing users to express themselves creatively and develop their artistic skills. Providence Row will use the top floor for office space, while other parts of the building will contain storage and archive facilities for the charity.

Concept/solution

Featherstone Young were keen to create a thoughtful yet functional building that uses its landlocked site to its full advantage, in order to accommodate as many uses as possible in the limited space available. Because the building (on the site of a former storage building) faces the main day centre across an under-used courtyard, Featherstone Young also wanted to find a design solution that could animate the courtyard and improve connections and flow between the two buildings on the site as a whole.

The main feature of the building is its single-aspect angular façade. Likened to a mask the faceted blinkered windows take cues from the pod windows at Featherstone Young’s award-winning SERICC crisis centre in Essex, offering privacy to those within whilst also providing essential visibility for staff by designing a permeable façade. Above and below the main faceted level are vivid green and yellow perforated cladding panels to the ground floor workshop and the second floor. The building is topped with a colourful, irregular-shaped rooflight that provides a fun and lively aspect for those working in the surrounding higher buildings.

Conceptually, this mask elevation is intended by Featherstone Young to act as a visual metaphor for Providence Row’s users and to confront the invisibility of homeless people. The striking, colourful building challenges passers-by to ignore what was previously an anonymous space, while its appearance is a visual reminder that homeless people, like the new building created to serve them, can have great depth of character and dignity.

At ground floor level, the large workshop doors open out onto the courtyard, bringing natural light into the workshop and encouraging activity to spill out onto the courtyard towards the main Dellow Centre building. Behind the workshop, large storage spaces have been created for clothing and equipment. Inside, the space is functional and robust – a design approach that is continued throughout the new centre.

A simple staircase leads from the ground floor to the first floor, where the main space is the art studio. Here the large full-height timber-framed windows flood the room with natural light – ideal for art activity during the day. The faceted windows face away from the street and across the courtyard to the main centre – giving privacy for users, valuable passive surveillance for staff, and creating a positive relationship with main centre. This space can also be fully blacked out for film screenings. Other spaces on this level provide further storage and archive facilities for Providence Row.

On the upper level, an open plan office space leads onto an external terrace, where a zig-zag balcony follows the line of the first floor windows. Like the ground floor, a colourful facade gives this level a lively feel, and the palette is repeated in bold vertical stripes along the length of the external wall. A small private meeting room accessed from the main room is lit from above by the large and colourful funnel-like rooflight.

Throughout the building, an emphasis has been placed on creating a series of robust, flexible and functional internal spaces. Lighting and services are simple and basic, and the building is designed to be easy to use and maintain.

Planning/budget constraints:

The site is a small, landlocked site, accessed via a small private courtyard. It is landlocked on three sides by tall buildings (a building immediately adjacent to the centre has recently been demolished and will be replaced) and faces the main Dellow Centre which was built in the 1980s. Featherstone Young’s design response was a building that could project its own strong character alongside its neighbours, animate the underused courtyard and enliven the otherwise bland setting.

The client brief had originally been for a two-storey building, although Featherstone Young were also encouraged to explore options for three storeys in order to maximise use of the site. Planning consent was granted for three storeys after the trustees saw the additional possibilities of a higher building. With a strong design concept the building has withstood the rigours of tight cost constraints and was completed on budget.

Ethical selections for the globally minded from our 2011 Holiday Gift Guide

Since this is the season for giving, we have selected various items from our 2011 Holiday Gift Guide that benefit communities and charitable organizations around the world. Particularly pleasing for the folks that have everything and want to share the wealth, or anyone with a sharing spirit, the following items represent the most rewarding gifts one can give.

Lemlem Printed Rustic Scarf

Support global artisans and chic winter accessories with the purchase of a Lemlem scarf. Handmade in Ethiopia, the bold hues and beautiful color combinations are block-printed and inspired by traditional Ethiopian paintings.

Handmade Paper Garland

Ethically sourced from women from Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, these handmade paper flowers are a welcome alternative to humdrum commercial tree ornaments.

Spektral + Sto-Lang Paper Mobiles

These laser-cut velum paper mobiles are perfect for newborns and adults alike. The goods are made in Europe from factories that employ 300 mentally challenged people, a concept borne by Swiss designers Briggita and Benedict Martig-Imhof of Tät-Tat.

Krochet Kids Peru Beanies

The altruistic friends behind Krochet Kids International hope to empower the women of Africa and now Lima, Peru by teaching them a skill to provide for their families: crocheting. Each limited-edition, hand-crocheted beanie comes in a variety of styles and colors, all made of wool and acrylic-blend that bears the name of the women who stitched it.

Heifer International Chicks

A small donation to Heifer International will purchase a flock of chickens for a needy family in Heifer International’s global outreach program. Producing up to 200 eggs per year, your donated bird will help fill a child’s belly with essential protein.

Seahorse Socks

As a way to support his charity tutoring program 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s started a pirate supply store in the heart of San Francisco. The money goes to helping local youth develop their writing skills, and the lucky someone on your list gets a pair of pirate-inspired socks.

Jambox Charity:Water Edition

Jawbone has joined forces with charity:water to help support staff and operations in bringing clean, safe drinking water to billions living without it. With each purchase of the powerful little bluetooth speaker, Jawbone will donate $50 to support charity:water.

UNICEF Bangles

Give a lady some responsible style with these bracelets, whose proceeds go to support UNICEF’s programs around the world. The accessories are made from durable rosewood and polished brass in India.

Illustrated song lyric posters celebrate the music publishing giant’s anniversary

With an impressive two centuries in business, Warner/Chappell is celebrating the spirit of their enterprise by doing what they do best—spreading the beauty of music. But in this case, rather than act as a publisher of songs, they instead tasked ten visual artists to dream up interpretations of their favorite lyrics. The result is a collection of images which reflect the emotions of the original work while bringing it into a completely new context.

Warner/Chappell is donating its share of the income to charity, just another reason to purchase one of these striking posters, available from £90 through Stolen Space.

Celebrating creativity in a digitally-powered exhibit

When scientist Edwin Land created the Polaroid camera in 1948, he hoped to simplify photography. As the Minnetonka, MN-based company continues to innovate in the 21st century, they’re keeping that value at the forefront with products like their GL10 Instant Mobile Printer. The wireless digital printer can pump out instant party pics or stand in as postcards of your latest vacation. Like the original invention, there’s tons of creative potential, which is shown to great effect in the one-week group exhibition and auction, “Made in Polaroid” that opens today, 7 September 2011, at New York City’s Phillips de Puery & Company’s gallery.

Described as “about the creative process and a new era of creative spirit” by photographer Chase Jarvis, who worked with Polaroid to put the show together, the project challenges 50 notables across various disciplines to each create one work of art using only the GL10. We got a sneak peek at the the lineup—including the likes of James Franco, Patrick Demarchelier, Rob Pruitt—and a chance to speak with avid Polaroid photographer and French stylist Maripol, artist and entrepreneur Vashtie Kola and the Philadelphia-based satire artist Joka, who explained their initial concepts and shared a few thoughts on using the printer.

Taking more than a week to print her final concept, Maripol’s “Maripolaroid Go Green” dress is the upshot of her longstanding passion for Polaroid pictures, undaunted by the printer’s initial technical difficulties. The legendary stylist, inspired by the vivid colors of the Zink printer, insists it’s “not a Polaroid, it’s a digital print.” She still uses the original camera and film too, most recently on a shoot for Vogue’s December 2011 issue, but her Polaroids have graced gallery walls around the world. In her piece for the exhibit, she seamlessly mixes old and new too, attaching the Zink paper images to a 1981 Millard dress with colored safety pins.

Looking to another legend of Maripol’s era as well as NYC itself, Vashtie snapped shots of city landmarks—both cultural and institutional—to make up her ransom letter-style Warhol quote. Her process included a few weeks of preparation, meticulously choosing her representative letters before scouring New York with her Canon G11 and iPhone, printing the final piece in three days. Vashtie told CH she habitually carries an Epson mobile printer with her and found the GL10 to be on par with weight and ease of usability once sorting out the initial setup.

Joka chose to combine traditional print photographs and painting in his “Do You See Me Like I See You?” Always working primarily in pinks and purples and applying paint with toothpicks, Joka’s time-consuming tactic beautifully balances the immediacy of his digital portrait. Though he shared that the project was more strategic than he was accustomed to, he enjoyed the pragmatism the printer lent to the challenge.

Raising awareness for Free Arts NYC, the auction will take place 14 September 2011 at Philips de Pury’s gallery at Milk Studios. Check out more details at the Made In Polaroid website.